Does Tracking Employees Make Them More Productive?

“Big Brother is watching.”  

For some employees, it’s starting to feel like George Orwell’s dystopian future has left the pages of fiction and entered the workplace. Remote and hybrid work have made employee monitoring tools increasingly attractive for organizations seeking greater visibility into productivity.

Drs. Nick Turner and Justin Weinhardt, PhD, examined what research tells us about whether workplace monitoring actually improves performance. A meta-analysis of 94 studies involving more than 23,000 participants found no overall relationship between electronic monitoring and improved performance.

The evidence is clearer when it comes to how employees experience monitoring.

“Electronic monitoring is linked with greater stress, lower job satisfaction, weaker fairness perceptions and stronger feelings that privacy has been invaded," Turner and Weinhardt write in The Conversation.

Why more data doesn't mean better performance

The logic of adopting software that tracks time spent in applications, meetings, email and browser activity is straightforward: if managers can see how employees spend their time, they can better manage workloads, staffing and performance.  

However, digital activity only tells part of the story.  

While monitoring may increase visible activity in routine, measurable tasks, it does not necessarily improve the quality of work or business outcomes.

“Someone who appears constantly active may be busy without doing especially valuable work,” Turner and Weinhardt point out. “Monitoring can make some parts of work easier to count while making other parts easier to overlook.”

When employees feel constantly watched, they may prioritize appearing busy rather than focusing on doing their best work.

What employers need to know

Measure outcomes, not activity 
Instead of tracking clicks, screen time or application usage, leaders should define and measure meaningful outcomes. Success should be tied to results such as customer satisfaction, project completion, innovation, quality improvements or business goals.

In this Globe and Mail opinion piece, Turner and Weinhardt point out why surveillance can be misleading. "It often measures what is easiest to count, not what matters most." 

Build trust through transparency 
If monitoring tools are used, organizations should clearly explain what data is collected, why it is collected, who will have access to it and how it will be used.

"Context matters,” write Turner and Weinhardt. “Employees are likely to respond differently when data are aggregated to identify workload bottlenecks than when individualized data are used to scrutinize or rank them.” 

Fix systems, not people 
Before implementing monitoring software, leaders should ask what problem they are actually trying to solve.

“If [workplace surveillance] helps identify bottlenecks, reduce unnecessary work and improve staffing, it may have a constructive role,” Turner and Weinhardt write. "If it becomes a tool for micromanaging employees or pressuring them to justify every moment of the workday, the costs are likely to outweigh the benefits.” 

For CEOs and managers using or considering digital surveillance, the challenge is to understand work well enough to improve it without making ordinary work feel like constant inspection.