The COVID-19 lockdown meant a surge in remote work, and the trend toward remote and hybrid workplaces has persisted long after the pandemic receded. That has changed the nature of workplace management as well. Bosses can’t check for butts in seats or look over their employees’ shoulders in the office to make sure they’re working instead of having a LAN party. So they’ve turned to software tools to fill the gap.
So-called “bossware” lets managers keep a close eye on employees’ activity, tracking everything from knowledge workers’ website visits to the gait and facial expressions of those involved in more physical activities.
Employers have long been able to access electronic communications you conduct on their platforms, whether those are emails or direct messages. However, many employers don’t snoop on your inbox unless there’s an investigation, and some platforms make that more difficult than others. Slack Business+ and Enterprise, for example, require administrators to submit a formal request to Slack support if they want to view a user’s private DMs.
For paranoid managers who want next-level surveillance, installing bossware fits the bill. It can roll up employee activity into neat, graphical reports and charts, showing how much productive and unproductive time they’ve had based on what applications and websites they are using. Some bossware can even track keystrokes and mouse movements.
For most employees, the idea of being closely monitored sounds unpleasant, but bossware publishers maintain that knowledge is power, both for the worker and for the company. Ivan Petrovic, CEO and Founder of bossware company Insightful, posits that his utilities help give employers the confidence to let their employees work from home.
“With more autonomy, employers need to ensure accountability from their employees,” Petrovic told The Register. “We have all heard about quiet quitting and burnout reaching peak levels for many industries. That is why we built Insightful: to restore balance to the employer-employee relationship, offering both autonomy and accountability in one simple package.”
Insightful generates detailed reports showing how each employee spends their time, whether it’s using required software or logging out for a long break. It even flags when employees appear to be burned out or, on the flip side, are working more than the required hours.
Petrovic notes that employers are taking the insights from his program and using them to cut waste that goes well beyond individual employee performance. For example, he said, one client recently saved $2 million by detecting that no one was using an expensive piece of software their company was paying for.
Danilo Coviello, founding partner of Espresso Translations, said that his company tracks its translators’ work because it’s able to better allocate resources that way.
“Translation platform monitoring is performed because the client is paying for translation time, not scrolling through Facebook,” he told The Register. “Productivity metrics are tracked so we can have linguists focused on intricate tasks at optimum times, not on the calendar when it might be easy.”
Through tracking, Coviello learned that his German language team was taking 40 percent longer on translating automotive text, so he brought in someone with specialized expertise to prevent his regular workers from burning out. That said, Espresso may track that a user is browsing the web instead of working, but it won’t track which websites employees are visiting. “Personal internet browsing is always private” unless there’s a legal reason to investigate, he said.
Love it or hate it, employee monitoring and the software behind it are becoming commonplace, though not necessarily dominant. In a July 2025 poll of UK managers conducted by the Chartered Management Institute, a British non-profit that helps bosses, a third said that they monitor online activity on employer-owned devices.
Of those managers whose companies snooped on employees, 39 percent said that their companies monitored login and logoff times, 36 percent said that they monitored browser history, and 35 percent said that they monitored email. Another 31 percent said they monitor chat platforms such as Teams, Google Chat, and Slack, while 31 percent also track file transfers.
When it comes to US tracking, the numbers are conflicting but seem higher than the UK’s. According to a 2025 study from ExpressVPN, 74 percent of US employers surveyed use online tracking tools. A 2022 study from Gartner research pegged the percentage of employers monitoring their employees at 60 percent with a rise to 70 percent predicted for 2025. A 2024 research paper from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth claims that 68.5 percent of workers are monitored in some way (camera, location, etc.), but only 36.8 percent of them experience productivity monitoring.
The market for dedicated bossware like Insightful is expanding. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the global market for dedicated bossware was $587 million in 2024, but expects it to grow to $1.4 billion in the next seven years.
The dark side of bossware
Despite its ability to catch inactive employees and unused applications, bossware has some serious drawbacks. First, it can harm morale, damaging workers’ relationships with the company and making them more likely to leave.
According to a 2023 worker study from the American Psychological Association (APA), 36 percent of monitored employees believe they do not matter to their employer versus 22 percent of those who are not monitored. 51 percent of monitored employees feel that they are micromanaged versus 33 percent of non-monitored staff. Most importantly, 42 percent of monitored employees planned to look for a new job within the next year versus 23 percent of those who were not monitored.
Workers are concerned not only about being judged by an algorithm, but also about what types of information their employers collect. Professors Jessica Vitak and Michael Zimmer surveyed remote workers about what types of monitoring concerned them most coming out of the pandemic in 2021.
The workers Vitak and Zimmer polled had the greatest qualms about having photos or videos of their homes transmitted to the boss. They also were unhappy with employers collecting health data or looking at their social media feeds.
The Center for Democracy and Technology conducted its own worker poll [PDF] in 2025 and found that workers were most concerned about being tracked when they were off the clock or when it harmed their physical or mental health. They also strongly agreed that employers should have to tell workers why they are collecting data, allow them to review the data, and not allow the employer to share that data with a third-party without permission.
Morale and retention are reasons why some companies choose a lighter touch and only snoop on employees when they have to because of a legal or HR investigation.
“For monitoring user activity, our strategy emphasizes security threat detection over monitoring for lost productivity because monitoring hurts trust and organizational culture,” Nick Disney, CEO of real estate firm Sell My San Antonio House,