Your team already opens SCREENish every day to track time and stay on the same page. Now there’s a brand-new reason to keep it open. Meet SCREENish Huddle — a private place for your whole team to talk, call, and share, built right into the window you already use.

Look for the new Huddle tab. Behind it you’ll find a team directory, one-to-one chat, audio and video calls, and direct file sharing — all in one spot. And here’s the promise we want to lead with: this is a secure team chat app designed so that your company’s conversations stay your company’s business. There’s nothing new to install and no separate account to create. If you have SCREENish, you have Huddle.

Everyone on your team, one click away

No more hunting through email addresses or trying to remember someone’s username. Open Huddle and a simple team directory shows exactly who you can reach. Message them, call them, or start a video — all from the same list.

Just as important is who can’t show up there. Only people verified as being on your team can message or call you. There’s no inviting the whole internet, no strangers wandering in, and no spam from accounts you’ve never heard of. This is a private team messaging app built for real coworkers, not for the outside world.

Chat one-to-one without leaving a trail

Sometimes you just need a quick answer. Huddle lets you send text messages straight to a teammate, right inside SCREENish — perfect for the day-to-day questions you’d rather not scatter across email threads or some outside app.

Here’s what makes it a genuinely private business messaging app. Messages are delivered while you’re both online. Our server simply passes each one along and then forgets it — so there’s no growing pile of chat history sitting on a server somewhere for anyone to leak, hand over, or mine. The only copy of your conversation history lives on your own computer, and it’s locked to that computer. Copy that history file to another machine and it simply won’t open. Your words stay with you.

Text chat in Huddle is always one-to-one — a real, private conversation between two people.

Jump on a call, face to face

When a call beats typing, start one in a couple of clicks. Reach a teammate by audio or video, or gather a small group — up to four people — for a quick huddle to talk something through together.

This is where private video calls for teams really shine. Whenever your network allows, your call travels straight from one person’s device to the other — device to device, not parked on some company’s cloud. It’s scrambled the entire way, so no one in the middle can watch or listen in. And on the rare occasion a strict office firewall forces a call to take a detour, the point it passes through still can’t make sense of a thing — your conversation stays unreadable to it.

The call also runs in its own separate space that shuts down the moment you close the app. Nothing lingers.

Send files straight to a teammate, and nowhere else

Need to hand someone a document, an image, or a report? Huddle’s secure file sharing for teams is the strictest part of the whole experience.

Files travel straight from your device to your teammate’s device — hand to hand. They never pass through, and never sit on, any server. And if a truly private, direct connection can’t be made, Huddle doesn’t quietly reroute your file somewhere you didn’t choose. It cancels the transfer and tells you clearly. Privacy always wins over convenience. Anything you receive lands neatly in your Downloads folder, right where you’d expect it.

It all lives in one window

Chat, calls, and file sharing sit together under the Huddle tab, so there’s no bouncing between apps all day. Because it’s part of SCREENish, your team stays in the tool they already know. One login, one window, one place for team communication — that’s the whole idea behind a truly built-in team communication tool.

How SCREENish Huddle keeps your team’s conversations private

We think about privacy the way you do — in plain English. Here’s the honest picture of how we help you keep team conversations private:

• Everything runs on our own equipment. Huddle doesn’t hand your team’s calls, chats, or files to Zoom, Slack, Microsoft, or any other outside service. It all stays on infrastructure that SCREENish runs itself. This is genuinely self-hosted team chat — your talk never leaves hands you trust.
• Our server is a switchboard operator that keeps no record. Picture an old-fashioned operator who connects two people and then forgets they ever spoke. That’s our server: it introduces two teammates, passes things along, and saves nothing — no messages, no files, no recordings. Your calls and files are scrambled so the operator couldn’t make sense of them anyway, and your chat messages are gone from our side the instant they’re delivered.
• Nothing sensitive is ever stored. No saved messages, no stored files, no call recordings sitting on a server anywhere. There’s no online history to be leaked, hacked, handed over, or mined — because it was never kept in the first place.
• Your chat history stays on your computer, locked to it. Move that file to another machine and it won’t open. It belongs to one device: yours.
• Calls go straight between the people talking, scrambled the whole way — and even a firewall’s detour point can’t see or hear anything.
• Files go device to device and never touch a server — and a transfer that can’t stay private is stopped, not rerouted.
• Everything travels over secure, protected connections — the same kind of protection you rely on when you log into your bank’s website.

That’s what makes Huddle secure team communication software you can actually explain to your team without a technical manual.

How it’s different

Slack, Zoom, and Teams keep your chats, files, and recordings on their cloud, run by their company. Huddle keeps nothing sensitive on a server at all — your history lives on your own computer, and your files pass straight from one teammate to the next.

