How many hours do your employees waste during the day? Chatting with buddies, reading news, browsing the Web and entertaining themselves with 'office killer' games, employees in a normal office waste as much as 35% of their working hours, according to a Microsoft survey performed in 2005 [1]. Microsoft surveyed employees of large corporations, and discovered unclear objectives, insufficient team communication and ineffective meetings to be the top time wasters. But is it valid for small and medium-size companies?

Owners of small and medium-size companies find themselves in a different seat. Running small businesses leaves no room for unclear objectives. Small teams make miscommunications impossible, and corporate meetings are inexistent. Does it mean that small business are immune to the problem of wasted time? Not really.

Small business owners often find their employees wasting time chatting, playing office computer games, reading news or browsing the Internet pointlessly. While browsing the Web and communicating with clients over email or in instant ant messaging might be a part of employees' everyday duty, it is hard to distinguish between what's being done for work and what's for fun.

Fortunately, small business owners are not left in the cold.

Refog Employee Monitor (http://www.refog.com/employee-monitoring.html) makes it possible to intercept and log employee activities that lead to the most time wasted. The keystroke monitoring tool intercepts keystrokes, logs all Web sites visited by employees, records chats and conversations in popular instant messengers, keeps track of applications they run and files they open, and makes periodic captures of their displays.

Refog Employee Monitor is easy to learn and to use, and does not require business owners to hire security staff. The provided intelligent filters make it simple to glance through employees' essential activities while skipping assigned tasks. The advanced chat module recognizes most instant messengers such as AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN Messenger, and produces chat logs in a legible, easily readable format. Instant alerts notify business owners if any of the pre-defined events occurs, such as if an employee types certain key phrases or launches certain applications.

With Refog Employee Monitor, it's up to the business owners whether or not to tell about the computer monitoring system to employees. The available invisible mode makes Refog Employee Monitor completely hidden from employees, while password-protection makes it impossible to circumvent, disable or uninstall. All in all, Refog Employee Monitor is an extremely cost-effective, result-oriented computer surveillance system that does not require any wiring or extra hardware.

A free evaluatopn version of Refog Employee Monitor is available at:

[1] Microsoft Corp. "Survey Finds Workers Average Only Three Productive Days per Week"