The Evidence Employers Ignore

In May 2024, Wells Fargo fired more than a dozen employees in its wealth and investment management division. Their offence was not fraud, misconduct, or incompetence. It was the use of mouse jigglers, small devices costing roughly twenty dollars apiece that simulate cursor movement on a screen, creating the illusion of an active worker at their desk. The disclosures, filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, described their transgression as “simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.” A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour.”

The incident became a flashpoint. Not because the employees were blameless, but because it exposed the architecture of suspicion that now undergirds the modern workplace. These workers were not stealing money or falsifying accounts. They were gaming a system designed to reduce their entire working day to a stream of keystrokes, mouse movements, and activity scores. The fact that such a system existed, and that circumventing it was treated as a fireable offence, tells you more about the state of employer-employee relations in 2026 than any corporate mission statement ever could.

Across the industrialised world, millions of remote and hybrid workers now operate under what researchers and labour advocates have come to call “bossware”: a sprawling ecosystem of software tools that log keystrokes, capture screenshots at random intervals, track application usage, monitor website visits, record webcam footage, score activity levels in real time, and in some cases analyse facial expressions to determine whether someone is paying attention. According to industry surveys, 80 per cent of US companies now track employee performance digitally, and 74 per cent use online tracking tools of some kind. Sixty-one per cent use AI-powered analytics to measure employee productivity or behaviour, signalling a shift from simple time tracking to algorithm-driven performance evaluation.

The employee monitoring software market, valued at approximately 587 million US dollars in 2024, is projected to reach 1.4 billion dollars by 2031. Some market analyses place it significantly higher, with estimates ranging up to 4.59 billion dollars in 2026 depending on scope. However you measure it, the trajectory is unmistakable. The business of watching workers is booming.

And yet, a growing body of research from institutions including MIT, Stanford, and the US Government Accountability Office suggests that these tools are not accomplishing what they promise. They are not making workers more productive. In many cases, they are making them more anxious, more disengaged, and more likely to leave. Some evidence links intensive productivity monitoring to increased physical injury rates. The question that emerges is not simply whether this technology works, but what its continued adoption reveals about the distribution of power between employers and the people who work for them.

The Machinery of Ambient Scoring

To understand what bossware does, it helps to examine the tools themselves. The market is crowded, but a handful of names dominate:

• Teramind
• Hubstaff
• ActivTrak
• Time Doctor
• Veriato
• Kickidler

Their capabilities vary, but the general architecture is consistent. Each tool sits silently on an employee's device, often installed by IT departments without detailed explanation, collecting behavioural data and feeding it into management dashboards that convert a working day into graphs, percentages, and colour-coded scores.

Teramind, one of the more comprehensive platforms, offers keystroke logging, screen recording, application and website monitoring, email surveillance, file transfer tracking, chat monitoring, clipboard capture, and even printing activity logs. Hubstaff provides screenshot capturing at set intervals, keyboard and mouse activity tracking, GPS location monitoring for mobile workers, and application usage analytics. These tools run continuously, and their data collection is often invisible to the worker. There is no blinking light, no notification, no moment when the system asks permission. It simply watches.

Some systems go further still. Fujitsu Laboratories developed an AI model capable of detecting small changes in facial expression muscles using a framework called Action Units. The system claims to determine whether someone is concentrating or not by tracking muscular micro-movements every few seconds, capturing both short-term changes such as a tense mouth and longer-term patterns such as a sustained stare. Fujitsu reported an 85 per cent accuracy rate based on a study of 650 participants across the United States, China, and Japan, and has targeted applications including teleconferencing support and employee engagement measurement.

The Victorian parliamentary inquiry into workplace surveillance in Australia specifically cited this kind of facial analysis technology as an example of the expanding frontier of worker monitoring. The committee heard evidence about wearable devices that monitor conversations, including how enthusiastically someone is speaking.

The data these tools generate is then fed into dashboards that score employees on productivity metrics, often in real time. Managers can view who is “active” and who is “idle,” which applications are being used, and how time is distributed across tasks. In some implementations, these scores feed directly into performance reviews, promotion decisions, and disciplinary processes. The worker rarely sees the same dashboard the manager sees. They experience the outputs of the system, in the form of warnings, performance ratings, or termination, without access to the inputs that produced those outcomes.

The core premise is straightforward: if you can measure activity, you can optimise it. What the research increasingly shows is that the premise is wrong.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

In February 2025, MIT Technology Review published a detailed investigation by Rebecca Ackermann into how opaque algorithms designed to analyse worker productivity have been rapidly spreading through workplaces. The piece argued that these algorithmic tools are less about efficiency than about control, and that workers have less and less recourse to challenge the decisions made on the basis of their data. There are few laws, Ackermann noted, requiring companies to offer transparency about what data goes into their productivity models or how decisions are derived from them. Labour groups, the article reported, were pushing back against this shift in power by seeking to make the algorithms that fuel management decisions more transparent.

