Employee Surveillance Is on the Rise…Here’s Why That’s Bad

It’s another workday. You sign in to your computer…and so does your boss, silently observing your typing speed and blink rate via the webcam.

This may sound downright creepy, but it’s the unfortunate reality for many remote and hybrid workers. 80% feel monitored by their employers, and about the same number of employers have some type of activity tracking in place.

At Toggl, we strongly oppose employee surveillance. It’s ethically unacceptable, legally concerning, and, worst of all — severely damaging to companies and their people.

Yet, employee monitoring software is a booming billion-dollar market, and Toggl’s 2025 Productivity Index revealed that 70% of leaders are comfortable using surveillance software in a remote work setting.

So, how did we get to a state where companies distrust their employees and cultivate productivity paranoia? Let’s unpack this.

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Over 550 employee monitoring products now offer employee surveillance technologies, such as keystroke logging, screen recordings, webcam monitoring, and GPS tracking. 

• These technologies erode trust and invade privacy and often have the opposite effect — they actually reduce productivity, increase disengagement, and lead to higher turnover. One in six workers consider monitoring technology usage a good reason to quit a job. 

• Excessive monitoring often breaches data privacy laws like GDPR, ECPA, and CCPA, with regulators taking action against companies that overstep boundaries. 

• There are better ways to manage employee performance, such as collaborative goal-setting, data-driven capacity planning, promoting deep work, and providing regular feedback. These approaches focus on building trust and intrinsic motivation rather than instilling fear via surveillance. 

• Toggl Track believes transparency and trust are the crux to higher workforce productivity and better operational performance. 

• To increase workforce productivity, employers should channel more effort into improving their visibility into teams’ workloads and available capacities. Try new work schedule strategies and continuously course-correct via internal employee feedback. 

The rise in employee monitoring

As more teams moved from cubicles to home offices, a new term emerged — bossware.

Also known as electronic employee monitoring software, bossware refers to the expanding means companies have to monitor employees’ laptops, phones, and physical activity under the guise of ‘productivity tracking.’

Browser history, app usage, mouse movements, keystrokes, break clock-outs, Slack messages — there are very few things employers can’t track.

Such intrusive surveillance raises many questions. Is it warranted? Yes, if you ask (micro)managers who doubt their people are working. But otherwise? No, because most employee monitoring software has zero positive effect on performance.

Is it morally questionable? Absolutely. 83% of employers realize the ethical issues with employee surveillance, but 78% nonetheless use monitoring tools due to fear their people aren’t doing enough.

85% of leaders say the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to trust employee productivity. This has led to productivity paranoia, where leaders fear lost productivity is due to employees not working despite increased hours worked, meetings, and activity metrics.

Microsoft

No one likes being watched — and people get tense. High stress levels and poor mental health naturally lead to lower performance, absenteeism, and disengagement, all of which increase the intention to quit. 63% of workers consider monitoring technology usage a good reason to leave an employer.

When quitting isn’t an option, people often resort to a “productivity theater” strategy — finding workarounds to dupe the apps and inflate the tracked metrics. A quick online search provides plenty of options.

But this only creates more antagonism. Some employers, like Wells Fargo, have responded by firing people who used desktop activity simulation tools. Others are forcing people back to the offices. 

But neither addresses the real problem: Is employee monitoring software the solution to more productive work?

Many employers appear to think so. Starbucks, Delta, Nestlé, and AstraZeneca are using an AI-powered tool to monitor employees’ messages (yes, private ones on social media, too) from company-owned devices.

Barclays installed workplace surveillance software that emailed staff daily to warn them about not being “active enough” or “having too many unaccounted activities” like bathroom breaks. Other options are available to snoop on office and remote workers.

The most common types of employee surveillance

Employee monitoring software has become a $587.8 million market in less than five years, growing at 12% year-on-year.

Still, we feel it’s important to clarify that not all time tracking or attendance management apps are inherently bad. However, some of the following new technologies take employee monitoring too far. 

