When monitoring employees, be ready to answer: why?

Employees prefer to, if not dance, then certainly work like no one’s watching.

In a September 2025 report, Gartner found that employees who felt “overmonitored” were up to 24% less inclined to stay at a company. Meanwhile, employees had 7% lower workplace engagement when they faced consequences as a result of their company monitoring their activity.

You might think that companies concerned about employee retention and morale would curb their use of motivation-killing monitoring tools, but it remains popular: Almost seven in 10 (69%) respondents to the Gartner survey said their organization monitors them, with over a third (35%) reporting their company examines activity on work devices such as laptops and phones.

Employers have deployed tools like computer monitoring software and geolocation services to track employee productivity and efficiency, performance, safety and health, and workplace security, according to a 2024 report from the US Government Accountability Office. (One cited research organization “noted that increasing remote and hybrid work arrangements had raised employer concerns of workers avoiding their responsibilities.”)

We spoke with workplace consultants about how IT pros handle the pressure of installing monitoring tools and tracking their peers, especially given their colleagues’ negative reactions to these policies. All emphasized that IT pros in this position need to have a good answer to one question: Why are they doing it?

Watch it, bud. Philip Heijkoop, currently a global practice lead for enterprise service management company Valiantys, helps companies implement tools like time trackers. He’s experienced “plenty of resistance” with time tracking, which monitors hours on task and often requires employees to manually update their data into the platform.

“If the metric doesn’t feel right, oftentimes it’s not,” he told us. “[If] you can’t explain it to people…then you just run into all kinds of friction from an adoption perspective.”

Monitoring can look like a pretext for layoffs and make employers seem like they’re watching for “busyness” rather than meaningful work and outcomes, Heijkoop said. It helps if IT pros know why the organizations’ monitoring needs to happen, especially if they take a lot of heat from an employee who feels they’re being watched.

“If you challenge the ‘why’ enough to understand it, you generally also make it a little bit better, because you can become a part of the process, as opposed to just a pawn that passes it on,” Heijkoop said.

So, what’s a good “why”? Kimberly Lanier, managing director in consultancy Protiviti’s people advisory and organizational change segment, sees monitoring tools as a helpful way to identify a skills gap or an unused resource. For example, a company may find it useful to know that most of their Copilot licenses aren’t being used; a CIO might use that data to cut licenses or provide better AI training for employees.

“You need to follow through as an IT leader on your end,” Lanier said. “You’re going to have to do the work around the analysis and follow through.”

As part of its report, Gartner had some recommendations, including:

• Use monitoring to find and address frictions employees face in their day-to-day workflows. (Spotting a “too many meetings” problem is an easy answer to the “why” question, Heijkoop noted.)
• Don’t use the tools to punish employees.
• Track business-impacting processes vs. arbitrary activities.
• Focusing monitoring insights on workforce—not individual—productivity.

“When an organization clearly explains why the monitoring is existing, how we’re going to use the data, that those insights are going to actually be applied at the workforce level, not to punish individuals, that’s what's going to tackle that morale [problem], that engagement piece that has a real business outcome,” Keyia Burton, senior principal in Gartner’s business technology insights HR division said.