WASHINGTON — Despite evidence that working from home has not diminished U.S. productivity during the pandemic, employers are increasingly turning to monitoring software that can track workers’ keystrokes, log active hours, take regular screenshots and even activate a web camera.
And many companies may be using such tracking systems without workers’ knowledge.
Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm, estimates that 60 percent of large corporations now employ monitoring software, double the share of early last year.
Teramind, a Miami-based provider of employee-monitoring software, said that before the pandemic, about 70 percent of its sales came from companies concerned about security and 30 percent from those focused on worker productivity. That balance has since flipped, said Eli Sutton, Teramind’s vice president of operations.
“They want to make sure productivity stays high. It’s essentially become the new norm,” Sutton said, noting that Teramind’s sales tripled early in the pandemic and have not slowed.
Most surveys and economic reports show U.S. productivity did not suffer when American workers began doing their jobs from home. During the pandemic, Americans on average spent 40 percent of their work hours at home, compared with 5 percent in February 2020.
Yet U.S. productivity growth since the health crisis has run at more than double the rate it had in the decade before the spread of COVID-19 and surge of remote work.
And for more than 85 percent of...
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