Three out of four employers now track their workers' online activity. Fewer than one in four of those workers actually know it's happening.
That gap — between what employers do and what employees know — is the whole story of workplace monitoring in 2026. It isn't a story about whether tracking works. It's a story about what it costs once people find out.
74% track, 22% know
According to an ExpressVPN survey fielded in September 2024 with Pollfish (n = 3,000: 1,500 employers and 1,500 employees), 74% of employers now track their employees' online activity in some form, and 59% use real-time screen monitoring specifically. On the other side of that same relationship, only 22% of employees say they know they're being monitored.
Sit with that gap for a second. It's not that employers are open about tracking and employees don't mind — it's that most tracking happens quietly, in a program IT installed and nobody explained. The asymmetry isn't incidental to the practice; it's close to the point of it. Monitoring that had to be disclosed loudly, up front, in plain language, would answer a different question than the one most of these tools are built to answer.
Most managers reading that 74% figure aren't the ones who chose the monitoring software — it's usually a security or IT decision made well above their level, with the manager finding out about it around the same time their team does, if they find out at all. That's worth naming, because it means the manager is often just as much on the wrong side of the 52-point gap between the two numbers as the people reporting to them. The trust cost still lands on the manager relationship, even when the manager didn't make the call.
The paradox of watching closer
Employers adopt monitoring on a simple premise: watching the work makes people do more of it. The two sides of that premise don't actually agree with each other. A 15Five survey of 1,000 employees and 1,000 managers, published January 2023, found that 68% of managers said monitoring software improved performance — while 72% of employees said it either made performance worse or had no effect at all. The people installing the software and the people being watched by it are describing two different tools.
The same pattern shows up again once employees find out they're being watched at all. The ExpressVPN research cited above found that once monitoring is disclosed or discovered, 49% of employees say they'd consider quitting over increased monitoring, and 24% say they'd accept a pay cut — of up to 25% — just to avoid it entirely.
That's the paradox in one sentence: a practice adopted to help the work ends up threatening the thing the work actually depends on — whether your best people stay, and whether they believe the tool watching them is on their side. You can't extract more from a team by watching them closer if watching them closer is precisely what makes them leave, and precisely what the people being watched say doesn't work anyway.
The attrition math
Run the numbers on a team of ten. If a quarter of your team would trade as much as a quarter of their salary to not be watched, that's not a minor morale ding — that's a standing offer to your competitors, priced out loud, by your own people, before you've lost anyone. And 49% considering an exit over monitoring isn't a fringe reaction; it's roughly half the room.
Replacing someone who leaves costs real money — recruiting, onboarding, the ramp time before a new hire is producing at the level of the person they replaced. Monitoring is frequently framed as a cost-control measure. The ExpressVPN numbers suggest it's closer to a retention tax: a recurring cost, paid in attrition risk, for a practice whose upside (more output) is exactly what it's most likely to undermine.
And the 24%-would-take-a-pay-cut figure specifically is the number worth sitting with longest, because it isn't a hypothetical about people who already dislike their job. A quarter of respondents are describing a trade they'd make today, at their current employer, for nothing more than the removal of monitoring — no other change to the role or the work itself. That's not disengagement. That's a specific, named cost employees are putting on being watched, and it's a cost most monitoring vendors never show up in the sales pitch.
The regulation wave
The legal ground is also shifting under monitoring programs that assumed nobody would ask questions. The EU AI Act's ban on emotion-recognition AI in the workplace took effect in February 2025, adding real enforcement teeth to a domain regulators had mostly left alone — and the regulators are following through: Ireland's Data Protection Commission recorded a 45% year-over-year jump in cases received in its 2025 annual report, the clearest sign yet that European regulators are actively pursuing this ground, not just writing rules for it. In the United States, Connecticut and Delaware require prior written notice before an employer can monitor electronic communications (Delaware also requires employees to acknowledge that notice), New York has a dedicated electronic-monitoring notice law, and California reaches employee monitoring through the CCPA's notice-at-collection requirement — a patchwork, but a tightening one. In November 2025, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report on the effects of workplace digital surveillance, the kind of signal that tends to precede federal attention, not follow it.
None of this is disclosure-optional anymore, or heading that way. The 74%-of-employers, 22%-of-employees gap described above is exactly the gap regulators are starting to close from the outside — which means it stops being a choice a company gets to make quietly.
The transparency fix
Here's the part that should change how every one of these conversations gets framed: disclosure isn't just a compliance requirement, it measurably helps. The same ExpressVPN survey found that 77% of employees are less concerned about monitoring when it's disclosed in advance, compared to finding out after the fact.
That's a large, cheap lever. It costs nothing to tell people what you're doing before you do it, and it closes most of the trust gap that quiet monitoring opens. If a company is going to track activity at all, disclosure isn't a nice-to-have layered on top — it's most of the difference between a program employees tolerate and one that makes them start pricing an exit.
What to do instead: measure the work, not the person
There's a version of all this that sidesteps the tradeoff completely: measure the work instead of the person doing it. Capacity — the size and shape of what a team is carrying, sized in effort rather than hours or clicks — answers the same underlying question employers are trying to answer with monitoring ("is this team actually keeping up?") without watching anyone's screen to get there.
The distinction isn't cosmetic. Watching someone's tools infers what they're doing and reports that inference up to a manager who sees more than the person being watched does. A shared capacity picture is explicit — the team sizes the work together — and symmetric: the person doing the work sees the exact same number the manager does, at the same time, with nothing held back. One is surveillance with a dashboard attached. The other is a conversation with real data in it.
If any of this made you wince a little on your team's behalf, that reaction is worth trusting. Read Capacity-Aware 1:1s: The Complete Guide for what the alternative actually looks like in practice — a shared picture, question-shaped prep, and a growth timeline both people can see, with nothing inferred and nothing hidden.