​​Keystroke logging 

Employee monitoring tools with keylogging features capture keyboard usage frequency and timing as a proxy of engagement. Many also collect specific user inputs like recent search queries, form submissions, file usage, browser activity, and system commands.

Some employers argue it can detect insider threats and breaches of workplace policies. Forcepoint software scans for specific keywords in employee activity to predict whether an employee shows “signs of willingness to leak company information,” “engage in insider trading,” or “show other signs of illicit workplace behavior.”

This degree of monitoring borders on predictive policing, a morally questionable and ineffective practice. 

Screen recordings

Occasional screenshot capture or desktop activity video recording is another feature in some employee monitoring software. Some managers see it as ‘proof’ of employees’ engagement or a justification for tracked billable hours. 

Can employee outputs be measured in screenshots? If your sales manager spends most of their day chatting with clients on Zoom, should you penalize them for that? Or if they spent the day perfecting a few presentation slides that led to a multi-million dollar deal closure?

Screen recordings often contain sensitive corporate and personal data, including logins, passwords, and financial records. If a monitoring app gets breached (which does happen), all of this information will end up in the wrong hands. 

Webcam monitoring 

Requiring employees to always keep their webcams and microphones on is another problematic post-pandemic practice. 37% of employers expect workers to be on camera all day. Among them, 93% monitor real-time video feeds for four or more hours daily — not the best use of supervisors’ time.

Video surveillance is often justified by the following: In the office, employees are monitored with security cameras or by the manager’s keen eye. So equivalent measures must be in place for home-based workers. But regulators don’t agree.

A Dutch court recently fined a US company for unlawfully terminating an employee who refused to keep the webcam on during a 9-hour online training session. His behavior was deemed “insubordination” and “refusal to work,” leading to dismissal. The court ruled that such surveillance invaded privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and ordered compensation.

GPS tracking 

Location tracking is common in attendance and shift scheduling apps. It’s not bad as long as the feature is activated with employer consent for legitimate purposes, like optimizing delivery routes or coordinating field service work.

But location tracking can also promote unhealthy management habits, such as immediately questioning employees’ whereabouts when they take a different route or a “suspiciously long” break. It can also invade employee privacy. Walmart was found to collect phone cameras and location data from employees’ personal devices after they forgot to turn off the workplace app after work.

GPS data and attendance monitoring technologies like badges or biometrics are used to build ‘point-based’ systems for tracking absences and lateness. One too many strikes (five in the case of Walmart and eight with Amazon), and you’re out of a job.

These automated systems, however, are error-prone and do not distinguish between absences protected by national labor laws and those violating company policies. Over 18 million workers across 66 US employers were wrongfully impacted by such systems.

Psycholinguistic analysis

Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) advances, software has improved in evaluating natural language. Beyond detecting specific keywords in emails or phone calls, advanced algorithms can evaluate sentiment, do personality profiling, or seek out signals of “malicious, inappropriate, or illegal behaviors in corporate communication,” as some vendors advertise.

Some businesses might track customer service communications to judge if workers handle complaints well. Others….to moderate internal communication channels for harassment, profanities, or bullying.

But language analysis algorithms aren’t perfect. They can show biases and poorly interpret phrases out of wider context, helping immature managers draw fast (and wrongful) conclusions. Such tools can also breach employees’ legally protected rights.

Collective organizing (unionization) and whistleblowing are protected by American federal, EU, and state laws. Yet, this doesn’t prevent employers from overstepping boundaries. Amazon HR managers, using an email monitoring program, surveyed minority and activism groups to detect employee organizing around controversial issues.

Is worker surveillance even necessary (or legal) in the first place?

Employee surveillance technologies have two major problems: Trust and privacy. Employers monitor workers due to distrust. But workers also distrust employers who obsessively watch their every step. The very nature of surveillance creates an environment of suspicion, fear, and deviance.

Arizona State University researchers found that excessive monitoring policies reduce employee productivity. Workers are more likely to take unapproved breaks, work slower, or engage in performative activities to inflate tracked metrics.

