Productive Work is Not Always Efficient

Jason, the CEO of the e-commerce company, read a lot about employee monitoring systems but did not think he needed one. His company had been on the market for ten years. Most of his 18 employees worked there for more than five years, and four employees had been there since the beginning. There were no conflicts in the team; many employees were friends and spent weekends together.

When Jason's friend told him about CleverControl and how it helped him to increase productivity in his company, Jason also decided to try the software.

Jason's goal was not to spy on his employees' every movement. He was more interested in experimenting with what the monitoring system could do and how it could improve employees' performance.

The installation did not cause any trouble - Jason pushed CleverControl via Active Directory in the evening after all employees left the office. He forgot about the program for a while. When he checked the reports a couple of weeks later, he did not notice anything extraordinary.

According to the statistics, the idle periods were insignificant; the staff did not use unauthorized apps or programs unrelated to work. A glance over screenshots and visited websites did not reveal any suspicious behaviour. The employees stayed seemingly productive, although some tended to peek at Facebook or Youtube from time to time. However, the employees visited those websites for less than twenty minutes per day, so Jason decided to brush that away.

Next, Jason viewed screen recordings from random employees' computers. Mostly, those recordings confirmed his previous conclusions - the team was focused on their work, but one of the sales managers caught Jason's attention. Her User Activity statistics seemed alright: there were no long inactivity periods or hours on social media. By all logs and statistics, she should be considered productive. However, her screen recordings showed that she did everything extremely slowly. A line of text, a few switches between browser tabs, a few idle minutes, checking new emails, the next line of text and the next round. Jason assigned the employee additional tasks, but it did not change the situation - she kept her slow rhythm of work. She missed deadlines and said that she did not have enough time to complete the assignment. After a few months of monitoring, seeing no change, Jason fired the manager.

Although the manager was explained the reasons for her dismissal, she was angry and decided to revenge on the company. She erased all information from her computer, including correspondence with clients, agreements and other information. This information could cost a lot of time and money to restore, and the company would probably lose customers the manager was working on. Luckily, when Jason looked through CleverControl's logs for the past months, he managed to restore the deleted vital information.

If Jason did not try CleverControl, he might never know about the unproductive employee and would not be able to restore the information. Jason continues using CleverControl.

• User activity statistics

  Informative charts and tables show how productive and disciplined each employee is.
• Запис на екрана

  In the sales manager's case, statistics alone were not enough to assess her productivity correctly. Even though she did not break any rules, recordings showed that she was unproductive due to her tardiness.
• Event logs.

  Thanks to the fact that CleverControl captured all typed text, emails and other employee activity, Jason was able to restore the information that she deleted.