There’s a particular kind of manager who, faced with a drop in output, reaches for a monitoring tool. You’ve probably met some of them. These managers love screen recorders, keystroke loggers, activity scores, webcam check-ins… they enjoy finding the ways the modern workplace can watch its own staff. The pitch is always the same: with such tools, you get more visibility, accountability, and ultimately more productivity.
The evidence, however, tells a different story.
Across a growing body of research, workplace surveillance is turning out to be one of those interventions that feels like it should work but simply doesn’t. Businesses that lean hardest into monitoring often end up with lower trust, warier staff, and worse data than when they started. Workplace surveillance is a trap, and an increasing number of companies are walking straight into it.
The watched employee is a more honest employee
The theory behind surveillance is straightforward and follows this (faulty) logic: if people know they’re being observed, they’ll behave better. Although it’s a reasonable-sounding idea, it turns out to fall apart in practice.
A Harvard Business Review study that tracked more than 100 US employees, some monitored and some not, found that being watched didn’t improve anyone’s conduct. Just the opposite; it blunted it.
Monitored staff were more likely to act against their own sense of right and wrong, essentially adjusting their moral judgement to the monitoring system. Their thinking was “the system is watching, so I can’t be blamed.” So, apparently, when you steal someone’s sense of agency so abruptly, you also take away some of their instinct to do the right thing unprompted.
Gartner’s research, as Computerworld reports, tells a similar story from a different angle.
Digital monitoring has grown fast, with the share of employees being tracked electronically jumping in just a year, but trust hasn’t grown proportionally. Only around half of employees say they trust their employer, and employers aren’t doing much better when it comes to trusting their staff.
Furthermore, Owl Labs’s State of Hybrid Work report found that a significant share of workers list monitoring software among their top workplace concerns, and the overwhelming majority (85 percent to be exact) believe employers should be legally obliged to disclose when it’s being used.
A new phenomenon: task masking
If you want a snapshot of how badly workplace surveillance can go, just look at the rise of task masking. This is the practice, now well documented on TikTok and other social media platforms, of employees performing visible busyness instead of doing actual work.
In hindsight, task masking is the logical endpoint of surveillance. If a system rewards the appearance of activity, including mouse movement, keyboard taps, and logged time, then the appearance of activity is exactly what it will get. Qui quaerit, invenit.
The surveillance tools themselves could be the ones to blame. Many surveillance platforms measure inputs rather than outcomes, so an employee who spends an hour thinking through a problem before typing a line of code can look, on paper at least, less productive than one who won’t stop moving the typing all morning. Employees have simply adapted to what’s being measured, and that’s a perfectly rational response to such an imperfect system.
In the end, businesses end up paying for a very convincing performance of productivity, similar to pantomime, which is arguably worse than having no data at all.
The productivity also dips
Setting trust and task masking aside, the core promise that monitoring makes people work harder is simply untrue. A 2023 survey by 15Five found that a third of managers using productivity tracking software saw no measurable improvement in output, while roughly a quarter believed it had actively pushed employees towards the exit.
There’s also a persistent gap between what managers believe and what employees experience.
Well over half of managers think tracking software has improved performance, yet a clear majority of employees say it’s either done nothing or made things worse. It’s surprising how two groups looking at the same tool can reach opposite conclusions. Perhaps the conclusion here is that workplace surveillance tools are measuring the wrong thing.
By contrast, many studies on autonomy paint a rather more encouraging picture, saying that employees given ownership over outcomes instead of constant oversight have been found to be noticeably more productive than those tracked minute by minute.
Overall, one could conclude that watching staff is a poor substitute for giving them tools that make their own workload legible. What would improve the surveillance approach could be the transparency that serves employees first.
What should replace workplace monitoring
Perhaps businesses should deter workplace monitoring, and move from surveillance (which watches people) to visibility (which helps people understand their own work).
Such a thing is possible only with the right tools. Luckily, that’s the gap the growing number of tools are trying to close. Time tracking platform Memtime, for example, is built around automatic, privacy-first tracking that shows individuals exactly where their day went, without screenshots or activity scores.
It works quietly in the background, capturing which apps, documents, and websites someone has used, then turning that into a private timeline only the user can see. Managers get the hours and project totals later on (that they need for billing and planning), but not a full view into someone’s screen. The logic is that if people can see their own time clearly, they’ll manage it better themselves.
Transparency is what is needed
The businesses getting workplace surveillance right seem to have a common thread: they don’t view monitoring as a control mechanism but more as a means to reach more visibility. In such environments, employees are told how they can measure their time and why. So, the purpose of such monitoring (if one can even call it that) is tied to something concrete, like accurate client billing, fairer workload distribution, and better forecasting, not just the need for proof that people are working.
Workers broadly accept visibility because it’s transparent, proportionate, and tied to a purpose they can see the point of. The businesses avoiding the surveillance trap are the ones that put trust and visibility first, which is not a hard thing to do.
Leave a Comment