43% of employees spend 10+ hours a week on productivity theater tasks that make them look better in front of managers or colleagues but aren’t really warranted. 

Visier

Invasive employee monitoring also erodes personal accountability. Because people feel constantly micro-managed, they have a lower sense of personal responsibility, show less initiative, and don’t perform to the best of their abilities. 

In many cases, employee surveillance often backfires. Instead of higher performance and productivity, workers become disengaged and miserable. 3 in 4 workers say workplace monitoring lowers job satisfaction. Employees channel more energy into being visibly busy or thwarting monitoring systems instead of applying the same zeal to meaningful work.

By focusing just on the actions people take, these tools completely ignore the environment in which people are working. Managers are often attempting to juice productivity within fundamentally broken environments—full of fragmented or non-standardized processes and tasks, user-unfriendly IT applications, poor UX design, bottlenecks, and other factors that make work harder and slower. No single employee controls these variables and is instead subjected to them. Therefore, not only do these productivity tools fail to fix what is broken, they don’t even surface the real issues.

Rohan Narayana Murty,  junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and CTO at Soroco

Apart from being morally questionable and mildly effective, workplace monitoring can be illegal.

A number of privacy laws restrict employee data collection: 

• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 
• European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR)
• Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) 
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) 
• UK Data Protection Act 2018
• Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000

These laws don’t ban employee monitoring per se, but each limits its applicability. Employers must obtain workers’ consent, disclose monitoring use cases, restrict these to specific circumstances, and ensure the measures aren’t excessively intrusive.

Some national laws push for stricter workplace privacy. French CNIL says screen captures “are likely to be neither relevant nor proportionate since it is a frozen image of an isolated action by the employee, which does not faithfully reflect his or her work.”

The authority discourages such employee monitoring with a few exceptions, such as training or combating fraud. Employees cannot be subject to both video and phone call recordings at the same time.

Violators of data privacy rules risk fines. CNIL fined Amazon’s French division €32 million in 2024 for creating an intrusive employee monitoring system and running video surveillance without consent.

Employers can also face consequences for using collected data. An ExpressVPN survey found that 73% of employers used logged employee activity data and electrical communication for performance reviews, 43% to monitor potential workers’ union formations, and 37% as evidence for firing. When companies are then sued for privacy violations, courts often side with workers. 

In the US, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a warning against adopting monitoring tools using algorithmic scoring, third-party background checks, or any technology lacking transparency or breaching legal privacy protection.

Denmark has amended its video surveillance laws to bar companies from using remote or automatic workplace cameras for anything but security and crime prevention.

Greece and Cyprus have prohibited remote employee monitoring via webcams, while Portugal says employers must inform workers about any devices and apps used to monitor their activity remotely.

We are urging all organizations to consider both their legal obligations and their workers’ rights before any monitoring is implemented. While data protection law does not prevent monitoring, our guidance is clear that it must be necessary, proportionate, and respect the rights of workers. We will take action if we believe people’s privacy is being threatened.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office 

There are (several) better ways to monitor and manage employee performance

Employee surveillance rarely achieves the desired effect because it optimizes the wrong measures.

Many companies still peg productivity to vague metrics like “visibility,” “total productive hours,” or even absurd ones like “logged keystrokes” or “messages sent” (although to be fair, 39% of C-suite execs polled did say there is too much focus on hours worked rather than output achieved).

The point is that these measures only increase productivity paranoia, where companies try to coerce employees into productive mode via nagging, micro-management, threats, and punishments.

Happiness, not fear, is the strongest productivity driver.

Our brain triggers a fight-or-flight response whenever our stress level rises. There’s a 50% chance we’ll either act and power through the unreasonable demand or freeze and fall further behind on a stressful task. Ongoing stress leads to loss of motivation, emotional exhaustion, and reduced effectiveness.

Happy workers, on the contrary, are 13% more productive. They use their time more effectively to complete tasks faster and at a higher quality. Happiness and high performance directly correlate with intrinsic motivation — our internal drive to engage in interesting, novel, or inherently satisfying activities.

