Employee monitoring systems go beyond the core time tracking functionality of clock-ins, clock-outs, and managing workloads. While some of the vendors in this roundup are essentially tracking players that have added nifty monitoring features such as keystroke logging, location tracking, and screenshots, others offer deep monitoring platforms that track all employee activity. Particularly for large corporations that schedule thousands of shift workers in settings such as call centers, employee monitoring agents installed on company machines give these businesses complete visibility and traceability into their operations.  The employee monitoring agents also aggregate key data on employee productivity. To get started with productivity tracking, you'll typically sort applications and websites into productive and unproductive categories. You'll then break down how productive you expect each team, department, or individual employee to be. Productivity-scoring algorithms make it possible to measure individuals against their past performance, as well as that of their peers. This data is less about disciplining employees and more about helping teams course-correct and stay productive. Customization and user grouping are important here, because an app that's deemed productive for one job function may be considered unproductive for another. For instance, social media managers spend much of their time on Facebook and Twitter because that's core to their role, whereas a sales manager who spends many hours a day on LinkedIn or other social sites should throw up a red flag. Automation and the ability to set alerts by way of email reminders and warnings are also effective ways to manage a large, distributed workforce. Some products can also aggregate activity data on a macro level in real-time for display on admin and manager dashboards. Also available is the ability to construct detailed reports to slice and dice various productivity metrics. For example, you might drill down into the data using factors such as the most productive or unproductive employees or compare team or departmental efficiency or productivity on specific projects. Employee monitoring tools often give you at-a-glance data visualizations. Examples might include a productivity bar that breaks down productive and unproductive app percentages or lists and leader boards that show active or inactive users or the most often used apps. Many of the solutions we tested can also track and log which websites or services employees spend the most time on and which ones are underutilized.  Another aspect of activity tracking is keystroke monitoring, which provides a baseline for employee activity. Once you have data on how often employees are typing or interacting with their machines, you can map it against corresponding factors to fill out a complete profile of their online activity. Example factors might include screenshots, activity logs, audit trails, and the other, deeper monitoring vectors that we'll get into later. Some of the most powerful monitoring software we've tested can intake raw keystroke data—meaning a timestamped map of what system keys users pressed at any given time—and cross-reference that against any of the other metrics or captured activity data collected. In addition, newer tools like Controlio can aggregate keystrokes and sync them to video recordings to form a more accurate picture of employee activity. As a result, you can see the full context of what employees were doing and when they were doing it and make inferences as to why they were doing it. This level of insight is unmatched for companies that need to gather forensic evidence, for example, for a regulatory compliance audit.