Your boss may be measuring the wrong thing

ISSUE #44 • THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2026 • 5 MIN READ

Good morning. Thanks for opening Still Monday. If your employer tracks mouse movement, please move the mouse gently while reading so everyone feels productive.

Workplace monitoring keeps getting more sophisticated. The managerial question has not.

What exactly are we trying to learn?

A new UC Berkeley Labor Center report on workplace “bossware” describes technologies that can track location, activity, scheduling, productivity, biometric data, cameras and algorithmic performance. Some systems even attempt to infer emotion or sentiment. UC Berkeley Labor Center

The sales pitch is easy to understand. If work happens through software, software can create more data about the work. Managers get dashboards. Dashboards create the comforting feeling that somebody, somewhere, knows what is going on.

The danger starts when activity becomes a substitute for output. Keyboard time is not customer value. Green status lights are not good decisions. A salesperson can make 80 calls and destroy a territory. An engineer can spend two hours thinking and save six months of rework.

Connecticut expanded its electronic-monitoring notice rules on October 1, requiring employers in many cases to identify specific workplace locations that may be monitored and to give new hires plain-language information about monitored activities. SHRM

The legal details vary by location. The management lesson travels better: collecting a metric does not make the metric meaningful.

Once employees know a system rewards visible activity, they become excellent at producing visible activity. That is how an organization ends up with perfectly active keyboards and mysteriously slow projects.

Good measurement starts with the result. What should be better if this person is doing a good job? Customer retention? Defect reduction? Revenue quality? Cycle time? Decisions made? Then work backward toward evidence that actually helps.

The dashboard can tell you somebody clicked. Management still has to decide whether the click mattered.

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The Berkeley report covers location tracking, digital scheduling, biometric timekeeping, wearables, sensors, cameras, algorithmic evaluation and predictive analytics. Monitoring increasingly sits inside normal workflow software.

Connecticut's October changes require more detail about where electronic monitoring may occur. Regulators are asking employers to be clearer about what workers are being measured on.

Presence, clicks and response speed are attractive because they are countable. Countability and usefulness are different properties.

If your team tracks a productivity metric, ask: What business result should this number predict? If nobody can answer, treat it as a signal for investigation rather than a score for people.

For employees, read your monitoring policy and keep personal accounts, files and devices separate from work systems. Convenience is nice. Accidental disclosure is less charming.

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People optimize for what gets rewarded. A call-center metric can shorten calls while increasing repeat contacts. A sales activity target can fill the CRM while hurting conversion.

The software bill is visible. The cost of teaching people to game the wrong number usually is not.

SOFTWARE: Employee was active 97% of the day.

MANAGER: Excellent. What did they finish?

SOFTWARE: I track activity.

MANAGER: What did they improve?

SOFTWARE: Would you like a chart?

The future of management may have more data. It still needs judgment.

Vote below and tell us what your company measures too much: hours, online status, meetings, activity metrics or absolutely everything.

Technically Thursday. Emotionally moving the mouse.

— The Still Monday Desk