Many employee performance management strategies only leverage extrinsic motivation — financial rewards, praise, or aversion to negative consequences. Employee surveillance tools only aggravate the latter.

A better (but slightly harder) approach is maximizing workers’ intrinsic motivation. This includes giving people greater autonomy and control over their actions (instead of micromanaging), helping them gain necessary competence levels, and giving them appropriately challenging tasks.

Timely feedback, supporting workplace dynamics, and a stronger connection to the company’s purpose improve employee performance more than blanket monitoring and threats.

Not sure where to start? Try these softer approaches to employee performance management.

Collaborative goal-setting

Humans are wonderfully unique, and everyone has their own timelines for getting good work done. The timing correlates with the nature of the job, their skill set, and cognitive capabilities.

As managers, we can help people understand and meet expectations by setting SMART team goals. Explain their importance and each person’s contribution to them, then break down each goal into individual KPIs — metrics that reflect real progress rather than sham activity.  

At the end of the day, you want your people to deliver better business results, not type more messages or stare into the webcam for 8 hours straight.

Data-driven capacity planning 

Good managers optimize employee outputs, not contributions. Just because someone is “active” for 8 hours doesn’t mean they contribute more value than someone doing 4 or 6 deep work hours. They may be less productive in “real terms” — waste time in unnecessary meetings, on redundant tasks, or by troubleshooting broken workflows. 

In such cases, time tracking, not activity tracking, can identify what’s holding your people back and where inefficiencies cost money. Analyzing time spent on tasks can reveal ways to remove, optimize, or automate low-value work. 

Focus on deep work 

Longer hours don’t translate to more outputs. Our brain has performance limits — it can muster five hours max of hard cognitive workload. 

Carving out that space is hard due to constant interruptions from messages, meetings, and other seemingly urgent but non-essential requests. For example, software engineers spend only 32% of their time writing code and about 70% on testing, operational, and management tasks.

An anonymous survey among FAANG employees also found 45% of workers don’t do more than four hours of focused work daily. Yet, these companies are hardly unprofitable. In fact, many companies and even entire countries are switching to six-hour workdays or four-day workweeks, and their productivity and economic outputs increase.

To improve your people’s productivity, you need to maximize the opportunities for deep work in a blissful state of distraction-free concentration. To promote deep work, companies adopt asynchronous communication, remove daily, recurrent meetings, and encourage employees to time block entries on their calendars for deep work. 

1:1 feedback sessions 

Immature managers often use employee monitoring software data to issue warnings to underperforming employees without investigating root causes. In 99% of cases, there’s a good reason for a performance dip.

Anika might have had a hard week due to a family issue but didn’t take PTO because it would look bad in the attendance tracker. Or Latricia might have been given a new task with unclear instructions, spending hours on call and in Slack clarifying the requirements. A manager must understand where and why their team is struggling — that’s what 1:1 sessions are for.

Toggl’s anti-surveillance stance

At Toggl, we’re big proponents of time tracking for personal productivity, not behavior policing. 

Our products will never have features that could breach employee privacy. No keystroke logging, screen captures, or location tracking — because we believe in empowering people, not oppressing them with totalitarian-like surveillance.  

Toggl Track’s mission is to provide the big picture of productivity data through the pane of time management. Studying your habits, processes, and task completion rates can help you understand when your performance is peak and what holds your company down. 

Time tracking gives real project visibility: Progress across sub-tasks, budget usage, resource availability, and time blockers. Activity monitoring only gives you “noise” — no context into group progress or individual contributions beyond the number of sites visited. In the end, it is the outcomes that matter, not the inputs. 

As long as everybody has a clear understanding what needs to be done, you can be quite liberal on how exactly the work is done.

Alari Aho, Toggl Founder

By giving our people the opportunity to be flexible with their time — all Togglers are free to choose when and how much they work — we’ve built a strong, loyal, distributed workforce of 150 people. When many choose to double down on surveillance, we put our bets on trust.  

