Is your company secretly monitoring your work at home? Since COVID, the practice has surged
WASHINGTON — Despite evidence that working from home has not diminished U.S. productivity during the pandemic, employers are increasingly turning to monitoring software that can track workers’ keystrokes, log active hours, take regular screenshots and even activate a web camera.
And many companies may be using such tracking systems without workers’ knowledge.
Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm, estimates that 60% of large corporations now employ monitoring software, double the share of early last year.
Teramind, a Miami-based provider of employee-monitoring software, said that before the pandemic, about 70% of its sales came from companies concerned about security and 30% from those focused on worker productivity. That balance has since flipped, said Eli Sutton, Teramind’s vice president of operations.
“They want to make sure productivity stays high. It’s essentially become the new norm,” Sutton said, noting that Teramind’s sales tripled early in the pandemic and have not slowed.
Most surveys and economic reports show U.S. productivity did not suffer when American workers began doing their jobs from home.