The big platforms are built to remember everything forever. Huddle is built to remember as little as possible. There’s no third party sitting in the middle of your team’s business, no server-side history waiting to be exposed, and no extra app to buy, per-seat chat fee, or separate login to juggle. It’s the private version of team chat, calls, and file sharing — your calls scrambled end to end, your chat kept off our servers entirely — already inside the app your team opens every day.

Frequently asked questions

Is SCREENish Huddle really private?
Yes. Your messages, calls, and files run on SCREENish’s own servers, never through Zoom, Slack, or other outside services, and nothing sensitive is ever stored where it could leak.

Where are my chat messages saved?
Only on your own computer. Our server passes each message along and forgets it, so there’s no chat history sitting on a server. The history saved on your device is locked to that device, so copying the file to another computer leaves it unreadable.

Are my calls and video secure?
Yes. Calls are scrambled and sent straight from one person’s device to another whenever possible. In the rare case a strict company firewall has to reroute them, the go-between still can’t see or hear anything.

What happens to files I send?
Files go directly from your device to your teammate’s and never touch a server. If a private direct connection can’t be made, the transfer is cancelled with a clear message rather than quietly rerouted. Files you receive land in your Downloads folder.

Who can message or call me?
Only people verified as members of your own team. Outsiders and strangers can’t reach you through Huddle.

How many people can join, and do I need to install anything?
Text chat is one-to-one, and a call can include a small group of up to four people. There’s nothing new to install — Huddle is built into SCREENish, so just update the app and open the Huddle tab.

Turn on Huddle and start talking privately today

Getting started takes seconds. Update SCREENish, open the Huddle tab, and your team directory is right there waiting. Send your first message, start a call, or share a file — all in a few clicks.

If you’ve been looking for a team chat app for small business that respects your privacy by design, this is it. Give your team a place to talk freely and share freely, knowing the conversation stays yours. Open Huddle and start talking privately today.

By SCREENish Team

This isn’t paranoia. It’s a real concern that costs businesses millions every year through time theft, identity fraud, and schemes where someone else performs the job entirely.

The Cost of Not Knowing Who’s Working

Time theft hits businesses harder than most realize. The American Payroll Association found that employers lose around 4.5 hours per week per employee to various forms of time theft. For someone earning $15 an hour, that’s roughly $3,500 gone every year. Multiply that across a company of 50 people and you’re potentially losing over $175,000 annually.

Then there’s buddy punching. About 75% of U.S. businesses deal with it. That’s when one employee clocks in or out for another. Nearly one in five employees admit they’ve done it for a coworker. Seems harmless enough, right? Except it accounts for about 2.2% of gross payroll losses across affected companies.

But these are the old problems. Remote work introduced new ones that are far worse.

The Proxy Worker Problem

Here’s a scenario that’s becoming disturbingly common: a skilled interviewer lands the job, but someone completely different shows up to do the actual work.

In documented cases, companies realized the person who aced their technical interviews wasn’t the same person accessing their systems every day. The interview candidate was essentially a hired gun – someone who interviews well and then hands off the position to whoever is actually going to do the work.

Sometimes it’s not even that organized. An employee accepts a full-time remote position, then quietly subcontracts the work to someone overseas while collecting the full salary. The employer has no clue who’s actually handling their sensitive data and accessing their systems.

The U.S. Department of Justice investigated operations where thousands of IT workers used stolen identities to infiltrate hundreds of American companies. These weren’t isolated incidents. It was systematic fraud at scale.

The Overemployment Scheme

Some people have figured out they can hold multiple full-time remote jobs at once. They use avatar software during meetings, keep their cameras off whenever possible, and juggle responsibilities across different employers.

On paper, they’re a dedicated full-time employee. In reality, you’re getting maybe 10-15 hours of actual attention per week while paying for 40. Quality suffers. Deadlines slip. And you have no idea why because your “full-time” employee seems to be online and responsive.

There are entire communities online dedicated to teaching people how to pull this off. They share tips on managing overlapping meetings, which jobs are easiest to juggle, and how to avoid detection.

Deepfake Interviews

This one sounds like science fiction, but it’s happening now. People use AI tools to alter their face and voice in real-time during video calls. An unqualified candidate can present themselves as someone completely different – sometimes even impersonating a real person whose credentials they’ve stolen.

The technology is good enough that hiring managers don’t notice anything wrong. The candidate passes multiple interview rounds, gets hired, and then either can’t do the job or was never planning to do it themselves in the first place.

The “Clock In and Disappear” Problem

Even without elaborate fraud schemes, remote work makes simple time theft trivially easy. Someone clocks in at 9am, does an hour of work, runs errands until 4pm, puts in another hour, and clocks out at 5. Their timesheet shows 8 hours. They worked 2.

