Monitoring employees is completely valid

A lot of remote workers on Reddit try to portray monitoring employees as though it’s not only unnecessary, but is actually tantamount to treating employees “like children”. Some have even tried to flip the script and claim that when people think employees need to be monitored, it’s “actually just a projection of how they would slack off if left unmonitored”.

This is all silly and paints the problem of “slacking off” as if it’s some narrow binary where workers are either completely driven and responsible at all times, or childish slackers.

The real issue is that people take little liberties when left unsupervised. Once they see what they can get away with, they push it a little further. Even if they aren’t deliberately slacking off the entire day, the temptation to take little liberties will often manifest. If you’re leaving even two hours a day completely unaccounted for, in the course of a year, this adds up to over 500 hours of unproductive time that is completely unaccounted for. Ideally, managers realize that everyone needs a little break now and then, but any honest person would realize that a company who is compensating you has a right to see what’s being left on the table.

Micromanaging is indeed often a sign of a bad manager, but that doesn’t mean that monitoring in and of itself is an illegitimate thing.