Managing people you cannot see is not a monitoring problem. It is a rosters, hours, pay and communication problem that most businesses try to solve with four disconnected tools and a spreadsheet.
How do I know they are actually working?
It is worth saying plainly, because every vendor in this category knows it is the question and most of them answer it with a screenshot gallery. That answer creates a second problem: your team now has software installed on them that gives them nothing back, and the resentment outlasts whatever you learned.
The more useful version splits into three, and only one of them needs monitoring at all:
Are the hours real? A clock record you can trust, from wherever they are, against the roster you published. A rostered shift nobody started raises a flag on the day rather than at payroll.
Is the work happening? Tasks moving, outcomes shipped, response times. For most roles this is the whole answer and no monitoring is required.
Is anyone struggling? The genuinely valuable remote signal, and the one nobody markets. Someone working every evening, or not clocking off, or going quiet — visible early, while it is still fixable.
Laptop or phone, with an optional location check for roles where it matters. The clock record is what pay is calculated from, so there is one number and not a timesheet someone reconstructs on Friday afternoon.
Published rosters, recurring shifts and multi-person assignment. A roster change reaches someone as a change to their roster, not as a message they have to be watching a chat thread to catch.
Fair Work award interpretation runs on the actual clock record — penalty rates, evening and weekend loadings, public holidays, overtime tiers — with the working shown line by line. Remote does not change what you owe.
Channels, DMs, threads, huddles, video and screen share, plus a Town Hall for the whole team when you need everyone in one room. The social layer a distributed team loses first.
Hours worked against hours rostered, roster adherence, output, response patterns and a watch-list of who needs attention. Most of what an employer actually wants to know does not require watching a screen.
Off by default, enabled per person rather than per workforce, disclosed before anything is captured, and on a personal device only between clock-in and clock-out. The employee sees their own productivity view too.
Every person has their own timezone, so their working day is read in their local hours. That sounds obvious until you meet a tool that does not do it: a single office offset flags your Manila team as working through the night, every night, and the report you were relying on is noise.
We know because it happened to us. Our own burnout signal used one offset and was wrong for half our people until we fixed it — and it was wrong in the worst direction, quietly producing confident numbers about named individuals.
Offshore contractors are tracked for hours and tasks but are never monitored, whatever the switch says. Worker type is a ceiling the monitoring setting cannot exceed, enforced in the product rather than left to an administrator to remember.
The failure mode of a distributed team is almost never people doing too little. It is the good ones quietly doing too much, at 9pm, because the work follows them home and nothing marks the end of the day.
When someone ends their shift, non-urgent notifications stop reaching them. The message still posts to the channel — the team carries on, nothing is hidden — but the ping does not chase somebody who is off the clock. Urgent still gets through, because a right to disconnect is not a right to be unreachable in an emergency.
Messages, files, HR records, timesheets and screenshots stay in Sydney, with backups in the same region, and the AI assistant runs there too rather than sending your team's conversations offshore to be processed. If you are an Australian employer managing remote staff, "where is this stored" has a short answer.
We run a distributed team across two countries. Per-person timezones, the contractor monitoring ceiling, the off-clock notification rule and the clock-in nudge all exist because we needed them, not because they tested well. Several of them were built after getting it wrong first.
Written for employers in this position, not as marketing:
Honestly: the wrong version of this question is "can I watch them", and the tools that answer that one tend to make the problem worse. The useful version is "can I see whether the work is happening" — hours actually worked against hours rostered, output against expectation, and whether someone is quietly drowning. WorkAndGo gives you all three, and activity monitoring as an optional layer if your business genuinely needs it. Most of the signal comes from the first three.
Generally yes, with disclosure, and the requirements differ by state — NSW for example requires 14 days written notice before computer surveillance. Covert monitoring is the thing that is prohibited. WorkAndGo cannot be switched on silently: the person acknowledges a disclosure naming what is captured before anything is captured, and on a personal device capture happens only between clock-in and clock-out. Not legal advice — see our guide on monitoring law for the detail.
The parts that break are timezones, pay and belonging. Each person has their own timezone, so their working day is read in their local hours and nobody is flagged as active at 2am because head office is in Darwin. Australian staff are paid against their award; offshore contractors are tracked but never monitored, because worker type sets a ceiling the monitoring switch cannot exceed. We run a team across two countries ourselves, which is why per-person timezone exists — the single-offset version was wrong for half our own people.
From the app, on a laptop or a phone. You can require a location check for roles where it matters and leave it off for roles where it does not. The clock record is what pay is calculated from, and reading your own attendance record is free on every plan including a lapsed one.
That is the part most remote tooling ignores. When someone ends their shift, non-urgent notifications stop reaching them — the message still posts to the channel, so nothing is hidden from the team, but the ping does not chase a person who is off the clock. Urgent still gets through. It is the right-to-disconnect obligation built in rather than written into a policy nobody reads.
Sydney — messages, files, HR records, timesheets and screenshots, with backups in the same region, and the AI assistant runs in Sydney too. If you are managing Australian staff remotely, the question of where their screens are held has a short answer.