Introduction
This report is part of a series of employee monitoring and productivity software comparisons designed for the business owner, compliance officer or HR Manager who is looking for software systems to deal with Insider Threats and measure employee productivity. The questions our audience are asking include:
- How can I easily monitor my employee’s phones and computers without needing technical help?
- How can I prevent sensitive data company data leaving the office?
- How can I see which employees are productive and which aren’t?
- How can I measure employee attendance and absences?
- How can I do this without a huge investment in hardware and training
It is written by KnowIT technical staff from the perspective of Digital Endpoint.
Summary
Feature Comparison
When it comes to employee monitoring, productivity and attendance are the two key areas that an application must focus on for employers to consider using it to monitor their employees.
Below you can see the feature comparison between Worktime and KnowIT.
KnowIT is the industry leader in employee monitoring software for both computers and mobile devices and it focuses specifically on productivity and attendance monitoring as its core features.
| Feature | Worktime | KnowIT |
|---|---|---|
| Instant Messengers | ✓ | |
| AIM | ✓ | |
| Hangouts | ✓ | |
| iMessage | ✓ | |
| LINE | ✓ | |
| ✓ | ||
| Skype | ✓ | |
| Trillian | ✓ | |
| Viber | ✓ | |
| ✓ | ||
| Yahoo Messenger | ✓ | |
| Websites Visited | ✓ | ✓ |
| Chrome | ✓ | ✓ |
| Firefox | ✓ | ✓ |
| Internet Explorer | ✓ | ✓ |
| Browser Search Terms | ✓ | |
| ✓ | ||
| Yahoo | ✓ | |
| Bing | ✓ | |
| Ask | ✓ | |
| Dogpile | ✓ | |
| Duck Duck Go | ✓ | |
| Yippy | ✓ | |
| Webopedia | ✓ | |
| The Internet Archive | ✓ | |
| Mahalo | ✓ | |
| Baidu | ✓ | |
| AOL | ✓ | |
| Nate | ✓ | |
| Naver | ✓ | |
| Daum | ✓ | |
| Zum | ✓ | |
| Webmail | ✓ | |
| Gmail | ✓ | |
| Yahoo! | ✓ | |
| Outlook | ✓ | |
| Screenshots Capturing | ✓ | |
| Requested screenshots | ✓ | |
| Scheduled screenshots | ✓ | |
| File Transfer Tracking | ✓ | |
| USB File transfer tracking | ✓ | |
| Web File transfer tracking | ✓ | |
| Cloud file transfer tracking | ✓ | |
| File Activity Tracking | ✓ | |
| Files created | ✓ | |
| Files copied | ✓ | |
| Files moved | ✓ | |
| Files deleted | ✓ | |
| Files modified | ✓ | |
| Application Tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Application usage | ✓ | |
| Installed applications | ✓ | ✓ |
| User Log on Tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Log on/ log off | ✓ | ✓ |
| Lock/unlock screen | ✓ | |
| Global Application Discovery | ✓ | |
| Network Connections Tracking | ✓ | |
| Network Traffic Tracking | ||
| Print tracking | ||
| Keystroke recording | ||
| Clipboard Tracking |
As you can see from the above table, Worktime gives you far less features for monitoring employees than KnowIT.
Immediately KnowIT looks like the better employee monitoring product of the two.
KnowIT also has several key monitoring features that Worktime is lacking that managers need to effectively monitor their employees, including screenshot capturing which we discuss further below.
Furthermore, KnowIT has many unique features such as global application discovery. This feature means that whenever a new application is installed or an existing one removed then KnowIT keeps track of it so that when you later set up KnowIT productivity groups or you want to see what applications are installed then KnowIT is always current.
Productivity
For most companies and their managers, they need an easy to understand way to measure their employee productivity whilst they are at work. When it comes to productivity monitoring KnowIT and Worktime do this differently.
Worktime has no real productivity monitoring features.
This is because Worktime simply captures the activity data. It doesn’t do anything that ties it all together in a way that managers can understand to get employee behavior insights.
So, if you are a manager who is monitoring hundreds of employees using Worktime you will have to dive in to the data that is captured and find events of interest yourself. There is nothing that tells you quickly how productive your employees are.
KnowIT gives you a complete productivity monitoring solution for your employees.
Using KnowIT, you can see how much time your employees spend in productive or unproductive applications or websites that you have set according to your company definition of productivity.
KnowIT also gives each employee an easy to understand, normalized productivity score, based on their attendance and what applications or websites they use, so you can easily see which employees are productive and which are not simply by looking at the scores.
You can also create productivity groups for specific departments or employees and monitor their productivity alongside the productivity of the remaining employees in your organization.
KnowIT gives you a visibility over the productivity of all the employees within your organization.
And with this method of productivity reporting you can measure employees against each other as well, as well as encourage employee self-policing as a deterrent against unproductive behavior.
Attendance
The majority of employee monitoring software simply defines attendance as when the user logs on or off the computer for each day. This is not an entirely realistic or accurate way of measuring employee attendance. For example, how can you use that data to see who always arrives late or leaves early?
