Is Remote Work Monitoring a Reasonable Solution for Distributed Teams? [2025 Guide]
Employee surveillance – monitoring the activities of staff – is by no means a new concept. Long before remote work was widespread, an estimated 80% of large companies were already monitoring how employees used the internet, phone, and email during work hours.
If it was common before, employee monitoring has positively exploded in recent years. A quick Google search returns a handful of ads for remote surveillance software promising to improve productivity, alert leaders when staff is away from their desk for too long, and visualize their team’s performance in easy-to-use dashboards.
Whatever your personal beliefs about remote surveillance, one thing is clear: professional attitudes and practices vary widely depending on the industry, company size, and leaders. In finance and health care, for instance, many argue that employee monitoring is not only useful, but essential for privacy and security, as staff regularly handles sensitive information. Others say that employee monitoring is invasive, belittling, and provides an inaccurate picture of a person’s true “productivity.”
Regardless of opinion, employee monitoring is here to stay. As a remote staffing agency, we know that monitoring employees is inevitable; in many cases, it’s sort of the “cost of doing business.” But for clients and contractors alike, surveillance has raised a lot of questions.
In this article, I’m hoping to shed some light based on our research and experience for both sides, including:
- Whether you should monitor your remote employees,
- If it truly represents their productivity, and if not, how you can fill in the rest of the picture, and
- If you do plan to monitor your team, how to do it effectively
Table Of Contents
The Spectrum of Remote Work Monitoring
Employee monitoring refers loosely to digital tools used to track employee work progress, output, and performance. Comprising both hardware and software tools, they’re used to measure productivity, assess behavior, track attendance, and improve organizational security.
