Employee monitoring software
All notes
Everything here, grouped by subject.
What the dashboard shows
Four hours of productive time. Idle for ninety minutes across the afternoon.
What was happening
Twenty minutes thinking through a problem, then writing the answer in five. The rest was a call, a document read on paper, and a conversation that unblocked a colleague.
The deeper the thought, the worse the score. This is what the measure is, not a setting that needs tuning.
What the dashboard shows
Activity up eleven per cent since deployment.
What was happening
People learned which signals are counted. Documents left open and scrolled during calls, email sent at hours that look committed, work split into more visible pieces.
Not dishonesty. A rational response to an incentive the organisation announced.
What the business case counted
Licence cost per user per month, against recovered minutes multiplied by an hourly rate.
What it actually cost
Half a role administering it. Months of consultation. Manager attention moved from the work to reports about the work. And two experienced people who left without saying why.
The people who leave first are the ones with options.
Core notes remain method-focused; separate guides compare named products. No unverified productivity-improvement figures. This collection does not argue that monitoring is always wrong. Nothing here is legal advice.
01
7 notes
The decision
Ask what they would do differently with the data. The answers separate a management question from a reporting one from a feeling.
02
7 notes
Reading the claims
Every figure in this field measures the vendor's own metric on the vendor's own customers.
03
7 notes
What it measures
The more skilled the work, the weaker the relationship between activity and output. In places it inverts.
04
8 notes
The people measured
Within weeks the measured behaviour changes. That is what happens when a number starts to matter.
05
7 notes
What it does to management
It is most attractive to the managers least comfortable with the conversation, which is where it does most damage.
06
7 notes
Obligations
Whoever examines this asks the same thing: was it necessary, and was there a lesser way.
07
6 notes
If you deploy it
Report at group level and hold that line. It is the single decision that determines whether the deployment is tolerable.
08
1 notes
The short version
Most of these requests are answering a question the software cannot answer
The concern is usually that expectations were never agreed, progress is not visible, or somebody is uncomfortable having a conversation. Monitoring does not fix any of those, and it lets an organisation avoid fixing them for years.