The ever-growing competition and a dry economy have made management a strenuous job. Managers are looking for instruments that could give a clear picture of their teams’ tasks, activities, and progress without much of their involvement.
This is where employee monitoring software comes in. Traditionally, it has somewhat negatively been associated with corporate surveillance. But in the last decade, it has proved its versatility. Your employees, however, may feel unsure about adopting monitoring tools, considering the implications if their data is illegally leaked/accessed.
Indeed, privacy is a vital factor in attracting and retaining talent. Especially when you consider how common data breaches are these days. These can end up costing you millions if you’re not careful.
Naturally, when you’re considering investing in an employee monitoring app for efficiency and productivity, you must evaluate its data security measures. Today, we will discuss one such app, TimeBee and its approach to data security.
What is TimeBee?
TimeBee is an employee monitoring app that lets you gather data about your employees’ productivity, resource usage, and overall productivity. It gives employers invaluable insights into workers’ performance and activities during office hours for remote and on-site employees.
The app has a balanced mix of productivity and management features that generate reports on:
- Employee work time
- Work schedules
- Billable hours
- Activity levels
- Project progress
TimeBee extracts real-time data which you can use to create proactive strategies for your business. Such insights can inspire and bring about perpetual, intuitive improvements in your organization.
How does TimeBee Work?
TimeBee works through a desktop app and an online dashboard. You initiate the timer of the desktop app, which starts tracking time across various tasks. Users can switch between projects and tasks to keep a precise record of their productivity.
This tracked data is fed to a central dashboard and is centered on maintaining real-time data about all your employees. It offers generous analytical features and reports to draw inferences.
TimeBee can provide insights about the following:
- Total time spent on different projects and tasks
- Weekly time tracked per worker
- Time spent doing productive work
- Websites and applications used during work hours
TimeBee’s Employee Monitoring Features
TmeBee is a time-tracking software that helps individuals and teams manage their time effectively. It offers a variety of features for keeping track of time, generating reports, and understanding the time habits of employees.
Let’s look into TimeBee’s main features:
Timesheets & Activity Summary Reports
TimeBee’s automated timesheets simplify time-tracking. All workers must do is record their start and end times across various tasks and projects while the timer does all the tracking.
Businesses rely on timesheets to ensure workers stay active during work hours. This straightforward approach provides clear insights into how much time is dedicated to specific projects, tasks, or clients. They give a clear picture of how workers spend their days.
Based on timesheets, TimeBee generates activity summaries to condense users’ activities within a specified time frame. They provide an overview of what was done and how much time was spent on it.
Using the team dashboard, you can also identify top performers and highlight ones that need improvement.
Similarly, you can also study employees’ work schedules to propose changes. For example, the daily activity graph helps you identify workers who take too many breaks and those who are pushing themselves too hard.
Activity summary reports are super helpful to learn about workers’ time-based productivity. Such insights are important to schedule meetings and other important tasks. You’d want to ensure that workers give their best to critical tasks only.
Productivity Reports
TimeBee categorizes work hours between productive and unproductive time.
These reports show how productive your workers have been in a specific time frame. Based on the ratings you decide per app and website, employee time can be classified as productive, unproductive, or neutral.
From an HR viewpoint, productivity reports can be used by managers in making retention or reward decisions regarding employees. Additionally, they can be used to evaluate the changes in productivity post a PIP or training program.
Productivity reports can uncover hidden aspects of workers’ behavior and output, so managers must capitalize on them before making long-term decisions.
Web & App Usage Reports
TimeBee tracks time spent on the most used apps and web pages. This feature allows management to classify internet usage between acceptable and unacceptable.
Since most work these days is online, it’s common sense to investigate workers’ web and app usage. A study by Desktime found that workers spend 50% of their time on personal activities, mainly on social media scrolling.
The user dashboard shows how much time individual workers are spending on various websites and apps. This helps you detect any time theft in the pretense of work. Additionally, you may want to tweak your web and app rating to reflect a fair picture of employees’ productivity.
For example, you may believe that LinkedIn is an unproductive app used for job hunting, but it may be used by your recruitment team to hunt talent.
Payroll Feature
TimeBee records workers’ output in hours worked on different tasks and projects. By clicking the user dashboard, you can view the exact number of hours worked by each worker, their hourly rate, and currency.
With one click, you can prepare accurate employee payroll for each employee. TimeBee takes care of tedious calculations and human errors. You can change the currency, hourly rate and even add overtime hours to the user profile.
Project Billing
TimeBee covers the time aspect of project management with its project billing feature.
The project dashboard displays the exact number of hours spent on projects. From there, you can view which team member spent how much time on tasks. It also shows how many total work hours a project took.
You can use past data to set realistic budget estimates and project timelines before you commence a project. It serves as a roadmap when doing similar projects. The estimated budget also helps you keep track of your costs.
Screenshot Monitoring
TimeBee takes timed screenshots of employees’ devices to capture their activities throughout the day. You can change the time intervals in the organizational dashboard.
Screenshots are a great way to establish accountability across the organization. With screenshots, workers can easily be held accountable for time theft and unproductive web usage. Therefore, they would be focused on getting work done rather than procrastinating.
TimeBee’s screenshot monitoring is best practiced within ethical boundaries. Firstly, your employees should be made aware of what is being tracked, and when screenshots happen. Secondly, users themselves have access to their screenshots through the user dashboard. This means that each worker can only view their images, and not anyone else’s.
