Why Traditional Employee Monitoring Tools Fail and the Power of Employee Engagement
The work-from-home era is now officially over, and so are legacy monitoring solutions. With a major shift to return-to-office for most of the workforce, we don’t really need tools to track vanity metrics or worse, spy on employees to make sure they’re working. We need solutions that help employees stay motivated, happy, and engaged.
According to Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report, measuring worker happiness is far more effective for business outcomes. Deloitte also asserts that:
“The once clear line that linked individual worker activity to tangible outcomes is now blurred, replaced by a complex network of collaborations and a demand for sophisticated skills that aren’t easily observed by traditional productivity metrics.”
-As human performance takes center stage, are traditional productivity metrics enough? Deloitte, 2025
Simply put, tracking activity and expecting it to translate into outcomes isn’t a realistic expectation anymore. While you don’t want to completely throw your workforce analytics out the window, you do want to gain insights into employee happiness and wellness, as well as flag what management can do to help staff be happier with their work.
What is Traditional Employee Monitoring Software?
Traditional monitoring tools are typically used in a fragmented, non-unified way to track specific activities.
They can include:
- Task tracking in project management tools
- Workplace surveillance tools, including mouse clicks and idle time tracking
- Usage logs on individual software solutions
- Time tracking tools, either from within a project management tool or as standalone solutions
Why Legacy Productivity Monitoring Tools Fail
Older monitoring primarily fails due to the “I’m being watched” factor and its impact on employee engagement. Legacy tools are also not tracking the right things for today’s workforce and the data isn’t unified in one dashboard. If data is siloed across different tools, only partial employee contributions will be visible, making their performance look less impressive. Additionally, they will only tell you what happened in the past and not offer any predictive analytics, which can be used for improvement.
They can also flood employees' email inboxes or Teams/Slack notifications with alerts, leading to alert fatigue. When everything is pinged, nothing is important, and true emergencies get lost in the noise.
The High Cost of Employee Surveillance & Distrust
While surveillance solutions have their place in environments where security is important, such as law enforcement, high-value retail, or sensitive government agencies, they have no place in a regular office environment. Installing a surveillance solution heavily implies that you don’t trust your staff, and most people don’t like to be told that they’re untrustworthy.
Additionally, studies have shown that when workplace surveillance is used, employees focus on the surveillance tool's metrics rather than their actual work. If they know idle time is being tracked, they’ll come up with busy work like answering unimportant emails rather than doing deep work where a good portion of their time may be spent thinking.
This is especially true if you are still operating in a remote/hybrid environment; time spent working from home may look less “busy” because it’s usually the time staff spend on deep work that they can’t do with the typical in-office interruptions.
Shifting to Worker Happiness: The Best Employee Engagement Metrics
Hitachi conducted an exercise to improve employee satisfaction by using AI-enabled suggestions to boost confidence, motivation, and alignment with management objectives. The results were staggering:
- Profits increased 10%
- Call center sales per hour increased 34%
- Retail sales increased 15%
More importantly, worker psychological capital (self-confidence and motivation) increased by 33%, which Hitachi cited as the reason for all the wins.
While productivity is still important to track, do so in a way that doesn’t feel like active surveillance; instead, coach and motivate your employees, as Hitachi did. This is possible with Prodoscore in a transparent way that focuses solely on the tools they use, not on their mouse clicks. According to data from the Deloitte report, employees don’t mind this kind of tracking and often expect it.
Prodoscore consolidates all that information into a single, easy-to-use dashboard that managers at every level can use to measure the health of their team and organization. We also leverage AI to provide insights that help them improve performance and stay motivated.