With no one watching, there’s no accountability. Traditional time tracking systems only know when someone clicked a button. They have no idea if anyone was actually there.

Why Traditional Verification Doesn’t Work Anymore

In an office, these problems mostly solve themselves. You can see who’s at their desk. You recognize faces. You notice when someone’s not around.

Remote work removed all of that. The verification methods that replaced it are weak:

Passwords and logins can be shared with anyone. If your employee gives their credentials to a friend or contractor, you’d never know.

Periodic check-ins are easy to game. Show up for the standup meeting, disappear for the rest of the day.

Activity monitoring tells you a keyboard is being used, not who’s using it.

Video calls can be faked, avoided, or attended by the “real” employee while someone else does the actual work.

None of these methods answer the basic question: is the person I hired the person doing the work right now?

What Actually Solves This

Face recognition tied to time tracking closes these gaps. The concept is straightforward: verify that the person at the computer is the person you hired, not just at clock-in, but continuously throughout the workday.

This makes proxy workers impossible. It doesn’t matter if someone else has the login credentials – if their face doesn’t match the profile, the system knows.

Overemployment schemes fall apart when you can’t just “be online” without actually being present at your computer.

The clock-in-and-disappear problem goes away when verification happens every few minutes, not just at the start and end of the day.

And buddy punching becomes a thing of the past. You can’t clock in for someone else when the only way to clock in is with your own face.

The Privacy Concern

The obvious objection is privacy. Facial recognition at work sounds invasive. And it can be, if implemented poorly.

The key differences that make it acceptable:

Local processing. Good systems do all the face verification on the employee’s own device. The biometric data never leaves their computer. There’s no central server collecting face images.

No photo storage. The system converts faces into encrypted mathematical representations. It’s not storing pictures of employees. It can’t be turned back into photos.

Verification only. The system answers one question: is this the right person? It’s not tracking expressions, emotions, or anything else. It’s not surveillance. It’s identity confirmation.

Employee control. People can see what data exists about them and delete it if they leave the company.

When done right, it’s less invasive than having a manager look over your shoulder in an office – which was considered completely normal for decades.

The Bottom Line

Remote work created a verification vacuum. Traditional methods don’t work when you never see someone in person. The result is a growing industry of fraud – from simple time theft to elaborate identity schemes.

Face recognition in time tracking fills that gap. It answers the question that every remote employer needs answered: is the person I’m paying actually the person doing the work?

The companies that figure this out will be able to hire remotely with confidence. The ones that don’t will keep paying for work that isn’t being done by the people they think they hired.

SCREENish offers time tracking with continuous face verification, built for remote teams who need to know their workers are who they say they are.

The researchers found that companies that allow employees to work remotely at least three times a month can increase annual profit growth by at least 10% compared to companies that do not practice this approach. And some firms with this policy in relation to their employees and link their success. But we are not talking about the fact that there is no control over the work of the staff at all, just employees can choose over which project and in what capacity they will work.

Some large organizations claim that thanks to the remote work of employees they are working to increase productivity. A detailed study by LRN showed that firms where employees have a higher degree of freedom are 10 to 20 times more likely to overtake firms where workers have a low level of freedom. However, do not confuse this with permissiveness and lack of control over the work of staff.

If your employees are able to do the job qualitatively and on time without being in the office, then you need to give him that opportunity, and time tracking with screenshots will not deliver in that case any problems. To bring the spirit of freedom to the collective, you need to go three steps.

1. Find out what kind of freedom your employees need, and try to act in accordance with their wishes.

The needs of the staff are very much dependent on the nature of the company’s activities, on the services or goods it provides, on location and much more. You can find out their needs only by asking a direct question. Most often the employee is asked: the opportunity to work remotely, increase the paid vacation, choose a project, remuneration for outstanding contribution to the development of the project, determine his line manager, and make decisions about the path of professional development and growth. When people are serious, the manager will understand this in a personal conversation, hear and evaluate their requests and will not worry about monitoring the work of the staff. If the company is large, and the staff is too much to personally meet with everyone, conduct a few discussions with representatives of different departments.

2. Carefully study the tools for communicating remote employees.

To determine which means your company will use, consult those who already have remote work experience. In addition, such tools will help the supervisor to monitor the work of staff.

3. Speak boldly about the freedom-loving orientation of your organization.

Today, the possibility of working remotely for candidates on the labor market is a competitive advantage of the company. Such a brand, where there are pleasant nuances and flexibility in the company’s policy, attracts professionals more. If the rules of your company are really attractive to potential employees, be sure to tell them about it on the official page of the company and mention at the interview. Do not miss the opportunity – use this competitive advantage. Do not be afraid that the candidates mistakenly think that there is no control over the work of personnel in your company. Competent interviewing of the candidate will put everything in its place.