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Time Tracking
October 2, 2018
4 minutes

Employee Time Tracking with Screenshots! Is it really needed?

Man standing beside the laptop

With every passing day and a step closer to becoming more technologically advanced every day, newer ideas and technologies are making their way into the Corporate World as well. The use of employee time tracking software is a new trend has emerged recently in the Modern Corporate World.

It is the universal goal of all the businesses to increase their profits by minimizing their expenditure. And the executives and managers are relying more and more on technology to get closer to this goal.

A large chunk of organizations is making use of software tools to manage the employees and to optimize their productivity. Some of these tools also capture the snapshots of employee’s screens to help the employee monitoring practice. But we cannot deny the fact that it does raise some brows!

Screenshot capturing: Illegal or ethical?

There are no legal regulations that protect employees from screen monitoring. So monitoring the employees through screenshots is definitely not illegal.

But is it ethical? This is an ongoing debate in the Corporate Sector and there is a wide variety of viewpoints on the subject.

Read more: Rational and Ethical Employee Monitoring
It is widely agreed that screen monitoring would be a lot more acceptable by the teams and employees if it is publicly declared and clearly defined.

Why is it becoming a trend?

Laptop and white sheets

It equips the managers with remote employee monitoring capabilities

Most people who work an office job require a computer with an unfaltering internet connection to carry out the daily tasks. And we all know that it is typical human behavior to get distracted from time to time. Getting distracted once in a while is acceptable in most situations but too much of it can be unacceptable for the employees.

But it is hard to keep a watch over the online shenanigans of all the employees all the time. And this is where a time tracking solution that captures employee screenshots comes to rescue.

Screenshot capturing facilitates the employers by bringing records of employees activities directly to his screen.

It lets the supervisors know about the progress of the employees

When your supervisor and the employer can see your work activity, he would know about your progress. Your productivity will be communicated to the leaders through those screenshots. On the same lines, the lazy employees cannot dodge the screenshots as well.

The employers would know which one of the employees is actually productive and which ones are not so much.

The screenshot monitoring also informs the team leaders about the progress of an ongoing project.

It helps the remote employers

Many small and medium business owners love to hire talent from across the oceans at competitive costs. But this is not so easy.

There are many hurdles in the way of managing remote and distributed teams effectively. Distance happens to be the biggest one of them. However, applications like StaffTimerApp, which capture screenshots and informs the remote employer about the progress and productivity of the employees, help a great deal in managing and minimizing the impacts of these hurdles.

It fosters cooperation amongst the team members

Screenshots build a relationship amongst the remote workers. Since the colleagues of distributed teams are situated very far away from each other, there is a deficit of cooperation and lack of communication.

To help with this problem, a software that uses screenshots can be very helpful.

By viewing the screenshots, the manager of a distributed team will be able to review the way the employee is working. He will be aware of all the glitches that he faces. The progress of the employee will also be visible to him. These insights are very useful for fostering a human relationship.

Software like this lets people connect in a better fashion.

In this day and age, many companies are dealing with tremendously large data sets. And more often than not, the data sets have sensitive information, the breach of which can result in lethal financial and legal troubles.

Constant surveillance of the employees work activities is also a facade of employee monitoring. And this one is particularly useful especially when there are so many intelligent hackers out there and a small loophole In the work management can end up in an unforeseen disaster.

Conclusion

Screenshots might seem like an unnecessary hassle in many cases. But in many more, they are quite mandatory considering the current landscape of the Corporate World. Use a Time Tracking Software with Screenshots to discover many more advantages of using one!

Is capturing screenshots, ethical or not? We would love to hear from you.