Conversation starter: Big brother comes to the office 

Key findings

Employers have always been interested in observing what their employees are doing, and in turn, employees resent being watched too closely. However, the combination of remote work and technological advancements in monitoring have employees worrying a lot more about whether their bosses or HR is virtually looking over their shoulders. Over the past four years - and particularly in the past 6 months - a growing share of Glassdoor reviews are making references to big-brother style employee monitoring.

Employee monitoring

While many frontline jobs (e.g. manufacturing or call center representatives) have long been subject to output tracking and electronic surveillance, technology-based tracking is now coming for knowledge workers. Some companies have started monitoring their remote employees by tracking keystrokes and mouse clicks or taking regular screenshots. As surveillance becomes more common, so does the fear of being watched. Our 2023 poll found that 36% of workers were unsure if they were being monitored. Many knowledge workers worry about maintaining an “active” status on workplace messaging services like Teams or Slack. 

To see whether awareness (or paranoia) over these terms was becoming more common, we identified a broad range of employee monitoring keywords - from broad concepts like “workplace surveillance” and “employee monitoring,” to specific monitoring practices, hacks, and technology - like “badge swipe tracking”,  “mouse jiggler”, and employee monitoring software names. These mentions have been steadily increasing since Q1 2021

Necessary evil or Orwellian corporate overreach?

Some reviews mentioning surveillance are positive, accepting that a company device may be monitored by the company but that they enable remote work, as in this review from a marketing professional at a moving company:

Some reviews were generally positive about their employers, but disliked that their work was tracked. Consider the “cons” section from a four-star review of an IT support company about how monitoring software has impacted the culture on remote work teams:

However, most reviews mentioning surveillance were negative. Employees resent what they see as excessive surveillance. Here’s a review from a technical project manager in fintech:

One VP of Operations in an HR consulting company views employee monitoring as a distraction:

While a scrum master at a telecommunications company thinks it drives good talent away:

To Jiggle or not to jiggle?

Employees also worry that they’re being watched. One account executive recently sought advice on the best mouse jiggler that could not be detected by their Fortune 500 employer:

A few themes stood out in the responses.

Conclusion

Employees hate being watched too closely - and more and more feel that this is the case. While employers may want to catch employees who are playing hooky, the impact of surveillance on your team’s sense of being trusted to do their work may not be worth it.

Methodology

We tracked the proportion of all reviews of US-based employers from full-time or part-time employees on Glassdoor mentioning keywords related to employee monitoring from 2021 to the present, grouped by the quarter of review submission. The data presented are normalized to the rate at which employees used these keywords in Q1 2021.

Note: The opinions expressed in example reviews and posts included in this research do not represent the opinions of Glassdoor. They are included as illustrations of trends in employee sentiment and discussion.