How can I tell what my remote team is working on without monitoring software?

Most of the time, the question behind "what is my remote team doing?" is really "where is the work?": what has come in, who has picked it up, what is waiting and what is stuck. Monitoring software answers a different question, about whether someone is at their keyboard, and it does not tell you whether the work is moving.

The work is already recorded. A remote reviewer approves a result, a support agent updates a ticket, an estimator sends a quote, an accounts clerk posts an invoice. Each of those is an event in a system you already run, with a time and a person or role attached. Put those events together and you can see who is working on what, how long work has been waiting and where it is stuck, without watching anyone.

The ICO's guidance on monitoring workers applies to any monitoring of staff, including the use of data from your own systems. It says, among other things:

• purpose and least intrusive means: be clear about your purpose and select the least intrusive means to achieve it. The guidance also says that just because a form of monitoring is available, does not mean it is the best way to achieve your aims
• transparency: you must tell workers about monitoring in a way that is accessible and easy to understand
• risk: you must carry out a data protection impact assessment before processing likely to cause high risk, and the guidance gives keystroke monitoring of workers as an example. It says you should carry out one even if there is no specific high risk

The ICO's examples of monitoring include keystroke monitoring and productivity tools that log how workers spend their time. A view of the work drawn from your own systems is less intrusive than those, but it is still personal data. This is not legal advice, so check your own plans against the guidance.

• Start from the work. List the moments your systems already record: arrived, picked up, started, finished, waiting on someone, done
• Show roles and tasks, not scores. Show what is being worked on and where it is waiting. Leave out activity percentages, idle time and rankings
• Put everyone in one view. Remote and on site staff appear in the same picture of the work, so nobody is treated differently for where they sit
• Tell the team first. Explain what the view shows, where the data comes from and what it is for, and let people see it themselves
• Keep it to the purpose. If the purpose is spotting stuck work, there is no need to keep a history of each person's day

Live Workplace is a live, photorealistic picture of a business, driven by the events its own systems record. People appear as roles at their stations, the work moves between them, and stations turn amber and red as work piles up. It adds no cameras, screen recording, keystroke logging or location tracking, and it gives nobody a productivity score.

In a build for your business, a remote team member, such as a reviewer working from home, appears in the picture when your system shows them working on something, so the whole team is in one view of the work. Our live demo of a fictional testing lab at workplace-demo.varsuite.co.uk shows the on site side: fill in a short form and you get your own private copy. The demo shows staff on site only, and remote staff are part of what we build around your own systems, as our Live Workplace page explains.

ICO, Data protection and monitoring workers, part of its guidance on employment practices and data protection. Checked on 24 October 2026. The ICO says this guidance is under review, so check the current version before relying on it.