You Will Not Learn Whether Your Remote Team Is Working From A Screenshot

You will not know from a screenshot. Activity software records presence, and the question how do I know my offshore staff are actually working is a question about output. The University of Technology Sydney has just proposed a legal test for that software, and nobody has said whether it would reach a team employed overseas. Outstaffer sells the attendance tooling inside its borderless HRIS, so read the rest as a disclosure of interest.

One survey counted employers, another asked workers what they know

The UTS Human Technology Institute published Drawing the line, on tech-enabled surveillance of Australian workers in October 2026. It cites a 2021 employer survey, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer’s Future of Work Report, finding 91 per cent of Australian employers monitored their remote workers’ locations through software. The report offers no newer figure for employer practice.

A Minderoo Foundation poll in March 2026 found 43 per cent of more than 2,000 Australians knew some employers use technology to watch workers. Only 9 per cent knew it was used in their own workplace.

Five years apart, different samples, different questions, so one is not the other’s shortfall. Read separately they still land: tracking location was routine, and hardly anyone knows what runs on their own desk.

What would a fair and reasonable test actually ask?

Its central recommendation is that monitoring be fair and reasonable, written into the Fair Work Act and adapted from six privacy-reform factors: reasonably necessary, expected by workers, openly done, no less intrusive option available, a genuine choice, and harm proportionate to benefit.

Nothing has changed yet. It is a recommendation to government, not a law, and state surveillance legislation already applies.

Nobody has said where the test leaves your offshore staff

Whether something less intrusive would do the same job is a procurement question wearing a legal hat, and one an employer should have asked before buying the licence.

The report says the reform would apply wherever work takes place, and the examples it gives are homes, off-site locations and vehicles. It does not address workers employed overseas at all.

So whether it would reach an Australian employer’s staff in the Philippines is unanswered. What is not in doubt is that an answer either way would not make the watching more useful.

What knowing actually costs you, in hours

Price the alternative. Read one finished piece of work properly, twenty minutes a week. Across 46 working weeks that is about fifteen hours a year of your attention per person. For five people that is seventy-seven hours, two working weeks at 38 hours. It is also the only item in this argument that returns a judgement rather than a number.

Activity data after the same year gives a percentage, a heat map and no opinion about the work. The discipline that answers the question is the standard you wrote down before they started, which is where that argument is made in full.

The honest case for the monitoring you already run

The strongest counter is that the data is useful, just not for this. Attendance records settle a payroll dispute. Application logs satisfy a client security review. Time against project reconstructs a billable month nobody wrote down. Some clients require all three.

Where does the monitoring data earn its keep?

In disputes and audits, where a record beats a recollection. Not in the first fortnight, where you want a verdict and get a graph. The same split runs through written agreement an employer now has to produce for home-based work: the obligation is to write the arrangement down, not to watch it happen.

Related reading

• Performance managing a remote employee once the restraint clause goes
• Who actually runs the team day to day, according to the providers themselves

Decide which question you are paying to answer

Buy monitoring for the audit. Do not buy it for the verdict, because it has never given anyone one, and nobody has yet said whether the reform proposed here would cover your offshore staff. Where this touches your own obligations, get advice on your situation.

If you would rather the employment, the equipment and the attendance record sat in one place while you keep the judgement, set up an account and run one role through it. Then ask the better version of the question. Not whether they were working. Whether you would have noticed if the work had been excellent.