Remote employee monitoring: pros, cons and how to do it right

Remote employee monitoring is legal in Romania only if you have a well-justified legitimate interest, inform employees in advance, fully and explicitly, consult the trade union or the employee representatives, have first tried less intrusive methods and don’t keep the data for more than 30 days. These are the conditions set out in Article 5 of Law 190/2018, which implements GDPR in Romania. Below you’ll find the advantages, the drawbacks and the practical steps.

With the pandemic, remote work and remote employee monitoring soared, and so did doubts about how to do it within the law.

In 2021, when we wrote this article, studies by Global Workplace Analytics and Owl Labs showed a strong rise in remote work over the previous few years.

Remote employee monitoring is on the rise

Two months after the spring 2020 lockdown, in May 2020, about 20% of the organizations surveyed by Gartner had bought software to monitor remote work.

Around the same time, Gartner estimated that 48% of employees would keep working remotely at least part of the time after the pandemic, compared with 30% before it.

Companies have several reasons to monitor their employees: trust, cybersecurity and backup, as well as productivity monitoring. But Josh Bersin, an HR industry analyst at the Josh Bersin Academy, says: “If the intent is to benefit employees, it’s good; if it’s to evaluate employees, it’s potentially dangerous; and if it’s to penalize them, it’s probably a bad idea.”

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The growth in monitoring comes from the way COVID put the employer-employee relationship to the test. What’s more, doubts about the productivity of remote work seem to vary depending on who you ask and how each person adapts to the new reality.

Monitoring, says Brian Kropp, head of research in the HR practice at Gartner, covers “everything from technology that will take photos of employees from their laptops, to tools that let workers punch a virtual time clock, all the way to tracking keystrokes to monitor productivity levels.”

The advantages of remote employee monitoring

Remote employee monitoring has several advantages that help keep teams aligned and productivity under control.

Monitoring software can improve employee output by measuring the time people dedicate to the company, from the start to the end of their working day, whether they work from home or from anywhere else.

That way, employers can see whether workers are, for example, spending endless hours on social media or browsing pages that have nothing to do with their daily tasks. They can also step in if an employee is struggling with a project or a client.

Monitoring can also help manage billing and budgets effectively, because accurately measuring project timelines and the resources dedicated to a client is reflected in that client’s satisfaction.

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The case against remote employee monitoring

You can’t separate employee monitoring from ethics. “Employees may feel that their privacy has been devalued or violated, and it can be hard to retain employees if monitoring feels intrusive,” according to HR Daily Advisor.

“Monitoring can signal a lack of trust, which can breed resentment and lower employee morale and productivity.”

On that point, according to Gartner research from January 2021, fewer than 50% of workers trusted their companies with their data, while 44% received no information about the data their companies collected.

Brian Kropp says: “If it’s really just about ‘Are people productive or not?’, then you may have better tools to prove that.”

“If you use them to understand the employee experience, what’s hard for them, what breaks, what they spend a lot of time on… That’s where the productivity gains are.”

How to do it right

In the European Union, the rules are strict: GDPR, in force since May 2018, and, in Romania, Law 190/2018 require you to protect employees’ privacy and to notify them about monitoring in advance. The practical steps:

1. Define the purpose and the legal basis. Employees’ written consent, often recommended in older guides, usually isn’t a valid basis, because an employee can’t genuinely refuse it freely. The basis is the employer’s legitimate interest, under the conditions in Article 5 of Law 190/2018.
2. Choose the least intrusive method. For security, for example, monitoring the computers (updates, antivirus, suspicious logins) is usually enough and doesn’t involve screenshots or keystroke logging.
3. Inform employees in writing before you start: what you monitor, why, how long you keep the data and who has access to it. Consult the trade union or the employee representatives.
4. Carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA), which GDPR generally requires for systematic employee monitoring.
5. Keep the data for no more than 30 days, except where the law provides otherwise or there’s a well-justified reason.

The risk is real: in 2017, in Bărbulescu v. Romania, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that an employee’s right to privacy had been violated because the Romanian courts hadn’t checked whether he had been told in advance about the nature and extent of the monitoring of his messages.

Employees generally have an expectation of privacy when it comes to using their personal computers and phones, unless they’ve been given a different company policy in writing. If employees work on personal devices, separate company data from personal data (for example, with a work profile managed by IT) and don’t monitor the rest of the device.

Be careful with AI-based tools, too. Since February 2, 2025, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) has banned systems that infer employees’ emotions in the workplace, except those used for medical or safety reasons. AI systems that monitor and evaluate employees’ performance and behavior are considered high-risk and come with additional obligations for the companies that use them.

When it comes to independent contractors, companies may face a more complicated and thornier path, because using any kind of tracking and monitoring software on them “could affect their employment status with your company.”

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Remote job sites say independent contractors are allowed to do their work “how and when they want.” That’s all the more true when contractors use their own personal devices, such as phones, tablets or laptops.

If you, as the client, track and monitor them, you may end up controlling or directing their work, turning their status from independent contractor into employee.

Tracking a contractor’s online activity greatly increases the risk that ITM (the Romanian labor inspectorate) or ANAF (the Romanian tax authority) will treat the arrangement as an employment relationship, with unpleasant consequences for you and your business.

But trusting that people do their jobs is one of the essential requirements for remote work to function properly, especially since, in 2021, 85% of managers said teams with remote workers would become the new norm.

What kind of monitoring makes sense for IT security?

Monitoring devices, not people: which computers aren’t up to date, where the antivirus found something, which backups failed and which logins look suspicious. This kind of monitoring protects company data without tracking what each employee does. Details in the article on types of IT monitoring.

This article is for information only and is no substitute for a legal advisor or a data protection officer (DPO).

RezolvIT offers IT outsourcing and is experienced in implementing cloud technologies and helping companies let their employees work from home. If we’ve convinced you, request a quote using the contact form.