Category: Company

Most monitoring software is built around a one-way mirror: the manager sees everything, the employee sees nothing, and the entire relationship is designed around asymmetric information. We think that design choice is the actual problem — not monitoring itself.

What Surveillance-Style Monitoring Gets Wrong

When tracking happens in secret, three things reliably go wrong. Employees stop trusting the tool the moment they learn what it captures. Managers over-rely on numbers they don’t fully understand, because the system was never designed to explain itself to anyone. And the whole relationship shifts from “we’re on the same team” to “I’m being watched by someone who won’t show me what they see.”

If a tool can’t survive being fully visible to the person it’s tracking, that’s a sign the tool — not the tracking — is the problem.

What Transparent Monitoring Looks Like Instead

• Employees see the exact same dashboard a manager sees — not a stripped-down version
• Screenshot capture is optional and configurable, never silently on by default
• Keystrokes are counted for scoring, never logged as content
• Threshold changes apply going forward only — history is never quietly rewritten

Why This Is a Business Decision, Not Just an Ethical One

Transparent monitoring isn’t just the more comfortable choice for employees — it changes what managers can actually do with the data. A number nobody trusts gets ignored. A number everyone can see, including the person it describes, becomes something both sides can act on together.

Every plan includes an employee self-view portal showing the same data a manager sees. Read our privacy principles →

The Standard We Hold Ourselves To

Every feature we ship gets tested against one question: would this still feel fair if the employee it affects could see exactly how it works? If the answer is no, we don’t ship it that way.

It would have been easy to make employee self-view a premium add-on — plenty of monitoring tools do exactly that, treating an employee’s own visibility into their own data as a nice-to-have rather than a default. We decided early on that this wasn’t a feature to sell separately.

The Reasoning

If a piece of data is fair enough for a manager to see, it should be fair enough for the employee it describes to see too. Gating that behind a pricing tier would mean some employees get transparency and others don’t, based entirely on what their employer chose to pay for — and that’s not a distinction we were willing to make.

Transparency isn’t a premium feature. It’s the thing that makes every other feature defensible.

What This Actually Means in Practice

• Every employee sees the same dashboard a manager would see for them
• Attendance, focus sessions, and idle time are visible to the person they’re about, on every plan
• Screenshot access, where enabled, extends to self-view too — nothing captured that the employee can’t also see
• No plan strips this away to hit a lower price point

The Trade-Off We Accepted

This does mean self-view isn’t a lever we can pull to make cheaper plans look more different from expensive ones. We think that’s the right trade — a monitoring platform that only some employees can see into isn’t a platform we’d want to use ourselves.

Self-view is included on every plan, not gated behind Business tier. See our pricing →