Chat Monitoring
According to Verizon, 82% of data leaks have human involvement. To ensure that employee communication remains friendly, productive, and leak-free, managers monitor communication at work.
TimeBee acts as a data security watchdog by monitoring employee chats. Obviously, TimeBee maintains user privacy by ensuring these chats are accessible to the admin only.
Distraction Alerts
Distractions can be a great nuisance at work. Calls, notifications, meetings, doorbells – everything can become quite distracting while we work and disrupt our workflow.
TimeBee helps get back on track by issuing distraction alerts when they’re away from your desktop. Just as they’re about to waste time, TimeBee issues a pop-up alert to zap unproductivity.
How TimeBee Secures Your Data?
Data security is a cornerstone for TimeBee. Now we’ll see what data security measures are taken by TimeBee to ensure user privacy.
● Data Encryption
TimeBee uses top-tier data encryption to secure your data. This way, your data becomes unreadable for anyone with the key to unlock it.
TimeBee encrypts your data in two critical phases:
- Data at Rest: TimeBee’s encryption protects it from unauthorized access, even if the device is compromised.
- Data in Transit: TimeBee communicates with its servers with SSL encryption protection, making it unreadable to potential eavesdroppers on the network.
● Access Control
TimeBee uses access control to determinewho can access specific user data, what actions they can perform on that data and under what circumstances. It ensures that only authorized users can access and interact with sensitive information.
Access control is a vital component in modern cybersecurity standards, and here’s how TimeBee safeguards your data with access control:
- By restricting access only to authorized users, it safeguards data from individuals who shouldn’t have permission to view, modify, or delete it.
- By establishing clear access controls, you reduce the risk of accidental or intentional data leaks or breaches.
- By controlling who can modify data and how, access control helps maintain the accuracy and integrity of information.
● Data Backup
Data backup plays a crucial role in data security by providing a redundant copy of your information if the original data becomes compromised.
Here’s how TimeBee’s backup strategy strengthens your data security:
- In the event of a cyber attack, hardware failure, or accidental deletion, TimeBee backs up your data to a recent copy, ensuring nothing is lost. This minimizes downtime and data loss.
● Ransomware encrypts your data, essentially holding it hostage until a ransom is paid. A recent backup allows you to restore your data and avoid paying the attackers.
- Backups can act like a historical record of your data. If a file gets corrupted or accidentally modified, you can revert to a previous version stored in the backup.
It’s important to remember that data backup itself doesn’t guarantee complete data security. That is why, TimeBee employs encryption and extensive storage practices to safeguard user data.
● Compliance
TimeBee uses top-notch compliance with security standards. It uses HTTPS to encrypt data in transit to AWS servers, using its industry-leading compliance in security to secure your data.
For example, TimeBee uses Amazon S3 storage for securing a high volume of data. Also, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls access to its resources by applications and users.
● Monitoring & Logging
TimeBee combines monitoring and logging to detect and respond to potential threats and incidents. They provide crucial insights into system activity and user behavior, enabling security teams to:
- Continuously monitor system activity for anomalies and deviations from normal patterns, which could indicate potential security breaches, unauthorized access attempts, or malware activity.
- Monitor system performance and resource utilization to identify potential issues and ensure smooth operation of critical infrastructure.
- Log all relevant events occurring within a system, including successful and failed login attempts, file access, application activity, and security alerts.
- Maintain a precise record of events for audit analysis, allowing investigators to trace the sequence of events and identify the root cause of security incidents.
- Provide valuable information for troubleshooting system issues and debugging unexpected behavior.
● Data Minimization
Data minimization emphasizes limiting the collection, storage, and processing of data to only what is strictly necessary for a specific purpose. TimeBee only collects the data it absolutely needs and avoids acquiring any information beyond that scope.
TimeBee adheres to data minimization by:
- Focusing on the necessity and purpose of data being collected. It does not gather unnecessary or sensitive data irrelevant to employers.
- TimeBee stores data only as long as it is needed for genuine use. It backs up data for only up to six months and securely deletes all beyond.
By collecting goal-centric and less data, TimeBee minimizes the amount of personal information stored for anyone to misuse. Also, smaller data sets are way easier to manage in the occasion of potential security threats.
How to Set Up TimeBee for Your Business?
TimeBee’s can be downloaded from their website for both Mac and Windows. First, you’ll have to sign up using your email address or Facebook login. After account creation, you’ll set up a new organization with its actual name.
After you’ve registered your organization, it will take you to the homepage of your TimeBee dashboard. This place shows an overview of your organization’s projects, groups, and overall tracked time. But first, you’ll have to add users to fetch their data.
From the user management dashboard, you’ll send invites to your members at their official email addresses. Note that you should assign them the ‘user’ role since only the administrator will be yourself.
Once the users start accepting the invites, you’ll have yourself a user directory. You create groups and teams for projects or departments. Data is tracked for both individual and team users.
Summing Up
TimeBee goes beyond basic time tracking, offering a balanced mix of features for all kinds of businesses. This makes it a valuable option for any size of business looking to optimize their workflow.
After laying down the security protocols of TimeBee in this blog, it’s safe to say that TimeBee is a safe employee monitoring app to boost your productivity. It prioritizes user privacy with robust security measures. For added privacy, personal and sensitive data is only made accessible to the admin and concerned users.
Rest assured, you can use TimeBee without having any concerns about your security.