For a traditional company that wants to start allowing remote work, I am looking for software to check whether office workers are doing their jobs.
While the best would be to judge people on results, in this particular case the results are difficult to measure, and management insists on a “control-oriented” solution in addition to result measurements. Employees are working fixed hours, answering the phone and doing secretary work (all papers are in electronic format), on webcam-equipped company laptops.
Requirements:
- Employees can state when they start/stop and take breaks.
- Somehow check whether people are working (could be a mix of taking random screenshots, taking random webcam shots, or software activity monitoring).
- Designed to not bother employees more than necessary.
- Via a web interface, managers can check activity either in near real time, or afterwards. Start/stop/break times are also visible.
- Client software is easy to install on Windows, starts at boot.
- Open source, gratis (both client and server)
If monitoring software activity: the main software tools used by the office workers are Microsoft Office, Windows Explorer, and web browsers connected to the company’s intranet and sometimes other work-related websites.
