Workplace Surveillance: Does Employee Monitoring Work?
Employee monitoring software now records keystrokes, screenshots, location, AI chat history, and time on task in many workplaces. Leaders adopt these tools expecting better performance and lower risk. The peer-reviewed evidence shows a different result, and it matters for anyone who leads people or works under observation.
What Is Electronic Performance Monitoring?
Electronic performance monitoring (EPM) is any use of technology to watch, log, and evaluate what employees do at work (Ravid et al., 2023). It includes keystroke logging, screen capture, email and chat review, GPS tracking, wearables, and productivity dashboards. Researchers also call the practice employee surveillance or workplace surveillance (König, 2025).
Does Employee Monitoring Improve Performance?
The research answer is no. Ravid et al. (2023) conducted a meta-analysis of the EPM literature and found no evidence that monitoring improves performance. The same analysis linked monitoring to higher stress. König (2025) reviewed the wider literature and reached a similar conclusion, the overall effect on performance was neutral, with a small increase in strain and a small decline in job attitudes. The interesting finding was that design changes the outcome and employees held more positive attitudes when monitoring was transparent and less invasive (Ravid et al., 2023).
How Does Being Monitored Affect Employees?
Monitoring changes how people relate to their own work. Thiel et al. (2023) found, across a field study and an experiment, that monitored employees reported a lower sense of agency. With less agency, they felt less personally responsible for their conduct and were more likely to break rules.
Zhu et al. (2026) identified a related pattern. Employees who perceived monitoring as invasive responded with anger and moral disengagement, and both predicted cheating at work. In both research programs, employees who judged their organization as fair overall showed weaker negative reactions.
Survey data point in the same direction. In APA's 2024 Work in America survey, a non-peer-reviewed source, 51% of monitored workers reported feeling tense or stressed on a typical workday, compared with 38% of other workers (Andoh, 2026). Monitored workers were also more likely to plan a job search within a year, at 39% compared with 21%.
Who Carries the Heaviest Monitoring Burden?
Monitoring is unevenly distributed. Behrend et al. (2026) analyzed data from APA's 2023 Work in America survey and found that workers in precarious jobs were more likely to be monitored. They also experienced more intensive monitoring and reported more negative psychological reactions to it.
Vitak and Zimmer (2023) surveyed 645 U.S. adults who worked from home early in the pandemic. Acceptance of monitoring depended heavily on context. The authors conclude that reduced privacy and autonomy can widen existing power imbalances, particularly for vulnerable employees.
For leaders, this is an equity question as well as a performance question. Employees with little power to object are often the ones observed most closely.
A monitoring decision shapes how much agency and fairness employees experience at work (Thiel et al., 2023; Zhu et al., 2026). I advise leaders to treat it with that weight. In most corporate settings the same tools run across teams and levels, so the question shifts to who can speak up about them. Contractors, temporary staff, and people on teams facing layoffs often cannot raise a concern without risk.
Before approving a tool, ask how the data will be used and whether the people affected can question it safely. Leaders who want accountability can begin by holding themselves to the same standard of transparency.
What Do Monitoring Metrics Miss?
Monitoring data capture a narrow part of a job. Pawirosumarto and Kurniawan (2026) describe how people analytics can turn employees into what the authors call datafied selves, a profile of measurable activity that stands in for the whole person. Their paper is a conceptual and ethical analysis, and it argues that this substitution can produce unfair judgments and tighter organizational control.
Monitoring tools count activity such as keystrokes, logged hours, and messages sent. Mentoring a colleague, thinking through a difficult decision, and repairing a strained working relationship are absent from that count. Research summarized by Behrend et al. (2026) also indicates that monitoring narrows attention and motivation toward the behaviors being measured.
For example, a manager spends an hour preparing a colleague for a difficult client meeting. The activity log records that hour as idle time. The work mattered to the client relationship, and it is missing from the data used to judge the manager's performance.
