The workplace is exceedingly digital nowadays and when employees are surrounded by mobile phones, laptop screens, apps, instant messages and entertainment websites, it’s understandably hard to stay focused on work. There are many things you can do when there are three or four employees you are in charge of, but as the number goes up your chances of successfully keeping track of everyone’s productivity drop.

Fortunately, there is a scalable solution that works equally well for small teams and for large corporations. Employee tracking software is a digital solution that’s easy to implement and use and it offers plenty of features and reports you can use to track employee activity and make informed decisions that will significantly improve your team’s productivity.

Here are some features you can use to track and improve productivity:

Most employee monitoring apps give you the possibility to see which websites, applications and programs on your employees’ computers are being used. This can be done in real time but you can also get this data in an aggregated report.

The true power of an employee activity tracker is the fact that you can categorize the apps into three groups: productive, unproductive and neutral. This will give you insights into how each employee is using their time. Then you can work on decreasing the time spent on unproductive tasks and, most importantly, you’ll know which apps and websites you should be targeting.

However, try to use this feature of employee monitoring software wisely. You shouldn’t be aiming to eliminate the use of unproductive apps altogether. Short breaks increase productivity and if your workers feel like they can’t take five minutes to check their Facebook feed they will feel much less motivated to work.

The time tracking feature of any good computer monitoring software, such as Workpuls for instance, will keep track of how much time each employee spends on a certain task or in a particular app. You can use this data to delegate urgent tasks to your fastest employees. This application of the data provided by an employee monitoring software is rather obvious for most users.

However, you can take another route too. If you see that an employee takes much more time in Excel, for example, than everyone else does for the same task, this can be an indication that they need additional training in Excel. Providing this as soon as possible will not only benefit that employee, but will also boost the productivity of the entire team.

So far, we’ve talked about tracking which apps and websites your employees use and how much time they spend on them. As an extension of this, employee tracking software takes all this data and puts it into a neat and useful productivity chart. You can see the aggregated data for each day in a clean timeline, and it can be customized to show an individual employee’s productivity, as well as the data for the whole team, department or company.

This feature of computer monitoring can be used to show you which times of day are the most productive for your employees and teams. This can in turn help you make decisions on issues such as when you should plan the lunch break or other shorter breaks or when you should get your team to work on the most important projects.

Some employee tracking systems give you the ability to see how each employee’s productivity is changing over time. You can get a report on whether their productivity has increased or dropped and by how much in percentages.

One way to use this data is to know which employees need a little extra push and which need praise. But again, you shouldn’t be rash with your reactions; always look at the bigger picture and take all the data and circumstances into consideration to find out what the reason for the decrease in productivity might be. Alternatively, you can share this data with the employees. It can prove to be a great intrinsic motivator for improving their own performance and productivity.

When used wisely, an employee tracking software can be a powerful tool that can equip you with a lot of data and insights which can help you improve the productivity of your team or company. By analyzing things like apps used, productivity charts and trends, you can help each individual employee and the company as a whole succeed.