Remote workers have a message for spying bosses: That won’t work, and neither will we

Forty-one percent of U.S. professionals said they feel less productive when their boss monitors their work devices, per a 2,300-person survey released by Glassdoor on Tuesday. Workers in finance and tech were most likely to say that monitoring harmed productivity and negatively impacted their work output, while accounting professionals were more likely to feel comfortable with employee surveillance. Yet, 36% of workers were unsure whether they’re being monitored in the first place. 

It’s the latest evidence that bosses’ attempts to keep an eye on their workers is backfiring. In a remote work world where return-to-office mandates have come and gone to no avail, some bosses have cranked up the spying to monitor their remote workers’ productivity. JPMorgan, Barclays Bank, and UnitedHealth Group all track employees, the New York Times reported in a major investigation last year, via everything from their sent emails to keyboard strokes. Tracking is the result of productivity paranoia, which has only grown the more workers stay remote (current offices in major U.S. cities are only about half full, per Kastle Systems data provided to Fortune).  

Nearly all (96%) of remote-first employers admitted to monitoring their workers in some way, per a ResumeBuilder survey from March, with many doing so for the first time in the past year. Most told ResumeBuilder they believe using spying software upped workers’ productivity (although one in 10 admitted they’re only really using it to push employees back into the office). But Glassdoor’s data, along with other research, indicates this is the wrong strategy.

Many monitored employees tend to leave for workplaces “where they feel more respected,” Karen Levy, associate professor in the department of information science at Cornell University, told the BBC in February. People tend to feel more stressed and angry when they’re under constant observation, as their autonomy and dignity feels undermined, she explained. 

And they begin to take it out on their work. Employees were more likely to cheat on a series of tasks if they were told they were under surveillance, a 2022 Harvard Business Review study found, compared with those who were told they weren’t being monitored. The findings showed that “monitoring employees causes them to subconsciously feel that they are less responsible for their own conduct, thus making them more likely to act immorally,” the authors wrote. In a separate HBR study, workers were “substantially more likely to take unapproved breaks, disregard instructions, damage workplace property, steal office equipment, and purposefully work at a slow pace” when they knew they were being watched. 

Such research gives credence to the workers in the Glassdoor survey, who could merely just be saying being watched makes them unproductive in hopes that bosses will stop such measures. The consequences—and likely the ethics—of monitoring workers is becoming a matter of policy; in May, the White House announced plans to examine the impact of tools that “surveil, monitor, evaluate, and manage” workers.

Monitoring might just be more damaging to a company’s bottom line than a few minutes of pretend work here and there.