Private hours are the feature.

Workforce-tracking tools have a defaults problem. Screenshots are on. Keystrokes are logged. Idle thresholds are tuned for the worst-case employee. Privacy lives in a settings page three clicks deep, behind a “configure for compliance” panel no admin opens.

EmployeeSight Work ships with the opposite defaults. Screenshots are off. Keystrokes are never captured. Each employee has a one-click toggle that marks a block of time as private — and during that block, no activity is recorded. No app categories. No idle detection. No screenshots even if they were on for the rest of the day.

Why we chose this

Workforce intelligence is only useful if your team trusts the instrument. Productivity scores read by managers who don’t trust their team aren’t useful signals — they’re a wedge. We didn’t want to build the wedge.

The first version of EmployeeSight Work had screenshots opt-out. We changed them to opt-in in week three of internal use. Three engineers had already-private health records visible in a screenshot. They were polite about it. We took the feature out the same day and rebuilt it with explicit consent.

What private hours actually do

When an employee marks a window of time as private:

• The activity timeline shows the block as labelled private — managers see that hours were private, not what happened.
• No app or website data is collected from the employee’s machine during that window.
• The productivity score for the day is computed from the remaining hours; private time doesn’t penalise the score, it just isn’t included.
• If screenshots are enabled (rare), they’re skipped during private windows.

We thought hard about whether to include private time in productivity scores. We chose not to. Including it would tempt managers to read the score as “they only worked X hours” — a bad-faith reading we don’t want to enable. Productivity scores are about during tracked time, not how much tracked time.

Privacy as a product feature, not a compliance line

Most workforce tools treat privacy as a compliance exhibit — a policy doc, a DPA, a checkbox in the settings menu. We think privacy should be a product feature with its own page in the UI, its own opt-out flow, and its own in-product education. We’ve built it that way.

The team that uses the tool benefits. The manager who reads the reports benefits, because the signals are honest. The legal team benefits, because the defaults match the framework. The only people who don’t benefit are the kind of vendors who build software hoping no one reads the fine print.

What this means for your team

If you’re rolling out time tracking to a hybrid team — especially engineers, designers, or anyone with autonomy over their craft — the defaults you choose on day one set the trust ceiling forever. Start with privacy on. Add instrumentation only when you can defend each new signal to the team you’re asking to live with it.

That’s the bet we made with EmployeeSight Work. So far, the teams that switch to us from screenshot-heavy tools tell us the same thing: the engineer revolt stopped within a week.