Summary: Reports of police staff faking remote working activity have reignited the debate around trust and surveillance at work. While the misconduct itself is serious, leaders who stop at that conclusion are missing the bigger picture. The real problem isn’t dishonest employees. It’s a culture that rewards the performance of productivity over the substance of it.
Recent reports about police officers and civilian staff using ‘keyboard jamming’ to fake activity whilst working from home, have triggered exactly the kind of heated debate one could expect.
On one side, we hear the familiar chorus: “This is why managers can’t trust remote workers” and, on the other, a handful of experts are warning that: “This is what happens when leaders confuse surveillance with supervision”.
The headline cases are serious. At least 50 officers and staff across 14 different UK police forces have been dismissed or have resigned, after allegedly using methods such as weighing down keys to simulate computer activity whilst working remotely.
Obviously, faking productivity is dishonest and a breach of trust in any employment relationship. If someone is deliberately creating the impression that they are working when they are not, that is not clever resistance, harmless gamesmanship or some quirky by-product of remote work – it’s misconduct and it’s serious enough to warrant dismissal.
But, if as leaders, we stop our analysis here, we will solve the symptom and miss the system entirely. Fake productivity isn’t just misconduct or some moral failing by a few. It’s a mirror that is reflecting the kind of culture where the appearance of work has become easier to track than the value of the work. It shows us how organisations are actually asking their employees to perform ‘busy-ness’ rather than deliver actual results.
The surveillance race in the suspicion economy
Here is an uncomfortable truth that we aren’t talking about nearly enough: the monitoring technology currently being deployed in global workplaces is not just ineffective, but genuinely absurd.
Keystroke trackers. Hourly screenshots of employees’ screens. Mouse movement monitoring. Green lights on Teams being treated as proof of productivity. Every one of these tools shares a single, fatal flaw: they are measuring the wrong thing entirely.
These surveillance tools are measuring presence. They measure a digital pulse. These tools do not and can not measure actual value – especially not in the knowledge economy.
Think about what knowledge work actually looks like:
- A senior leader spends three hours in back-to-back meetings
- A strategist sits quietly staring out the window while working through a problem that will save the organisation £2 million
- A people professional spends 45 minutes fielding a difficult call from a line manager on their mobile
- A neurodivergent employee does their best thinking pacing, talking out loud or scribbling on paper, nowhere near a keyboard.
None of this activity registers on a keystroke tracker. None of it shows up as a green light on a tracker.
What we are building when we reach for these surveillance tools is not accountability, but a system that actively discriminates against people who work differently, think differently and contribute differently. Moreover, it’s rewarding those who are best at performing the appearance of productivity.
The monitoring technology currently being deployed in global workplaces is not just ineffective, but genuinely absurd
The productivity paranoia feedback loop
Microsoft’s research on ‘productivity paranoia’ found that 85 per cent of leaders said hybrid working made it harder to feel confident that employees were being productive.
This statistic is more telling about the leadership mindset and ineffectiveness than it is about employee activity or commitment.
It clearly shows that the majority of organisations embraced hybrid and remote working without ever having clearly defined what productivity means to them or what good looks like.
When leaders feel uncertain, many reach for proxies like RTO mandates and surveillance tools. Once people realise they are being evaluated on signals of life rather than evidence of value, many will adapt accordingly (hello coffee badging).
If the system rewards visible activity, visible activity is exactly what people will perform. The surveillance does not prevent gaming. It teaches people exactly which game to play.
Obviously this is not an excuse for deception, but rather an explanation for why deception takes the form it does.
The hard question about knowledge work
There is a question that the keyboard-jammer headlines conveniently allow us to avoid: how do we actually measure the value of knowledge work?
This is genuinely difficult because the traditional industrial revolution-era model of productivity – inputs and outputs, hours and units – does not translate neatly to roles where the most valuable contribution might be a conversation, a decision, a connection made or a problem reframed.
As leaders, we haven’t done nearly enough work on what meaningful performance looks like in the knowledge economy. And because that work is hard, many organisations have defaulted to measuring what is easy to see rather than what actually matters.
The result is a growing gap between what organisations say they value – judgement, collaboration, innovation, leadership – and what they actually measure: logins, response times, keystrokes and screen activity. Employees can feel that gap and many of them, over time, will respond to it in less than desirable ways.
If the system rewards visible activity, visible activity is exactly what people will perform
What good actually looks like
Business leaders and people professionals are in a really tough position right now. We have to ensure that we deal with misconduct decisively, but we also have a lot of work to do on defining what good looks like and what we are actually paying our people for.
In the knowledge economy especially, we should be paying people for their output or the results they achieve, not for presence, productivity theatre or time spent on a task.
We need to invest in leadership development and create environments that prioritise trust, autonomy, clarity and connection that enable people and performance to thrive.
We cannot achieve this by treating surveillance as a substitute for management or by continuing to feed the suspicion economy. Monitoring can tell us that a machine is switched on, but not whether someone solved a problem or supported a colleague, served a customer or made a decision that contributed shareholder value.
If we don’t have clear outcomes, meaningful success measures and regular, honest conversations about contribution, more tracking is not going to compensate for our lack of leadership effectiveness.
All we will be producing is more anxiety, more gaming and more performance theatre.
Fake productivity at the individual level is a conduct issue. At the organisational level, it is a big, red warning light reminding us that if we continue to manage by signs of life, we should not be surprised when people learn to fake a heartbeat.
The answer is not more or better surveillance. It’s leadership that knows the difference between a pulse and a purpose.
Key takeaways
- Keyboard jamming is misconduct but it’s also a mirror: the analysis needs to go further to solve the cause rather than the symptom.
- Keystroke trackers only measure a digital pulse: they don’t measure the real value.
- The gap between what organisations say they value and what they actually reward is growing: many businesses default to measuring what’s easy to see and employees adapt to this.
- More monitoring won’t fix a management problem: there’s a need to build accountability through clear outcomes, honest conversations and genuine trust.
Did you enjoy this? Check out another article by Deborah: The suspicion economy: Why low-trust organisations are racking up ‘AI cultural debt’
