Cognizant’s New Idle-Tracking Rule Sparks Employee Anxiety: A Surveillance System in corporate Clothing
Summary:
Cognizant’s new wallet PLATFORM' target='_blank' title='digital-Latest Updates, Photos, Videos are a click away, CLICK NOW'>digital monitoring system marks employees “idle” if there is no keyboard or mouse activity for 5 minutes, and labels them “away from system” after 15 minutes. The company frames it as a productivity tool, but employees fear it’s a step toward stricter surveillance and performance policing.
Cognizant’s move is part of a broader corporate trend: tightening control in hybrid and remote environments under the guise of efficiency. The hidden reasoning is straightforward—pressure from global clients demanding measurable output metrics, and employers' fear that flexible work has diluted discipline. By converting every minute of inactivity into a data point, companies gain the power to justify performance reviews, resource cuts, or contractual renegotiations.
Who benefits?
Cognizant’s management and its clients, who gain granular visibility into workforce behaviour.
Who loses?
Employees, who now must live under a wallet PLATFORM' target='_blank' title='digital-Latest Updates, Photos, Videos are a click away, CLICK NOW'>digital microscope where even thinking time, reading time, or short breaks become “suspicious inactivity.”
What the public misses is that such tools don’t measure quality—only motion. A developer debugging code or an analyst reading a long report may appear “idle” despite working intensely. This creates a false productivity narrative that punishes deep work and rewards shallow, constant clicking.
Critical takeaway:
When surveillance becomes the metric, genuine productivity becomes the collateral damage.
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