Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job
The COVID-19 lockdown meant a surge in remote work, and the trend toward remote and hybrid workplaces has persisted long after the pandemic receded. That has changed the nature of workplace management as well. Bosses can't check for butts in seats or look over their employees' shoulders in the office to make sure they're working instead of having a LAN party. So they've turned to software tools to fill the gap.
So-called “bossware” lets managers keep a close eye on employees' activity, tracking everything from knowledge workers’ website visits to the gait and facial expressions of those involved in more physical activities.
Employers have long been able to access electronic communications you conduct on their platforms, whether those are emails or direct messages. However, many employers don’t snoop on your inbox unless there’s an investigation, and some platforms make that more difficult than others. Slack Business+ and Enterprise, for example, require administrators to submit a formal request to Slack support if they want to view a user’s private DMs.
For paranoid managers who want next-level surveillance, installing bossware fits the bill. It can roll up employee activity into neat, graphical reports and charts, showing how much productive and unproductive time they’ve had based on what applications and websites they are using. Some bossware can even track keystrokes and mouse movements.
For most employees, the idea of being closely monitored sounds unpleasant, but bossware publishers maintain that knowledge is power, both for the worker and for the company. Ivan Petrovic, CEO and Founder of bossware company Insightful, posits that his utilities help give employers the confidence to let their employees work from home.
“With more autonomy, employers need to ensure accountability from their employees,” Petrovic told The Register. “We have all heard about quiet quitting and burnout reaching peak levels for many industries. That is why we built Insightful: to restore balance to the employer-employee relationship, offering both autonomy and accountability in one simple package.”
Insightful generates detailed reports showing how each employee spends their time, whether it’s using required software or logging out for a long break. It even flags when employees appear to be burned out or, on the flip side, are working more than the required hours.
Petrovic notes that employers are taking the insights from his program and using them to cut waste that goes well beyond individual employee performance. For example, he said, one client recently saved $2 million by detecting that no one was using an expensive piece of software their company was paying for.
Danilo Coviello, founding partner of Espresso Translations, said that his company tracks its translators’ work because it’s able to better allocate resources that way.
“Translation platform monitoring is performed because the client is paying for translation time, not scrolling through Facebook,” he told The Register. “Productivity metrics are tracked so we can have linguists focused on intricate tasks at optimum times, not on the calendar when it might be easy.”
Through tracking, Coviello learned that his German language team was taking 40 percent longer on translating automotive text, so he brought in someone with specialized expertise to prevent his regular workers from burning out. That said, Espresso may track that a user is browsing the web instead of working, but it won't track which websites employees are visiting. “Personal internet browsing is always private” unless there's a legal reason to investigate, he said.
Love it or hate it, employee monitoring and the software behind it are becoming commonplace, though not necessarily dominant. In a July 2025 poll of UK managers conducted by the Chartered Management Institute, a British non-profit that helps bosses, a third said that they monitor online activity on employer-owned devices.
Of those managers whose companies snooped on employees, 39 percent said that their companies monitored login and logoff times, 36 percent said that they monitored browser history, and 35 percent said that they monitored email. Another 31 percent said they monitor chat platforms such as Teams, Google Chat, and Slack, while 31 percent also track file transfers.
When it comes to US tracking, the numbers are conflicting but seem higher than the UK’s. According to a 2025 study from ExpressVPN, 74 percent of US employers surveyed use online tracking tools. A 2022 study from Gartner research pegged the percentage of employers monitoring their employees at 60 percent with a rise to 70 percent predicted for 2025. A 2024 research paper from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth claims that 68.5 percent of workers are monitored in some way (camera, location, etc.), but only 36.8 percent of them experience productivity monitoring.
The market for dedicated bossware like Insightful is expanding. Fortune Business Insights estimates that the global market for dedicated bossware was $587 million in 2024, but expects it to grow to $1.4 billion in the next seven years.
The dark side of bossware
Despite its ability to catch inactive employees and unused applications, bossware has some serious drawbacks. First, it can harm morale, damaging workers’ relationships with the company and making them more likely to leave.
According to a 2023 worker study from the American Psychological Association (APA), 36 percent of monitored employees believe they do not matter to their employer versus 22 percent of those who are not monitored. 51 percent of monitored employees feel that they are micromanaged versus 33 percent of non-monitored staff. Most importantly, 42 percent of monitored employees planned to look for a new job within the next year versus 23 percent of those who were not monitored.
Workers are concerned not only about being judged by an algorithm, but also about what types of information their employers collect. Professors Jessica Vitak and Michael Zimmer surveyed remote workers about what types of monitoring concerned them most coming out of the pandemic in 2021.
The workers Vitak and Zimmer polled had the greatest qualms about having photos or videos of their homes transmitted to the boss. They also were unhappy with employers collecting health data or looking at their social media feeds.
The Center for Democracy and Technology conducted its own worker poll [PDF] in 2025 and found that workers were most concerned about being tracked when they were off the clock or when it harmed their physical or mental health. They also strongly agreed that employers should have to tell workers why they are collecting data, allow them to review the data, and not allow the employer to share that data with a third-party without permission.
Morale and retention are reasons why some companies choose a lighter touch and only snoop on employees when they have to because of a legal or HR investigation.
“For monitoring user activity, our strategy emphasizes security threat detection over monitoring for lost productivity because monitoring hurts trust and organizational culture,” Nick Disney, CEO of real estate firm Sell My San Antonio House, told The Register. “Email monitoring is only performed when necessary to respond to legal mandates or suspected policy infractions.”
