In the first few weeks of this health crisis, we had a lot of customers asking us if we could help them track who is logging in to do remote work. That’s because remote work requires trust – trust that can only be built up between the user and his/her manager. But tracking logins and logoffs, just like looking out across the floor and seeing who is there first thing in the morning and late in the evening, was never an accurate view of the contribution and value of individual employees.
There are numerous articles and blogs about the lack of work/life balance new remote workers struggle with. The point is, these users are struggling, and you, in IT, have the ability to help managers identify key users who may be burning the candle at both ends so they can more effectively manage their remote teams. I’ll discuss how in this post.
Help Managers Spot Users Most at Risk for Burnout
The rise in remote work can be a very uncomfortable experience for those organizations who haven’t embraced it before. Traditional management styles are being challenged – and frankly should have been challenged a long time ago – because no one is at the office to see who is on the floor at 8 a.m. and who is still there when the manager leaves.
Instead, we hear of reports of users overworking to prove themselves since the physical evidence of their work (being in the office) is no longer available to them. Add on top of this that many are working with kids at home too, these same workers are trying to prove even more that they’re adding value. This means early mornings and late nights and working through meals. The burnout is very real on top of the anxiety we all are feeling during these uncertain times.
This is where Quest can help. With Quest InTrust user session auditing, managers can get reports to track both interactive and remote interactive logons to find those users who may have their work/life balance out of whack. Check out this video to learn how easily these reports can be generated for your remote workforce.
With InTrust, you can report on the user logon sessions by day or by week. For example, the weekly report adds up all user sessions and calculates the total time a user was in front of their workstation for that week. The advantage of this report is it adds up all the individual user session events and gives you a total number of hours/minutes/seconds per day or week.
Furthermore, Quest InTrust can go to so far as to also track the engagement of the user. This means you can easily weed out the few users gaming the remote system with Mouse Jiggler, and identify those who really are overworking to prove their remote productivity by tracking the applications and services.
On a side note: InTrust can even spot and stop processes like Mouse Jiggler or something more sinister like malicious PowerShell on remote workstations, even personal ones used for work right now and not connected to VPNs.
InTrust provides user session auditing tracks for both interactive and remote interactive logons to verify how long users are actively working at their workstations. A user session starts when a user logons or unlocks their workstation. It ends when a user’s workstations gets locked, they log off, screen saver comes on or PC gets rebooted. Every daily session has a start time, end time and duration.
Learn more about InTrust by registering for the webcast: How to Audit Remote and VPN logon activity during the work from home surge.
