The Dangers of Confusing Activity With Productivity

Monitoring Camera

Source: Tobias Tulli / Unsplash

Imagine that a hundred years from now, our descendants visit a museum that displays common everyday objects from our time. What might they find there? And what conclusions would they draw about our fears, longings, and values?

As an historian of the present, I would like to reflect on a small piece of tech that is selling like hotcakes on Amazon: the undetectable mouse jiggler. The mouse jiggler is a presence and activity simulator, designed to give the impression that we are sitting alert at our screens, engaged in meaningful work. It makes our mouse move at random intervals, imitating the clicking and scrolling activities of a typical knowledge-worker. The anthropologists of the future would surely wonder why on earth so many of us had a need for such a simulator.

First and foremost, the mouse jiggler is a technological response to another tech innovation —namely, employee monitoring software (EMS), which is becoming ubiquitous across the globe. The clue is in the name. In spite of the fact that most research confirms that working from home and hybrid working enhance employee productivity, engagement, and well-being levels (Hall et al., 2024; Harrington & Emanual, 2021; Bloom et al., 2013), ever more employers are fearful of losing control over how their employees spend their working hours.

Hybrid working in particular has significant benefits for staff well-being and retention. In addition, Hall’s meta-study has found that home workers actually spend more time in front of their screens: They work longer hours and take shorter breaks than people working in offices. They tend to take less time off sick and also often work evenings and weekends (Hall et al., 2024).

And yet the accelerated move towards WFH during COVID has strengthened demand for products that measure productivity and evaluate efficiency, regardless of where employees are based. Employee monitoring software measures mouse movements and keyboard activity. It can also track and evaluate websites visited and documents opened and closed. Perhaps most disturbingly, some programmes take random screenshots of employees during the working day. Employers can literally see for how long you go to the loo, when you take breaks, and how much time you spend on specific websites. Screenshots may catch you unaware at any moment of your working day. Hello, 1984!

The disturbing intimacy of this kind of data grab seems to be driven by a fantasy of total control. It is also rooted in the feudal idea that employers not just “own” their employees’ time while they pay for it, but that they should be able to control their employees’ movements, bodies, and even thoughts during this period of temporary servitude. The desire here is not only to prevent employees from stealing their bosses’ time, but also to find more effective ways to manage “sweat assets” and to maximize the utilization of “human resources”.

These metaphors speak for themselves. But other things are at stake here, too. First, software of that kind rests on a conflation of key categories — namely, activity and productivity. Activity, as in surfing websites, opening documents, and moving our fingers and devices, is in no way an indication of meaningful work. Ask Cal Newport (2016, 2019, 2024). EMS measures neither the quality of our thoughts nor their quantity, for our attention could literally be anywhere while our bodies are physically present in front of our screens. Nor can mouse activity ever indicate how effective and impactful our actions are. It merely logs physical movement.

Secondly, the knowledge that every minute we move away from our screens will be logged and potentially contested will make us even more reluctant to take proper, restorative breaks. All research on the secrets of human productivity and flourishing tells us that taking proper breaks is essential for working and performing well. Being monitored in an intrusive way will make us even more reluctant to take the breaks we need.

Thirdly, such low-trust, low-autonomy approaches to staff can only be profoundly counter-productive on the engagement, well-being, and morale fronts. We know that the best way to enhance productivity and engagement in any organisation is by building trust, creating psychological safety, fostering autonomy, supporting personal growth and professional development, and stimulating a sense of belonging and shared purpose (Lencioni, 2002 & 2012; Canavesi & Minelli, 2022). EMS does the exact opposite. By assuming that all workers are lazy time-thieves, it treats staff like naughty children who need to be closely monitored and disciplined.

People will inevitably rebel against mindless and humiliating digital servitude of that kind. While EMS may well generate a short, fear-induced spike in productivity, in the long run its effects will be counterproductive. Even Forbes agrees that EMS can be “destructive when it comes to morale and company culture” and lead to “employee frustration, increased turnover, ethical issues and potential legal issues.”

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Lastly, many modern workplaces have already actively rendered what Cal Newport calls “deep work” completely impossible (2016). And yet most knowledge workers should surely spend much of their time on precisely that. Together with back-to-back Zoom meetings, highly distracting tech, no offline time, and no permission to switch off even in the evening, EMS only aggravates what is already a deeply counter-productive state of affairs.

The mouse jiggler, then, tells a sad tale about a regressive return to outdated attitudes toward work, time, leadership, and organizational culture. The device also signals the hardening front between advocates of flexible and home working and those who abhor it for ideological reasons. Let us also remember here that WFH is particularly important for women with children and other people with caring responsibilities – people whose interests are frequently successfully ignored. At a deeper level, EMS deployment betrays a philosophical (as well as a political) belief that people are fundamentally bad and need to be subjected to discipline, fear, and punishment.

Research suggests that investing in workers’ mental well-being, in community-building workshops, and in enhancing company culture is a much wiser choice than digital spy-ware (Deloitte 2019 & 2021). Stick approaches, even digital ones, really are crude remnants of a bygone age, which, in wiser workplaces, have long been replaced by smart support and incentivization mechanisms. Besides, most employers already have multiple tools to assess employee performance – including traditional KPIs and numerous other nuanced and commonsensical measures of what constitutes good work.

But here is the most disturbing thought: What if we are all internal mouse jigglers – even if we are amongst the lucky ones who are not monitored by external forces in that way? What if we have deeply internalized the wider cultural imperative to be active all the time? What if we, too, confuse activity with productivity, and the act of merely sitting in front of our screens with meaningful work?

So many of us have become our own bad bosses, willingly removing moments of joy, rest, and community from our lives. This unhelpful work ethic, and our injurious assumptions about work and time, emerged long before EMS. In fact, they have century-old religious roots that equate laziness with sin, worldly success with spiritual salvation, and productivity with our ultimate existential purpose. Over the centuries, and especially in the recent decades of fast capitalism, these beliefs have congealed into a kind of malware employee monitoring system in our own heads. The undetectable mouse jiggler, then, is merely a symptom — the manifestation of our long-standing enslavement to a much older and profoundly unhelpful productivity diktat.