Managers need a product that calculates not only when their employees log or off but when they work extra hours or start late or leave early.
Worktime cannot be recommended for monitoring employee attendance.
KnowIT provides a far more effective attendance monitoring solution for employees, compared to Worktime.
It does this by considering the user log on and log off times, the same as Worktime, but it expands this by using the productivity settings for each employee and the company work schedule set in KnowIT to not only show you the log on and log off times for each employee but also to tell you who arrives late, who leaves early and who works extra hours.
Already this is far better attendance monitoring than Worktime but managers need a quick way to access and understand that data and KnowIT gives you that.
KnowIT delivers just that by giving managers a normalized and easy to understand attendance score for all employees.
This attendance score is out of 100 so you can immediately see, at a glance, which employees have a high level of attendance and which ones do not.
You can then track that back further by using KnowIT to examine the productivity of the employee in question as well to get a deeper insight in to the employee and their behavior at work.
Furthermore, with KnowIT, you can keep complete track of when employees are absent. Unlike other employee monitoring software though, KnowIT lets you specify if the time off for the employee is authorized or not.
This allows managers the ability to also see which employees are taking too many unauthorized sick days as opposed to being off work due to an authorized training event.
And KnowIT presents all this employee attendance information both conveniently inside the portal or through its extensive reporting system so managers don’t have to be logged in to KnowIT all the time to see how their employees are doing and whether they are at work.
Reporting
Reporting is where KnowIT really shines.
Unlike Worktime, where the only way to review the captured employee data is by looking at the reports, KnowIT gives you an employee device dashboard where you can see all the captured information in an easy to use tile layout.
With KnowIT just click the tile to view the employee data. There is no need to waste time wading through reports in KnowIT so you quickly get access to the employee insights you need.
With Worktime, you must browse through all the reports and then see if it matches what you require or not and this is time consuming. Furthermore, you must always be logged in to the online portal to download the reports to view offline. This is not convenient at all.
KnowIT gives managers a complete reporting system that is easy to use and doesn’t require being logged in all the time.
It does this by having a comprehensive reports section inside the online portal. These are default reports that can be used to answer key business questions quickly such as which employees are arriving late or which are sending the most email at work.
With KnowIT you can also choose to receive scheduled email reports so you do not have to be logged in all the time to keep an eye on your organization.
These reports cover employee productivity, attendance and alerts. So, you are always emailed the key information that lets you know who is at work, what are they doing and are they breaking company policy or not.
You just cannot do that easily with Worktime which makes KnowIT the obvious choice for managers who want to completely be able to monitor their organization.
You can also choose to email these reports to the employees themselves. This is a great way to encourage productivity and attendance self-policing which is not available in Worktime either.
Key Features
Apart from monitoring productivity and attendance there are several other key features that employee monitoring software must have to be an effective monitoring solution.
In a recurring theme, it seems that KnowIT is the only employee monitoring software that understands what managers want from such a program and allows them to easily and effectively monitor their employees.
We say this because KnowIT allows you to set alerts so that you can be immediately notified by email if an employee installs a prohibited or unknown application or visits a website that has been marked as prohibited.
This allows managers to immediately act when they need to.
Worktime doesn’t offer this, instead you must search through the reports in their Behavioral Analysis section to find any kind of data that may be suspicious. KnowIT makes this far simpler.
KnowIT also offers on-demand screenshots, so you don’t have to spend ages looking through tons of what could be useless screenshots to find what you want.
With a click of a button KnowIT will capture screenshots that instant so you only get the information you need.
Worktime forces you to look through reports and does not even offer screenshot capturing to start with so managers can expect to waste a lot of their time reviewing the captured information.
We already mentioned the KnowIT employee device dashboard but this really is a key differentiator between KnowIT and Worktime.
If you want a smart and convenient way to easily monitor your employees at work then you need KnowIT. Worktime just makes extra work for your IT department who must manually do all the work to find any meaningful insights.
Conclusion
It is plain to see that KnowIT is designed for managers who don’t have much time but still want to accurately and effectively monitor their employees in the workplace.
Worktime on the other hand is hard work for managers and makes them do all the data digging and analysis.
You can quickly answer key business questions about your employees with KnowIT in a way that Worktime just does not offer.
In addition to this KnowIT provides the most feature-rich employee monitoring package available, that covers all devices, including phones, whilst Worktime is very limited on features.
Worktime may be fine for small companies with a handful of employees but any large company who is serious about monitoring hundreds of employees cannot do that with Worktime.
Only KnowIT gives true, valuable employee insights and monitoring across all devices.
And even the price of Worktime makes choosing KnowIT a no-brainer because KnowIT is cheaper and offers far more employee monitoring features.
For $24.95 per month, per user, you can pick Worktime with limited features and monitoring capabilities or, for less, at $19.95 per month per user, you can pick KnowIT and get corporate grade real employee monitoring software for your employees and your organization.