If deployed in the wrong way, bossware can also lead to employees working to meet the demands of the software, rather than doing what’s best for the business. According to a 2022 New York Times article, a group of social workers employed by UnitedHealthcare was labeled as idle when they were talking to patients, because they had long periods where they didn’t touch their laptop keyboards. These workers received ratings of 1 to 5 based on how much they typed. Another UnitedHealth employee said her manager told her to jiggle her mouse during meetings to make sure she appears active.
According to a report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) [PDF], employees are often subject to unfair discipline based on meeting the standards set by electronic monitoring and, when problems occur with how the software measures productivity, they often have little recourse.
“Part of the strategy for some employers is to allow them to scale back on human managers, and then the result of that is sometimes an employee can't get a hold of someone in order to resolve an issue,” Josh Boxerman, Government Affairs Manager at NELP, told The Register. “It doesn't have the ability to think outside the box, doesn't have the ability to understand situations that are not expected, and that can lead to unfair discipline and termination, leaving workers with little to no recourse.”
Petrovic says that Insightful uses AI to spot and highlight trends so that managers are alerted to anomalies in work patterns. However, he argues that humans have to be the ones making the calls when it comes to discipline, something many orgs are ignoring.
“I don't believe that AI should be making hiring or firing decisions,” he said. “What AI is good for is consuming tons of data and presenting meaningful information to leaders so they can be well-informed about decisions they have the responsibility to make.”
Another problem occurs when employees suffer physical or mental injury as a result of working to the bossware’s requirements. Physical injuries occur most in blue-collar jobs such as warehouse management, where the snooping software looks at how fast you complete a task or even passes judgment on your gait. Emotional damage comes in the form of stress and burnout.
In the APA study, 45 percent of monitored employees said that work had a negative effect on their mental health versus 29 percent of unmonitored employees. A full 32 percent of monitored employees said their mental health was poor or fair versus 24 percent of non-monitored employees.
NELP’s report also notes the negative impact of workplace monitoring on employees’ legally protected right to join unions. With the company watching messages, workers are much less likely to engage in labor organizing and more likely to face retaliation from bosses.
“We can imagine situations where an employee is judged by a software to be likely to try and organize their colleagues into a union, and then the employer takes that data and decides, well, the best thing for me to do is to terminate that employee,” Boxerman said.
Boxerman noted that, while it’s illegal for companies to fire employees for union activity, the management could hide their decision behind other metrics.
Totally legal, but calls for reform are growing
There aren’t many laws in place that limit employee monitoring, though in the US, several states have regulations on the books requiring that companies disclose exactly what they monitor. For example, New York State Senate Bill S2628 forces companies to give employees written notice of electronic monitoring practices upon hiring and once per year.
But that's about all they have to do. “If the employer notifies their employees regarding their internal policies about monitoring the activities of the personnel and how this monitoring would take place, the employees should not expect privacy over their devices which were given by the employer for business purposes,” EPGD business law attorney Silvino Diaz told The Register, speaking about Florida law.
In the UK, employers must also disclose monitoring and they must also follow data protection laws to make sure that information stays private. Covert monitoring is only allowed if its purpose is to catch suspected illegal activity or gross misconduct.
But disclosure alone is not a salve for most of the problems bossware can cause. So some US states have proposed legislation that could give workers more rights.
California Senate Bill 7, colloquially known as the “No Robot Bosses” act, would protect workers from the consequences of discipline decisions made by an automated decision-making system (ADS), which is usually some form of AI. Humans would have to review decisions made by an ADS and employees would have an appeals process if a decision influenced by an ADS affects them negatively. So, if bossware shows an employee being “unproductive,” and that worker faces discipline as a result, they could fight back.
Also in California, Assembly Bill 1221 would prohibit workplace monitoring tools that include facial, gait, or emotion recognition. It would also stop employers from using tools that infer certain categories of information about a worker such as their immigration status, religion, disability status, or political beliefs. Companies also could not transfer the surveillance data to a third party, unless the third party was hired to interpret the data.
Massachusetts’ proposed Fostering Artificial Intelligence Responsibility (FAIR) act would offer a host of protections against the misuse of bossware. It would prohibit facial, gait, and emotion recognition or surveillance of a worker’s home. Employers would have to give employees 30 days' advance notice of any disciplinary action based on bossware so they could challenge it. The bill would also protect workers from discipline if they refuse to follow an AI’s work plan based on the objection that that plan would jeopardize their health or property.
Any law that regulates AI at the US state level may soon be forbidden, however. President Trump and some Republicans in Congress are trying to limit any AI regulation to the federal government by adding an amendment to the 2026 National Defense Authorization act. The President is also reportedly working on an executive order that would attempt to penalize states that put AI laws in place.
Another way that workers can fight back against overly aggressive surveillance is via collective bargaining.
“The substantial transfer of control from workers to employers and businesses, enabled by these tools, requires that we reinforce workers’ rights and expand collective bargaining,” the NELP report recommends. “So that workers can stand up to employers and businesses about whether and to what extent they are surveilled and subjected to automated decision systems.”
A matter of balance
Businesses that want to keep a close eye on their employees should think long and hard about what they’re trying to achieve. Looking at broad trends may be helpful and even identify ways to save money. However, the data you get may mislead you into making rash judgments about individual employees and your workforce as a whole.
“If I can collect more data about my workers, I can optimize efficiency and productivity, and that is going to be a good thing,” Vitak told The Register. “But there are lots of ways in which that data is not accurately representing reality. There are ways to game that data, and so, if you are believing that numbers don't lie, putting all your faith into that belief, then you're probably going to make poor decisions because it's much more complicated.”
Everyone wants to improve productivity, but depending on how you handle employee monitoring and make decisions based on its data, the effort could lead to more burnout and lower output.
“We believe that good jobs make for good productivity,” Boxerman said. “Good jobs mean autonomy, some amount of flexibility, and being able to do your job without risking injury. Those things are not aided by bossware.” ®
