He put cameras on remote workers. Then 23 quit.

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Today’s story has remote work, cameras, keystrokes and—according to the man who implemented the policy—23 resignations in one week.

This should go smoothly.

Let’s get to work.

John Morgan, founder of the law firm Morgan & Morgan, recently explained how his company handled employees who wanted to continue working from home.

They could.

But they would be watched.

Morgan said on The Iced Coffee Hour podcast that the firm used computer cameras and keystroke monitoring to track remote workers. He also said 23 employees quit within a week of the policy taking effect. That number comes from Morgan’s own account of what happened.

Morgan’s interpretation was straightforward: people who objected to the monitoring did not want to work.

Other people reached a different conclusion.

That disagreement gets to the center of workplace surveillance.

Employers have a legitimate problem. Remote work makes physical visibility harder. Some employees absolutely take advantage of flexible arrangements. If you own a company, “I trust everyone” is not a complete performance-management system.

Surveillance offers something seductive: numbers.

You can track keystrokes, screen activity, online status, location, call length and even aspects of customer conversations. Advances in AI, cameras and sensors have made monitoring remarkably granular.

The problem is that activity is easier to measure than performance.

A salesperson can be online for eight hours and sell nothing.

An analyst can type for six hours and produce a terrible report.

A highly experienced employee can solve in ninety minutes what takes somebody else five hours.

If you measure motion, people learn to produce motion.

Scientific American recently reviewed the growing research around electronic employee monitoring. One meta-analysis covering more than 23,000 subjects found no correlation between monitoring levels and employee performance, while monitoring was associated with higher workplace stress. Researchers also warn that people become creative at adapting to whatever the system measures.

Which explains the immortal invention known as the mouse jiggler.

For managers and owners, surveillance therefore creates a harder question than “Can we track this?”

Ask:

What do we actually need to know?

If you run a regulated operation, a warehouse, a fleet or a security-sensitive environment, monitoring may serve a legitimate operational purpose.

If you manage a knowledge worker, maybe the better scoreboard is output.

Did the customer issue get resolved?

Did the project ship?

Was the analysis accurate?

Did the salesperson create qualified revenue?

Did the team hit the quality standard?

Those measures still require judgment. That is less convenient than a green dot.

It is also closer to the work.

Because if the only way a manager can tell whether somebody is performing is to watch them perform, the camera may be measuring the wrong problem.

Current workplace systems can track screen use, location, keystrokes, calls and even tone of voice. Researchers interviewed by Scientific American said evidence that surveillance itself improves productivity remains surprisingly weak.

We have become extremely good at measuring whether somebody looks employed.

Australia is considering restrictions on camera-equipped smart glasses in government workplaces because of concerns about covert recording and sensitive information. England and Wales have already prohibited Meta smart glasses in courts, while Oslo has banned them in schools.

Your eyewear may soon need an IT policy.

Barclays is facing employee opposition after tightening office requirements to at least three days a week for many workers and four days for senior staff. Thousands of employees have backed a union open letter asking the company to reconsider aspects of the policy.

The office remains an impressively expensive place to debate trust.

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Pick one role on your team and identify three outcomes that genuinely tell you whether the work is going well.

For sales, that might be qualified pipeline, conversion and revenue. For support, resolution time, quality and customer satisfaction. For operations, throughput, defects and cycle time.

Then ask yourself:

If these numbers were excellent, would I care how often this person moved their mouse?

The answer can save you a surprising amount of software.

The software itself has a price.

So does turnover.

So does recruiting a replacement, training them, losing institutional knowledge and having a strong employee decide they would rather work somewhere that doesn’t require visual confirmation of their existence.

That doesn’t mean monitoring is always wrong. It means its ROI should include what people do in response to being monitored.

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MANAGER: How will I know you’re working?

EMPLOYEE: You could look at my results.

MANAGER: We bought a camera.

EMPLOYEE: How will the camera know my work is good?

MANAGER: …

MANAGER: It has AI.

If an experienced employee can produce excellent work in five hours while somebody else needs eight, the efficient person receives a powerful incentive:

Learn to look busy for three more hours.

Productivity achieved.

Vote below and tell us the strangest productivity metric you’ve encountered.

And forward this issue to anybody who has ever moved their mouse to preserve a green dot.

We understand. This is a safe space.

Technically Wednesday. Emotionally Monday.

— The Still Monday Desk