Is Workplace Surveillance Becoming the Norm?

Workplace surveillance seems to becom more and more normal.

What started with warehouse tracking and productivity metrics has slowly moved into offices, remote work, and everyday digital tools. Today, almost everything you do at work can be logged, measured, and analyzed. Emails, clicks, keystrokes, meetings, even how long you hesitate before replying.

Why This Is a Problem

Constant surveillance changes behavior in ways that are often counterproductive. When you know you’re being watched, you stop working naturally. You start optimizing for the metrics instead of the work itself. You don’t take breaks when you need them. You don’t experiment or take risks. You just perform.

People become anxious, creativity drops, and trust decreases. When you feel watched all the time, you stop feeling autonomous and start feeling managed. The workplace becomes less about collaboration and more about compliance.

There’s also the privacy issue. Monitoring doesn’t stop cleanly at work boundaries. Remote work, personal devices, background apps, social media. The line between work life and private life gets blurred, and suddenly employers have access to a lot more than just work-related data.

And once data exists, it gets used. Often in ways employees never agreed to or were fully informed about.

Many Tools Already Exist

The Danish Engineers’ Association (IDA) has collected a list of software solutions utilized for employee surveillance, partly based on the report ”Digital Surveillance and Control at the Workplace” by Wolfie Christl of Cracked Labs, and reports from the UK’s Trade Union Congress (TUC). Additionally, the American organization Coworker has launched a searchable database, Bossware and Employment Tech, cataloging over 550 tech products designed to monitor employees’ productivity, well-being, or digital behavior.

Some examples:

• Forcepoint: Claims to infer employee stress, financial trouble, resignation risk, mood, and communication behavior by monitoring emails, calls, websites, and physical access.
• Celonis: Tracks activity across enterprise systems like SAP and Salesforce, including keystrokes and mouse movements, in the name of efficiency.
• Humanyze: Uses wearable devices to analyze speech patterns, movement, and social interaction to calculate an “organizational health score”.
• Prewave: Monitors employees’ social media to predict job switching and assess reputational risk outside working hours.
• Hubstaff: Tracks time, applications, websites, and can take screenshots to prove “activity”.
• Teramind and InterGuard: Record screens, replay user actions, monitor communication, and alert on specific behavior.
• Microsoft 365 and Viva: Collect detailed data about meetings, emails, collaboration patterns, and work rhythms, often without employees fully understanding what’s being measured.

Some of these tools are presented as harmless analytics. While others are openly invasive, and the results the same. They all contribute to a culture of surveillance that’s becoming increasingly normalized in workplaces around the world.

Efficiency at What Cost?

Yes, some monitoring can help with logistics, safety, or resource planning. But there’s a huge difference between understanding workflows and watching individuals like suspects.

Productivity does not automatically increase because you measure more. As in many cases, it drops. This is due to people burning out faster, they disengage and they stop trusting their employer.

So even though surveillance might look efficient on a dashboard. It often feels awful on the human side. And that’s a problem, because work is not just about output. It’s about people, creativity, and collaboration. When you turn it into a surveillance state, you lose all of that.