🕜 Our productivity tracking problem
🕝 On The Clock is a biweekly newsletter sharing opinions and advice on the world of work — and the way it should be. If this episode was sent to you, subscribe here so you don't miss the next one!
Hey 👋
Welcome back to 🕝 On The Clock.
Before we dive into this week’s edition, a little present for you all 🎁
If you’ve been thinking of testing Toggl out, now’s the time to do it. Our end-of-year sale ends tomorrow, but there's still time to grab up to 30% off monthly prices. Get more details on plans here 💰
Ok, enough of the sales chat.
I want to pick up where we left after the last On The Clock — the topic of bossware.
We just wrapped up research for our 2025 Toggl Productivity Index, which will drop in January. We asked 450+ leaders from the C-suite about their priorities for next year, and we found two clear (and contradictory) themes:
🧑💻 The number one priority to improve performance in 2025 is more focus on productivity
😬 70% of leaders were comfortable with using surveillance software for remote work
The early results show leaders want their teams to be more productive, but the path to get there is... murky.
There is a clear gap between what they say they value — productivity, performance, collaboration and revenue — and what they actually prioritize, like rigid work hours and using surveillance software.
Our research also found a darker theme around how companies are approaching productivity. Instead of focusing on work, they are focusing on control.
What do companies actually get from workplace monitoring?
The demand for more flexible work, mixed with the rise of bossware, was always going to be a recipe for disaster.
Look at what just happened with Boeing and its “workplace occupancy program.”
Behind the fancy title, the guts of the program included installing camera sensors along with light, heat, and noise detectors in some of Boeing's offices.
The aim, according to the company, was to “manage energy and space usage.”
Boeing employees — quite rightly — hit the roof when they found out about the program. And the company was forced to pull the plug, wasting a total of $1,029,900 in the process.
This is an extreme example of workplace monitoring, but the deeper question is… what the f*ck did Boeing hope to achieve with this program in the first place?
If we take them at face value, the aggregated data was to be used for monitoring utilization of its offices. Other companies, like JP Morgan, are gathering similar data to monitor seating arrangement and office attendance.
Yet a recent report by Cracked Labs concluded this specific behavior of “tracking and analyzing employees’ desk presence, indoor location and movements” was the equivalent of intrusive behavioral monitoring and profiling.
The bigger problem with collecting this type of data is it doesn't, in any meaningful way, measure how productive employees are.
Employee monitoring is mostly useless noise
When I hear about companies tracking desk movements and recording employee screens, I can’t help but think… What are they expecting to achieve by collecting this data? Is there someone in an office somewhere, ferociously checking the screens of every employee to make sure they are working on a specific project?
Harvard Business Review called this the “squeeze ’em” approach to productivity tracking, where workers are judged on metrics that keep them busy at all costs.
But measuring employees by keystrokes and screenshots isn’t just demoralizing, it’s also dangerous in the long-term. It leaves zero room for creative thinking or tasks that don’t directly feed into these metrics. It also ignores the reality of a work day: what if something breaks? Or a network shuts down? Or a meeting overruns?
The reality is, company leaders are too busy to be focusing on this noise. More importantly, this noise isn’t an accurate reflection of how much employees get done.
We won’t reveal too much before we officially release our Productivity Index, but we will leave you with something to ponder.
Employee monitoring software, and the comfortability leaders have with it, is growing
But when we asked the C-suite what actually mattered for them in 2025, the overwhelming majority said improving productivity and focusing on measurable outcomes
Cutting out all the noise and measuring what employees actually get done — instead of how many keystrokes they log in an hour — is a much smarter way to achieve just that.
Thanks for reading 🕜 On The Clock — see ya in two weeks 👋
Kimberlee
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