When you’re running a business with several departments with various tasks and differing objectives, it can be hard to fairly evaluate productivity. Here, we give you a few tips on how to best assess their work using KnowIT’s unique features.

A standout and unique feature of KnowIT is its Productivity Groups setting. This handy tool lets you create groups of employees (for example by department) with specific lists of applications and websites that can be set as: productive, neutral, non-productive or prohibited specifically for that group.

Understanding Different Roles

Why is this so important? Take for example your marketing department. They’ll need to access social media websites and potentially have to communicate with creative agencies, suppliers and others using file upload sites and instant messaging. Some of these activities (if not all) could be considered unproductive or perhaps even suspicious for other departments.

You can create your own name for a Productivity Group (i.e. ‘Marketing’) and add as many applications and websites that you’d like to monitor. If Facebook is considered productive for the marketing department, you can set that as ‘productive’, meaning time spent on Facebook during working hours will create a higher productivity score for employees within the marketing productivity group. However, if Facebook is considered non-productive for the R&D department, a separate productivity group can be created for them, whereby their usage of Facebook during working hours will reduce their productivity score.

Better Control, Better Productivity

It’s this simplicity that gives KnowIT a competitive edge, as it means you’re really in control of how the software calculates productivity for a wide variety of situations.

For prohibited applications and websites -for example BitTorrent clients, their usage will immediately send an alert to the manager or person in charge of monitoring. This will let them know exactly when an employee has used an application or visited a website that is strictly prohibited in the workplace – a great way to shut down threats such as a breach of cyber security, unfair bandwidth usage or unruly employees.