The pandemic stripped managers of their most basic employee management tool.
Overnight, millions of people disappeared from cubicles into Zoom tiles. Many managers had spent their careers walking the floor, popping into cubicles, and chatting about work with their employees in the break room. Now, they’d lost the casual visibility that told them who was working, who needed help, and how projects were moving along.
For many, that sudden loss of face time created anxiety. How could they be sure work was getting done if they couldn’t see it happening?
Into that fog of uncertainty stepped a new class of technology designed to track keystrokes, take screenshots, and monitor employee activity.
These employee monitoring tools, often derided as “bossware”, sold themselves as a substitute for visibility. Instead, it promised accountability through data.
Yet, with all that investment and all those pretty dashboards full of data, the question remains: has any of it actually helped improve productivity?
And, if it hasn’t, what’s the alternative?
What managers think employee surveillance software accomplishes
The managers most likely to turn to digital surveillance were those who believed visibility equals accountability.
When the pandemic forced remote work on a massive scale, it also exposed how dependent many organizations were on presence as a proxy for productivity. Without the ability to glance around the office and see who showed up early, who was wearing grooves into their chairs, and who was burning the midnight oil, many leaders felt disoriented.
That uncertainty sparked a predictable appetite for measuring activity. The logic went: if I can’t see the work, I can at least count it.
Modern business culture worships metrics, so the instinct makes sense. We’ve been told that more data means better decisions. The more you quantify and track, the theory goes, the better you can optimize.
When managers couldn’t see their teams in person anymore, they turned to dashboards instead, hoping data could replace judgment.
In that environment, monitoring software feels like a valid solution. Tools that record idle time or track mouse movement promised to inject objectivity into performance management. In theory, that data would even make things fairer because it would be a neutral, measurable standard.
Many also believed employee monitoring tools would make management more scientific. Ingest enough inputs and maybe you could spot problems before they surfaced. If someone’s activity dropped, it might be a sign of burnout or disengagement, for example.
The reality, though, hasn’t matched the promise. The data these tools collect rarely delivers the clarity managers hoped for. In fact, the onslaught of data, and the means of collecting it, often undermine the very productivity it was meant to boost.
What employee surveillance tools actually “accomplish”
Studies consistently show surveillance and monitoring don’t make people more productive. At best, it produces no measurable gains. At worst, it actively hurts performance.
Even managers seem uneasy with the bargain. More than 4 in 5 admit to ethical concerns about using surveillance tools, according to an ExpressVPN survey. Yet nearly the same percentage continue to use them anyhow. The result is a workplace where everyone is on edge because managers doubt workers and workers doubt managers. Meanwhile, no one’s even quite sure what the data shows.
That’s because the flood of activity data these tools generate rarely comes with the context needed to make it useful. A spreadsheet of idle minutes can’t explain why a project is stalled. That drop in “active hours” might reflect laziness. Or burnout. It might be a sign that the employee received poor direction and isn’t sure how to proceed. It could simply reflect a period of deep thinking.
Set aside the problem of deriving meaning from the data. Even if you can draw sound conclusions from that data, you now face another problem. Once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a metric. In other words, the metric gets gamed.
If you track keystrokes, you’ll get more keystrokes. Not better work. If a sales team knows their performance is based on how often they tap the keyboard, you’ll get salespeople filling their CRMs with notes instead of calling prospects.
Surveillance reshapes workplace behavior in all the wrong ways. Employees spend less time with coworkers because conversation looks unproductive on a dashboard. Those casual interactions that build trust, spark ideas, and knit together that slippery concept we call culture all vanish. When culture erodes, engagement plummets. And disengaged employees are unhappy employees.
And researchers consistently find that unhappy employees, it may not surprise you to hear, are not productive employees.
When your system rewards activity, people make themselves busy. When your system rewards trust, people work. Choosing surveillance is choosing the wrong reward.
Why time tracking is different (and better) than surveillance
The issue isn’t measurement itself. The issue is that surveillance measures in order to control problems and people. Time tracking, on the other hand, measures so you can better understand both.
When done right, time tracking delivers the visibility managers crave without the distrust that surveillance sows.
Take a marketing team juggling several campaigns. Instead of managers tracking screen activity, employees log hours spent on each client project. After a month, the data show designers are consistently logging 50-hour weeks, while writers and project managers stay closer to 40. The manager adjusts timelines, brings in a freelancer to absorb design overflow, and rebalances client expectations.
Used this way, time tracking helps everyone see the same picture. A clear record of hours and tasks can reveal when workloads are uneven, when deadlines are unrealistic, or when a project is burning through its budget too fast. It can also highlight underused capacity, recurring bottlenecks, or the need for clearer priorities.
The same data that makes managers feel more confident helps employees make smarter choices, too. They can identify patterns in their own work like when they’re most productive, what drains focus, and where time consistently slips away. It’s self-awareness, not surveillance.
When time tracking integrates with payroll and billing, people are paid accurately for the time they put in.
Employees recognize the difference. In Buddy Punch’s 2025 Time Tracking and Trust report, 75% of employees said time tracking was helpful, and 82% believed their employer used it to support them, not control them. That’s the inverse of the surveillance dynamic. The same act of measurement, framed differently, produces trust instead of resentment.
You can’t spy your way to better work
Surveillance was born from fear. Fear of lost visibility, of slipping productivity, of not being in control. But control isn’t what drives performance. Trust is.
Monitoring tools collect endless data about what employees are doing. Time tracking, used well, helps everyone understand why. One extracts; the other explains.
The irony of surveillance is that it tries to manufacture accountability by removing autonomy and ends up destroying both. People do their best work when they feel trusted to manage their time.
Time tracking gives managers the information they need to plan intelligently, and it gives employees a mirror for their own habits and limits.
Managers don’t need more screenshots or keystroke logs. They just need a time tracker like Buddy Punch that gives them the information and context to make smarter decisions.
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