Years of watching work: What employee surveillance delivered and what it didn't

When remote work expanded rapidly in 2020 and 2021, many employers faced a challenge they had never encountered at scale: how to manage performance without physical visibility. Employee monitoring software quickly emerged as a solution. Vendors promised productivity insights, accountability and better workforce management.

Five years later, workplace surveillance is no longer a niche practice. Monitoring tools now track everything from screen activity and keystrokes to location data and communication patterns. Yet the central question remains unresolved. Did employee surveillance deliver the outcomes organisations were seeking, or did it create new challenges around trust, privacy and engagement?

The evidence suggests a more complicated picture than many early advocates anticipated.

From remote work response to mainstream practice

Early pandemic-era discussions focused largely on visibility. Employers wanted reassurance that remote employees were working productively outside the office.

A 2021 survey reported by HRMorning found that 60% of US employers were already using monitoring software to track remote workers, while another 17% were considering adoption. Employers cited three primary objectives:

• Understanding how employees spent their time
• Confirming employees worked a full day
• Preventing personal use of company equipment

The technologies varied in sophistication. Some tracked browsing history and application usage. Others captured screenshots or logged keystrokes. For many organisations, these systems became a substitute for traditional managerial oversight.

At the time, several employers reported productivity improvements after implementation. According to the survey, 81% said productivity had increased after introducing monitoring software.

Yet even in 2021, questions emerged about whether observed productivity gains reflected genuine performance improvements or simply behavioural changes driven by surveillance.

Researchers warned of hidden costs

As adoption accelerated, academics and labour researchers began examining broader consequences.

In 2023, Coworker and Data & Society's Labor Futures Initiative documented the rapid growth of workplace surveillance technologies across sectors. Their findings suggested monitoring had expanded well beyond traditional security functions.

The report described how surveillance technologies had become embedded in everyday work tools, enabling employers to track employee activity, location, communications and productivity metrics. Researchers warned that workers often lacked visibility into what information was being collected and how it was being used.

The report also highlighted concerns around:

• Worker privacy
• Data collection practices
• Increased pressure to meet productivity targets
• Potential impacts on collective organising efforts

Researchers noted that surveillance was affecting both frontline and knowledge workers, making monitoring a cross-industry workplace issue rather than a challenge confined to logistics or manufacturing environments.

Trust emerged as the missing variable

While organisations focused on measurement, researchers increasingly focused on employee experience.

A 2023 study by Janey Zheng and colleagues, published in research examining remote workers during and after the pandemic, explored how employees responded to perceived supervisory monitoring.

The findings were consistent across both research samples. Employees who felt managers were closely watching their activities reported lower levels of trust from supervisors. In turn, those perceptions were associated with lower energy levels and greater emotional exhaustion.

The study identified a critical dynamic. Monitoring itself was not the only issue. Employee perceptions about trust appeared to shape how surveillance affected wellbeing and motivation.

The research suggested organisations faced a difficult balancing act between accountability and autonomy.

Surveillance became bigger, not smaller

If early concerns were expected to slow adoption, the opposite happened.

By 2025, workplace monitoring had become deeply embedded in organisational practices.

According to reporting by Computerworld, citing MIT research, 80% of companies were monitoring remote or hybrid workers. Gartner estimated 71% of employees were digitally monitored, representing a substantial increase from previous years.

An ExpressVPN survey reported:

• 74% of employers used online monitoring tools
• 67% used biometric monitoring methods
• 61% used AI-driven performance evaluation systems

Monitoring also expanded beyond remote work. Even as return-to-office mandates increased, organisations continued investing in digital oversight technologies.

According to Gartner research cited by Computerworld, only 42% of HR leaders believed employees could be trusted to complete work without monitoring.

The persistence of surveillance suggests many employers continued viewing visibility as an essential management requirement regardless of employee location.

New evidence raised privacy concerns

In 2026, researchers from Northeastern University provided one of the most detailed examinations of modern employee monitoring platforms.

The study analysed nine widely used workplace monitoring applications and found all nine shared worker information with external technology providers.

Researchers reported that platforms shared:

• Employee names and email addresses
• Company affiliation information
• Device and browsing data
• IP addresses and activity information

The study also found some platforms could track employee location even when applications were operating in the background.

According to David Choffnes, one of the study's authors, the findings demonstrated that workplace monitoring data was not simply being collected internally but was also being shared across broader technology ecosystems.

The research shifted discussion beyond productivity and performance toward questions of data governance, privacy protection and regulatory oversight.

So, did HR deliver?

The answer depends on which objective organisations were pursuing.

If the goal was widespread adoption, surveillance clearly succeeded. Monitoring technologies moved rapidly from specialist tools to mainstream workplace infrastructure.

If the goal was improving visibility into employee activity, employers gained unprecedented access to workforce data.

However, evidence remains far less conclusive regarding broader organisational outcomes.

Across multiple studies between 2023 and 2026, researchers repeatedly identified concerns around trust, autonomy, wellbeing and workplace culture. Several studies also questioned whether monitoring systems accurately capture meaningful productivity, particularly for knowledge-based work where outcomes matter more than activity levels.

Research from the University of Waterloo in 2025 further challenged assumptions underpinning many monitoring platforms. Researchers found productivity metrics often focused heavily on time, activity and device usage rather than work quality or outcomes.

The findings suggest organisations may have become highly effective at measuring activity without necessarily becoming better at measuring performance.

The next phase will focus on governance

Employee surveillance is unlikely to disappear. The market has grown too large and become too integrated into workplace technology ecosystems.

The next challenge for HR leaders is different. Rather than deciding whether to monitor employees, organisations increasingly need to determine how monitoring should be governed, communicated and limited.

Five years ago, surveillance was framed primarily as a productivity solution. Today, it sits at the intersection of technology, privacy, trust and employee experience.

The industry's experience suggests visibility alone does not guarantee better performance. As monitoring becomes mainstream, the organisations that benefit most may be those that balance oversight with transparency, trust and accountability.