The evidence against the effectiveness of monitoring has been building for years. A meta-analysis published in Computers in Human Behavior Reviews examined the impact of electronic monitoring on job satisfaction, stress, performance, and counterproductive work behaviour. The findings were stark: electronic monitoring showed a near-zero correlation with performance improvement (r = -0.01) while showing positive correlations with stress and counterproductive behaviour. In other words, monitoring does not make people work better. It makes them more stressed and, in some cases, more likely to act out. The study also found that performance targets and feedback, when combined with monitoring, could further exacerbate these negative effects.

A 2024 study published in Social Currents by Paul Glavin, Alex Bierman, and Scott Schieman, based on a nationally representative sample of 3,508 Canadian workers, found that perceptions of workplace surveillance were indirectly associated with increased psychological distress and lower job satisfaction. The mechanism, the researchers found, ran through what they termed “stress proliferation”: surveillance increased job pressures, reduced autonomy, and heightened feelings of privacy violation, all of which compounded into measurable psychological harm. The study used a novel measurement approach that captured overall surveillance perceptions across all types of work, rather than focusing narrowly on specific monitoring technologies.

The American Psychological Association's 2024 Work in America Survey, conducted by The Harris Poll among more than 2,000 employed adults, found that 56 per cent of workers who reported being monitored also reported feeling tense or stressed at work, compared with 40 per cent of those who were not monitored. Just over a third of respondents said they worried that their employer used technology to spy on them during work hours. The prevalence of monitoring was notably higher among Black and Hispanic workers (55 per cent and 47 per cent respectively) than among White workers (38 per cent), and higher among those doing manual labour (55 per cent) than among office workers (44 per cent). These disparities point to an equity dimension that is rarely discussed in the productivity optimisation conversation. The people bearing the heaviest burden of surveillance are disproportionately those who already occupy the most precarious positions in the labour market.

The US Government Accountability Office weighed in with a comprehensive report, GAO-25-107126, published in September 2025 and reissued with revisions in December 2025. The GAO reviewed 122 studies published between 2020 and 2024 on the effects of digital surveillance on workers' physical health and safety, mental health, and employment opportunities. The report concluded that while surveillance can in some contexts alert workers to potential health problems and increase their sense of physical safety, it can also increase anxiety and, critically, increase the risk of injury by pushing workers to move faster to meet productivity targets. The report further noted that several federal agencies that had previously provided guidance to employers about digital surveillance had, by mid-2025, rescinded those efforts or were reassessing their alignment with current administration priorities. The Department of Labor, for instance, removed a relevant resource from its website in June 2025 as part of a broader review.

When Productivity Scores Cause Injuries

The starkest illustration of how productivity tracking can cause physical harm comes from Amazon's warehouse operations. In December 2024, the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions published a 160-page report following an 18-month investigation led by Chairman Bernie Sanders. The investigation examined Amazon's internal systems for tracking worker speed, including the so-called “Time Off Task” metric that penalises workers for any period of inactivity, including time spent using the bathroom or waiting for equipment.

The Senate report cited an internal Amazon study, Project Soteria, which found a direct relationship between the speed at which workers performed tasks and their rate of injury. In each of the prior seven years, Amazon workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured as workers at other warehouses. More than two-thirds of Amazon's fulfilment centres had injury rates exceeding the industry average. The investigation concluded that Amazon had studied this connection for years but refused to implement changes that might reduce productivity, even when its own internal data showed those changes would reduce injuries. The report further alleged that Amazon manipulated workplace injury data to make its facilities appear safer than they were, and prevented injured workers from receiving needed medical care.

The report also found that Amazon's disciplinary systems, powered by automated tracking, forced workers into an impossible choice: follow safety procedures such as requesting help to move heavy objects, or risk discipline and potential termination for not maintaining sufficient speed. The system was, in effect, using surveillance and automated scoring to compel workers to choose between their physical safety and their employment.

Amazon contested the report's findings, insisting that injury rates had declined and that the investigation distorted the data. But the pattern the Senate investigation described - automated monitoring creating pressure that leads to physical harm - is not confined to warehouses. It is the logical endpoint of any system that reduces work to quantified activity and then optimises for speed.

The Panopticon Has a Subreddit

If you want to understand what it feels like to work under constant surveillance, the academic literature is illuminating. But Reddit may be more revealing. A 2024 study published on arXiv and later in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, titled “It's Always a Losing Game: How Workers Understand and Resist Surveillance Technologies on the Job,” analysed posts from nine work-related subreddits, including r/antiwork, r/remotework, r/WorkersStrikeBack, and r/overemployed, alongside ten in-depth semi-structured interviews with employees and managers from industries including operations, customer service, marketing, and food and beverage.

The researchers found that workers consistently identified surveillance technologies as causing significant stress, reducing their productivity, and increasing their risk of disciplinary action. Workers also reported that these technologies fostered paranoia and distrust, not just between employee and employer, but among colleagues who feared that their peers might be reporting monitored data to management.

The resistance tactics the researchers documented included commiseration (sharing frustrations with fellow workers), obfuscation (using tools like mouse jigglers to game activity trackers), soldiering (deliberately slowing down work in protest), and quitting. Search queries for “mouse mover” and “mouse jiggler” have remained consistently elevated since March 2020, when the mass shift to remote work began. Approximately 16 per cent of employees,