Webcam Surveillance and Face Recognition Technologies in Employee Monitoring

6 min readApr 4, 2023

Back in 2018, Gartner had outlined (based on its survey of 239 large corporations) that 50% of the companies were monitoring employees. In 2019, Accenture reported that USD 3.1 trillion was at stake for organisations, as it depended on how organisations make sense of employee data for actionable insights.

In July 2022, Wall Street Journal’s survey revealed that 67% of North American organisations have been employing employee monitoring programs to manage the workforce. Similar trends have been prevalent in Europe, where data analytics powered by monitoring and surveillance programs have been critical to workforce management.

This isn’t surprising when considering the rising cost of employee acquisition, performance retention, and engagement across organisations. Not to mention the highly volatile and rapidly evolving market that entails rolling out products swiftly, sustaining and improving the service quality over time, and being proactive (i.e., “preventive”) rather than reactive when it comes to navigating the complexity of internal and external challenges.

Besides, there’s an interminable challenge to keep employees safe in the face of ever-increasing cyber threats and increasing endpoints courtesy of remote and hybrid models.

So, it only makes sense that employee monitoring technologies are evolving, and the tools are getting smarter to detect, monitor and keep track of the employees and protect valuable intellectual property and company data from malicious actors.

That’s precisely what face recognition embedded in employee monitoring systems is all about.

Webcam Surveillance and Face Recognition in Employee Monitoring

Recently, CleverControl ran an experiment to understand the viability of the 4-day workweek. An average 5% productivity increase was recorded by the company’s clients towards the end of the trial. It’s noteworthy that CleverControl helped clients come up with this conclusion by regularly evaluating the employees’ active and inactive time.

This not only testifies to the viability of operational data to make strategic decisions but also shows how readily data can be mined by companies today to gain insights on employee performance and work towards driving tangible outcomes.

When it comes to web surveillance and face recognition, most employers make use of the tools to keep tabs on their employees’ daily activities, performance, and attendance. This can help identify patterns that either mitigate or promote engagement, performance, and productivity.

To this end, let’s take a look at some of the ways that web surveillance and face recognition can be used in employee monitoring:

Tracking Employee Attendance

Of course, the primary objective of employee monitoring programs is to ensure timely and consistent attendance. However, often, that isn’t the most straightforward of tasks, especially when employees are working remotely or in a hybrid setup. Besides, there’s always this issue of employees covering up for their colleagues and the risk of someone fudging the records. In this case, web surveillance and face recognition can be used to provide more effective insights into employee availability and activities.

Face recognition, in particular, can be used to compare an employee’s facial image with the one that’s stored in the database. This can confirm whether or not an employee was present at work, along with their activity details. Not only does this help identify manipulation in attendance records, but it also has the added benefit of providing more accurate time-off reports. All of this can be amalgamated to inform more meaningful insights on employee productivity and conduct.

Maintaining Office Discipline

An analysis found that 99% of employees feel distracted during the workday. 51% of them explained how it becomes tough to listen to calls, and 48% outlined that it impeded their ability to focus. Add the hybrid and remote work models to the mix, and you can expect that your workforce will be more distracted than ever. Hence, it’s critical to keep an eye on employee behaviour so as to instill a sense of discipline across the organisation.

Of course, this isn’t to get too intrusive, but if you’re already monitoring your teams, you may as well use the data to inform a few changes in the culture for the better. Facial recognition, for instance, helps instil greater accountability among employees by enforcing a “culture of discipline” in the workplace. In remote setups, such an intervention could go a long way in ensuring that remote workers are productive throughout the working day or as per the agreed-upon schedule.

Increasing Data Security

About 60% of data breaches are directly associated with insiders letting loose their access to sensitive data. In general, as well, data breaches are on the rise. The problem is that the remediation time for the same is getting longer owing to the complexity of the attack surfaces. Often, these breaches aren’t identified in the first place. For example, IBM reports how it takes 327 days on average to identify that credentials are lost or stolen.

It’s pertinent, then, to keep tabs on the activities of your employees so that you can identify rogue or malicious actors. And this goes for employees working across in-office and remote setups. The latter, in particular, is associated with increased endpoints and, therefore, increased security risks.

Web activity surveillance and face recognition can go a long way in leveraging data-driven insights to keep tabs on suspected or confirmed irregularities that an employee may have perpetrated, thereby reducing the rate of breaches and enhancing the security of sensitive employee and customer data.

Employee Monitoring Solutions that Offer Webcam Surveillance

A slew of employee monitoring tools is available to help employers keep tabs on their employees. A few of these tools that offer web surveillance capabilities include:

Spyrix

With support for Mac and Windows, Spyrix is a comprehensive employee monitoring solution that offers advanced web surveillance capabilities, including:

Live screen viewing and recording
Web camera viewing and recording
Social channel monitoring (Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, etc.)
URL monitoring

Hubstaff

A popular and comprehensive employee monitoring program, Hubstaff excels at tracking the time of remote employees, documenting their project progress, keeping tabs on their use of applications, and more. What stands out about Hubstaff is its ability to:

Keep employees in control of their data
Generate a single source of truth by collecting screenshots in one place
Make accountability competitive by allowing employees to earn badges based on their activity

Apart from these, several popular tools like ActivTrak, Teramind, TimeDoctor, and more are also a part of the kaleidoscope of employee monitoring tools that offer webcam surveillance capabilities.

But what about face recognition?

How CleverControl Goes a Step Further with Face Recognition

Besides offering all the aforementioned web surveillance capabilities, CleverControl embeds an advanced face recognition engine within its employee monitoring platform to enhance the efficacy of employee monitoring programs.

The program takes a photo of the employee in front of the computer every 5 seconds, compares it to the records in the database, and then generates a detailed report of who accessed the computer during the day and their activities, thereby enabling employers to keep tabs on their employees without invading their privacy.

All the information is intuitively presented on the dashboard for the employers to view and take action in case of any discrepancies. Such a system can significantly amp up the efficacy of your employee monitoring program by:

Providing a comprehensive glimpse into the employee’s time off and attendance
Linking all the data across departments
Measuring productivity and performance
Linking to growth and development plans

Final Thoughts

Webcam surveillance and face recognition technologies are new words in employee monitoring that offer valuable advantages. They enable businesses to monitor employee activity in real-time, improve productivity, and enhance security. These technologies also simplify compliance with data protection regulations and provide greater control over workforce management.

As face recognition technology continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, it is likely that its use in employee monitoring will become more widespread in the future. With advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, face recognition technology will become more accurate and reliable, making it an even more powerful tool for tracking employee activity and productivity.