A further risk is function creep. Function creep occurs when data collected for one purpose, such as security, is later used for another, such as performance evaluation. Vitak and Zimmer (2023) found that employees judged monitoring as less appropriate when its purpose was unclear or extended beyond familiar workplace goals.
How Can Leaders Monitor Employees Without Compromising Trust?
Some monitoring is necessary for safety, security, and compliance. The evidence points to four practices that reduce its costs.
1 State the purpose before collecting data. Transparent monitoring is associated with more positive employee attitudes (Ravid et al., 2023). If a leadership team cannot name the decision the data will inform, the data should stay uncollected.
2 Use the data for development. Position monitoring as feedback that helps people improve, and keep it separate from discipline wherever possible. Discipline here means using monitoring data to issue a warning, lower a performance rating, or support a termination decision. This protects the sense of agency that Thiel et al. (2023) identified as the mechanism at risk.
3 Collect the minimum. Less invasive monitoring produces better attitudes (Ravid et al., 2023), and perceived invasiveness predicts anger and cheating (Zhu et al., 2026). Set a review date and switch tools off when the purpose ends.
4 Keep human judgment central. Treat the data as a prompt for a conversation with the employee. Ask what the numbers leave out before drawing a conclusion.
Fairness runs through all four practices. In two separate research programs, overall justice buffered the negative effects of monitoring (Thiel et al., 2023; Zhu et al., 2026).
What Can You Do If You Are Being Monitored at Work?
Senior professionals are monitored too, and the experience can be disorienting for people used to autonomy. A few steps help.
• Ask what is collected, who sees it, and how it is used. These are reasonable questions, and transparency is associated with better outcomes (Ravid et al., 2023).
• Notice the pull toward performing for the metric. Monitoring tends to narrow attention to what is measured (Behrend et al., 2026). Keep your own record of the contributions the system does not see.
• Treat persistent distress as information. If being monitored conflicts with how you understand yourself as a professional, that conflict deserves attention.
Does Leadership Coaching Help with Workplace Monitoring?
Coaching examines the question behind the tool. For a leader, that means what you need to know about your team's work, what the data can tell you, and how you will explain the purpose to the people affected. The urge to monitor is treated as information about uncertainty, and the four practices above give the conversation its structure.
If you are the one being monitored, the useful work is about identity. Being measured by activity counts can conflict with how you understand your own contribution. Coaching puts that contribution into words, clarifies what to raise with a senior leader, and considers whether the role still fits the career you are building.
I work with professionals and leaders on exactly this question, through career and leadership coaching, in person in Little Italy, San Diego, and virtually worldwide. The Identity Gap Framework is a structured way to begin on your own. If you would prefer to talk it through, you can book a 20-minute intake call.
References
Andoh, E. (2026, November 1). The hidden costs of workplace surveillance. Monitor on Psychology, 57(8). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/11-12/hidden-costs-workplace-surveillance
Behrend, T. S., Shoss, M., Tracy, M., Stolle, D., Blachly, B., Chan, M., & Schwartz, B. (2026). Work precarity and workplace surveillance experiences. Journal of Business and Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-026-10105-3
König, C. J. (2025). Electronic monitoring at work. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 12. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-110622-060758
Pawirosumarto, S., & Kurniawan, B. (2026). Datafied selves at work: Ethical boundaries of surveillance in people analytics. Journal of Business Ethics, 208(2), 457–473. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-026-06272-1
Ravid, D. M., White, J. C., Tomczak, D. L., Miles, A. F., & Behrend, T. S. (2023). A meta-analysis of the effects of electronic performance monitoring on work outcomes. Personnel Psychology, 76(1), 5–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12514
Thiel, C. E., Bonner, J. M., Bush, J. T., Welsh, D. T., & Garud, N. (2023). Stripped of agency: The paradoxical effect of employee monitoring on deviance. Journal of Management, 49(2), 709–740. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063211053224
Zhu, H., Zhao, F., Liu, J., Chen, Y., & Wang, L. (2026). The cost of surveillance: How perceived invasiveness of electronic performance monitoring triggers workplace cheating. Human Resource Management, 65(3), 761–779. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.70051
