A remote employee logs in at 9 a.m., answers messages throughout the day, and appears active on every work platform. Another starts later, spends two hours away from Slack, and finishes a report that helps the company make a better hiring decision.
Which employee had the more productive day?
For employers who rely on online activity to judge performance, the answer may not be as obvious as it seems. Time online, messages sent, and hours worked can tell a manager something about an employee’s day. They do not necessarily show what that employee accomplished.
Remote and hybrid work have left employers with a practical problem: how do you know whether people are doing good work when you can't see the workday unfold?
Some companies look at hours online, response times or activity on work platforms. Those numbers are easy to collect, but they don't always tell the full story. An employee can spend eight hours answering messages and still struggle to finish important tasks. Someone else might spend half a day working through a difficult problem and deliver exactly what the team needs.
What the research says about working from home
A meta-analysis published in ILR Review in October 2026 looked at 82 studies on working from home and productivity. Researchers Colin F. Mang and Amar Anwar found a small positive average effect, although the results differed across studies and groups of workers.
That doesn't mean remote work is the best option for every employee or business. It does suggest that employers should look beyond where people work when assessing how well they perform.
The researchers also identified differences in how productivity was measured as one reason previous studies have reached different conclusions.
For employers, the practical question is whether their performance measures capture the work that actually matters to the business.
Online activity is not the same as output
Many digital tools make employee activity easy to observe. Managers can see when someone signs in, how quickly they respond to messages, and whether they appear available during working hours.
Those signals can be useful in some situations. For example, a customer support team may need to maintain coverage during specified hours. A business handling urgent client requests may legitimately need to track response times.
Problems arise when you apply the same measures to every role.
A recruiter who spends an afternoon researching candidates may send fewer messages than a colleague who handles routine scheduling. A content writer may need uninterrupted time to produce a well-researched article. A software developer may spend hours investigating a problem before finding a solution.
In each case, a low number of messages or a period of inactivity can be part of a productive working day.
Employers should distinguish between measures that describe activity and measures that show whether work has been completed successfully. The right balance depends on the job, the team’s responsibilities, and the business's needs.
Monitoring does not automatically improve performance
It also raises the question of whether closer monitoring produces better results.
A January 2025 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, by Namrata Kala and Elizabeth Lyons, examined digital worker surveillance in a randomized experiment involving workers in an online labor market.
The researchers found no statistically significant average effect of surveillance on worker performance. They also found that failing to explain why surveillance was being introduced or removed reduced worker output.
The study focused on a specific work setting, so its findings may not apply to every company. Still, they give employers a reason to think carefully before introducing more monitoring. What exactly are they trying to fix, and do employees know why they're being monitored?
Take a team that keeps missing deadlines. Tracking mouse movements won't tell a manager whether people have too much work, don't have clear instructions or are waiting on another department to do its part. Those problems require different solutions, and more monitoring won't necessarily fix any of them.
Before adding another layer of monitoring, managers should identify the performance problem they want to address.
Start with the work, not the software
A better approach is to define what successful performance looks like for each role before choosing the metrics used to assess it.
For customer support, that might include response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction. For recruitment, it could mean the quality of shortlisted candidates, hiring progress and feedback from hiring managers. For content teams, relevant measures might include accuracy, usefulness, on-time delivery, and performance against the original brief.
Speed alone doesn't say much if the work has to be fixed later. And getting through a long list of tasks isn't much of an achievement if the work doesn't help the team meet its goals.
Managers should also consider factors outside an employee’s control. A recruiter cannot make a hiring decision on behalf of a client. A writer may be waiting for an expert interview. A customer support representative may be dealing with a complicated case that takes longer to resolve.
Performance reviews should account for these differences rather than treating every delay as an individual failure.
Give employees clear expectations
A recent review of remote-work research published by Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior in August 2026 examines the relationship between work location and performance, including the roles of collaboration, task requirements, and working arrangements.
The authors, Tammy D. Allen, Kristen M. Shockley and Ryan S. Grant, argue for a more detailed understanding of when remote work helps or limits performance rather than relying on a simple comparison between working from home and working in an office.
For managers, that means making expectations explicit. Employees need to know which deadlines matter, when they must be available, how their work will be evaluated, and when they should ask for help.
A team also needs agreed rules for collaboration. If one manager expects an immediate reply to every message while another expects employees to protect blocks of focused work, employees can end up being judged by inconsistent standards.
Clear expectations make performance easier to assess because both sides know what was agreed in advance.
Review the measures you already use
Employers do not necessarily need another software subscription to improve remote performance management. They can start by reviewing the information they already collect.
Before deciding how to measure performance, employers should ask two basic questions:
- Does the measure fit the job? If you're tracking online activity, how does it show that the employee is getting the work done?
- Are you checking the quality of the work? Are tasks judged by how accurate and useful they are, or mainly by how quickly they're completed?
- Are employees working under comparable conditions? Differences in workload, access to information and task complexity can affect results.
- Do managers discuss problems with employees? A missed target should prompt a conversation about causes before it becomes a conclusion about performance.
- Would the same standard apply in the office? If an employee wouldn't be judged by how often they move their mouse in person, the reason for using that measure remotely deserves scrutiny.
These questions can expose gaps in a performance system without requiring a complete overhaul.
Measure what the business needs employees to achieve
Remote work does not remove the need for accountability. Employers still need to know whether people meet deadlines, serve customers, produce quality work and help the business reach its goals. Retaining employees who consistently deliver results is also an important part of effective workforce management. Learn why businesses should pay attention to the employees they can't afford to lose.
Employees need to know what they're responsible for and how their work will be assessed. Tracking activity throughout the day doesn't tell a manager whether deadlines are being met, clients are satisfied or the work meets the required standard.
Before asking employees to spend more time online or introducing additional monitoring tools, employers should take another look at their current performance measures. They may already have enough information to spot problems. The question is whether they're looking at the right things.
Hiring for a remote team? Online.jobs connects employers with candidates for remote roles.
Sources
Mang, C. F. and Anwar, A. (2026). Does Working from Home Improve Employees’ Productivity? Empirical Evidence from a Meta-Analysis. ILR Review. Published online July 5, 2026.
Kala, N. and Lyons, E. (2025). The Effects of Digital Surveillance and Managerial Clarity on Performance. NBER Working Paper No. 33348. January 2025.
Allen, T. D., Shockley, K. M. and Grant, R. S. (2026). Toward a Better Understanding of Job Performance When Working Remotely: Evidence, Boundaries, and Trade-Offs. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. Published online August 14, 2026.