How to fight “productivity paranoia”

The definition of paranoia is “unjustified suspicion and mistrust of others,” and that’s exactly what we’ve seen for the last couple of years.

Managers doubt their people are working enough and obsess over marginal metrics. Greedy software vendors fuel that frenzy with Black Mirror-esque technologies, such as work pods with heart-rate sensors to detect employee stress levels or AI-powered facial recognition apps to detect emotional cues and predict workers’ behaviors.

Such systems further erode workplace trust, leading to higher turnover, low morale, strained leader-staff dynamics, reduced innovation potential, and poor company performance, according to research. 

What we chose to do at Toggl (and now encourage others to do) is focus on restoring trust and increasing individual accountability. Here’s how.

Aim for workload visibility  

Suspicions often grow in the shadows. Without visibility into the teams’ workloads, capacity, and processes, it’s easy to doubt your people’s productivity and business profitability.

Workers, in turn, lack clarity in their priorities, don’t understand task dependencies, and focus on perfunctory work like attending meetings or quickly responding to emails.

Get your project management in order. Are your task estimates accurate? Do the deadlines make sense for the proposed chunk of work? Do you have to break down and parallelize tasks across two people instead of piling everything on one person?

A project management app with time-tracking features can determine each person’s scope of work, plan tasks, and track progress.

Greater workload transparency helps employers set clear expectations, and workers maintain clarity in their priorities. It also shifts the dynamics from proving, “Look, I’m working,” in favor of demonstrating your progress towards established goals and results. This creates greater personal accountability and removes expectation ambiguities.

Build a feedback-focused culture 

Workplace tensions arise when people can’t find common ground. Employees don’t understand what’s expected of them, and managers struggle to frame their demands or explain how to do better. This aggravates the disconnect between workers and leaders and undermines trust.

The solution is implementing more frequent and objective feedback cycles. Netflix encourages the open (sometimes uncomfortable, yet necessary) practice of sharing constructive feedback with everyone, including subordinates, peers, managers, or senior executives. All feedback follows the 4A Principle: 

When giving feedback:

• Aim to assist
• Actionable

When receiving feedback:

• Appreciate
• Accept or discard

Work in targeted sprints 

Endless grind isn’t the answer to better productivity. With constant stress to deliver faster and better, most people will burn out and quit, leaving you with fewer hands on deck and slimmer chances to deliver on the big objective.

A better option is keeping your team “toned” with a mix of high and low-intensity cycles as 37signals (Basecamp) does. Every team operates on a 6-week cycle, followed by a 2-week cooldown. This model creates a sense of urgency to keep the progress happening but also gives enough room for reflection, quick fixes, and rest. Work hours are strictly limited to 40h/week (32 hours in the summer) — forcing teams to ruthlessly prioritize what matters and enjoy life outside of work for better personal well-being. 

The company has no official growth or revenue targets, yet it’s been profitable for 24 years with over 100,000 customers.

The future of remote work productivity

For some companies, remote work was one of the greater workplace experiments — an opportunity to re-evaluate and reinvent operating processes and even their business models. For others, it’s become an ongoing source of tension, leading to the rise in employee monitoring software adoption and forced return-to-office (RTO) mandates. 

However, one in seven leaders at Fortune 500 companies that require in-person work say this rule had no impact on staff productivity.

The truth is many remote-first companies like 37signals, Buffer, Toggl, and Automattic, have always been efficient and productive. Not because we allow people to work from home and take more breaks, or use some form of monitoring. But because we choose to build a strong culture of strong personal accountability, high trust, and open communication. 

To succeed, leaders need to change how teams work, not where. This requires greater clarity into workload distribution, process efficiency, and time for deep work — something we aim to provide with our technology. 

Toggl Track brings time data into all major workflows, providing clarity into capacities, workloads, performance, and goals. Simple interface, powerful insights, and huge no to any form of surveillance get a 100% team buy-in for adoption.