Capacity planning that does not read as surveillance
Remote monitoring has a reputation it earned. The category is full of tools that take screenshots every ten minutes, log keystrokes, rate people out of ten and email the manager a list of the bottom five — and a distributed team that discovers it is being measured that way does not become more productive, it becomes quieter and starts looking. The question worth asking is not whether to have visibility into remote work, but which visibility is worth what it costs in trust.
What goes wrong today
If none of these are familiar, this probably is not your problem.
- Managers with no sense of load across a distributed team, resorting to presence signals and response time as proxies for work.
- Capacity decisions made on the assumption that everyone has the same week, when one person has been on incident duty for three days.
- Monitoring tools that a remote team reads as surveillance, producing a compliance problem, an attrition problem and worse data than before.
- Time zone and overlap arguments settled by anecdote because nobody has the hours.
- People working across a laptop and a desktop, counted twice by anything that measures devices rather than people.
What changes
With privacy-by-default metadata tracking.
- Load and project split visible across the team without anyone reporting their day in a stand-up they cannot attend.
- Monitoring the team can live with: keystroke content is never captured, screen capture is off by default and behind a compliance review, and the person can see what is being collected on their own machine and pause capture.
- No productivity score, no ranking and no bottom-five list — producing one is an explicit non-goal rather than a feature not yet built.
- Overlapping time from two devices belonging to the same person resolved to one hour before it reaches a report.
- Hours captured while someone is offline on a train or a bad connection, synced on reconnect without gaps and without double counting.
What the design guarantees
- transparent-agent
- By default the person being monitored can see what is being captured on their own machine and can pause capture. The one exception is a covert investigation, which is Enterprise-only, unavailable in the EU, capped at 90 days, and audited.
- no-productivity-score
- ActivityPulse reports what happened and does not grade the person it happened to — there is no productivity score.
- two-devices-one-hour
- One person working on two machines is credited with one hour, not two — overlapping time is resolved before it reaches a report.
- offline-first
- The agent keeps working with no network, queueing segments locally and syncing them when the connection returns.
Questions from teams like yours
How is this different from the screenshot tools our team has heard about?
Screen capture is off by default and gated behind a compliance review rather than being the headline feature, and keystroke content is never captured. What is collected is which application and window were in the foreground, attributed to a project. It is metadata rather than a recording of the screen.
Can someone turn it off?
Capture can be paused by the person it applies to, and the agent shows what is being collected on their own machine. The single exception is a covert investigation, which is Enterprise-only, unavailable in the EU, capped at 90 days and audited — deliberately narrow, because a product that can be silently enabled everywhere is not a transparent one.
Does it track location or take webcam photos?
No. Neither is captured. The agent reads window and process metadata, not the camera, not the microphone and not the position of the machine.
Our team is spread across six countries. Does that change what we may deploy?
Yes, substantially. Employee monitoring is lawful across the EU, the UK and the US, but several jurisdictions require consultation with a works council or employee representatives before it starts, and the penalties for skipping that step are separate from data-protection penalties. There are per-country guides covering what applies where.
Will managers use this to check whether people are at their desks?
They can see hours attributed to work, which is not the same question and answers it badly on purpose. There is no idle-time alert, no activity percentage and no live screen view. If the goal is presence policing, this is the wrong product, and that is a design position rather than a gap.
See where the hours actually went
Free for up to three people. Windows and macOS. No keystroke content on any plan, and screenshots off unless an administrator turns them on.