- The bosses are looking more and more what their employees do during the working day.
- The demand for employee surveillance software increased from 54% from March 2020 to June 2023, a study revealed.
- The pressure is on bosses to reduce costs and eliminate unproductive workers, according to sources.
If you read this during your working day, there is a very good chance that your boss will know.
Employers have monitored workers for a long time, but companies now have more sophisticated means to see what employees do during the counter.
The bosses are increasingly deploying tools that can follow screen time, save strikes and take videos and screenshots to keep a tab throughout the day.
These gadgets, which exploded when the work remotely took off during the pandemic, is part of a broader trend in the workplace aimed at reducing costs and reducing the number of heads, which managers may think Done more effectively by eliminating less productive workers, sources that have declared to initiated business.
Between March 2020 and June 2023, the demand for employee surveillance software increased by 54%, according to TOP10VPN searches, a virtual private network comparison site.
At the same time, 73% of employers said they used calling for calls, emails or other messages as a factor in performance journals, while 37% said they used a registration to dismiss an employee, a separate survey of The ExpressVPN study revealed.
Five suppliers of employee surveillance software told Business Insider that they had experienced significant growth in the past year, four of which, according to reports that they had set their customers to scale by more than 25% in 2024.
Insightful, which manufactures surveillance software that allows employers to keep an eye on workers’ productivity thanks to features such as screenshot, says that it saw a 45% increase in customers last year . The company is already on the right track to see its customers jump 70% this year, said Alexandra Alexin, head of the generation of the insightful request.
Alexin has attributed the increased interest to employers wishing to hold responsible workers, adding that some companies have declared that they were trying to apply certain policies.
“It was fantastic from the point of view of companies,” said Alexin to Bi, noting that 2024 has marked the best year of the company. “I think that the real objective they have is, if these policies are applied, do they see more productivity and more efficiency of their workforce or not?”
Time Doctor, another performance monitoring software company that attributes productivity notes and alerts employers in workers’ inactivity, said customer interest increased by around 50% in 2024. Figures in the last quarters, the company plans to see a similar increase in 2025.
Liam Martin, the co-founder of Time Doctor, told BI that he attributed the increase in interest in employee surveillance tools to the rise of remote work, although cost reduction is also occurred in conversations with customers.
“Each employer to whom I spoke, and I asked them:” Will your number of heads descend because of the AI? “Above everyone said yes,” said Martin, adding that he believed that workers who could become more productive using AI were not going to be released.
Controlio, an employee surveillance tool that can classify employees on a very distracted “very productive” scale thanks to features such as keylogging, video recording and the activity of surveying files, says that this has seen a 30% increase in customers using its platform.
Moath Galeb, an account manager at Control, said that employers using Controlo are often shocked by the way some employees are unproductive. He added that some employers have used technology to determine the employees to let go.
“Many of our customers only use it to have the opportunity to make decisions,” he said.
The dismissal announcements by companies increased by 28% in January, according to a Challenger, Gray and Christmas report.
Meanwhile, a third of business leaders said that cost reduction was their top priority in 2025, according to a survey by Boston Consulting Group. About 86% of managers said they had planned to invest in AI or advanced analysis in 2025, BCG revealed.
While employers can flock such tools, workers are less enthusiastic about being monitored at work.
According to the American Psychological Association.
Time Doctor’s Martin says that fewer employees postpone technology once they have understood how it works, adding that it thinks that increased transparency is necessary for remote work to succeed.
businessinsider
