Company installs tracking software that checks employees' mouse movements to determine productivity, until one employee proves the system is faulty: ‘He told me to wiggle my mouse’

Author image for Bar Mor Hazut
Bar Mor Hazut • Senior Editor
May 27, 2026 10:30 AM EDT

How many times have you wiggled your mouse in the last hour?

As time goes by, it seems like companies find more and more ways to track employees in an attempt to ensure that each worker is using their entire 8-hour workday doing nothing but work. We constantly hear of new ways employers track their employees' "productivity", while making sure no one is wasting precious company time for their own benefits.

When this employee shared their story on Reddit's r/antiwork Subreddit, they wanted to vent about this exact phenomenon, while also proving just how faulty these new, high-tech systems truly are, and how useless they can become.

The newest craze in these tracking systems is, of course, the mouse tracking. Since many employees these days have at least one day a week where they get to work from home, bosses can no longer rely on the good ol' method of looking over their employees' shoulders to ensure everyone is doing their job. Now that some employees do their jobs remotely, a new tracking system is needed. All to make sure everyone is doing their due diligence.

In comes the "mouse tracking" system, which tracks workers' mouse movements on their computers to ensure that everyone is working all the time. This system was introduced to the employee below as well, who was told that anyone who does not move their mouse every 4 minutes will be written up for "idle time".

This system, however, neglects to take into account anyone whose job requires more than a few mouse jiggles every 4 minutes, which includes the employee who shared the story. So when they were called to their boss's office to explain why their "idle time" is so high, they came prepared to prove that the tracking system is missing some vital information about the job. Would that be enough to fight against these silly new protocols? You'll have to read below to find out…

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  • Man holding mouse while using laptop
    via Zan Lazarevic

    Man holding mouse while using laptop.

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • "My workplace introduced a new "productivity metric" that literally measures how long my mouse isn't moving"

    I work in data entry at a mid- sized insurance firm, been there about three years, mostly remote. The work itself is repetitive but manageable and I've never had any complaints about my output.
    via Weald_Crux7
  • Last month they rolled out new monitoring software called something like "WorkTrack Pro" and had an all-hands call to explain it. The main thing it does is track "active time" which apparently means time when your mouse is moving or you're typing.
    via Weald_Crux7
  • Periods longer than four minutes with no input register as "idle" and get flagged on a weekly report that goes to your line manager. They called this a "transparency initiative."
    via Weald_Crux7
  • The immediate practical problem is that my job involves reading documents and cross-referencing information between two different systems, one of which is a legacy database from approximately 2009 that takes.
    via Weald_Crux7
  • about 35 seconds to load each record. I spend a lot of time reading and thinking and waiting for things to load. None of this generates mouse movement. I had my first weekly report come
    via Weald_Crux7
  • back with 23% "idle time" flagged on Tuesday, which my manager forwarded to me with the subject line "Let's chat about this" and a meeting invitation for Thursday at 11am. During that 23% idle time I
    via Weald_Crux7
  • had processed 340 records, which is more than my daily target, and I had the timestamps to prove it.
    via Weald_Crux7
  • Group of people working on their laptops
    via Annie Spratt

    Group of people working on their laptops.

    Image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.

  • The Thursday meeting was me showing my manager a screen recording of a normal work session which included me reading a 6-page claim document, waiting for the
    via Weald_Crux7
  • database to load three separate times, and typing the results. He watched it, said "yeah okay I see what you mean," and then said the metric still needed to stay because it had been rolled out company-wide and removing it
    via Weald_Crux7
  • for individuals would create inconsistency. He suggested I could "try to keep the mouse moving a bit more during reading periods" to keep the numbers looking better. I want to be clear
    via Weald_Crux7
  • that a senior manager at an insurance company looked me in the eye and told me to wiggle my mouse while reading to trick the productivity software our company just paid for.
    via Weald_Crux7
  • I now have a browser tab open with a very slow-moving screensaver that I put in the corner of my second monitor. My idle time this week was 2%. My output is identical. Nobody has said anything.
    via Weald_Crux7
  • DigitalRoman486 It will never happen but I feel like there needs to be a law or regulation that means companies have to allow for a "reasonable level of human activity" during work.
    via DigitalRoman486
  • The idea that people have to be productive every second of every work day is crazy and does nothing but satisfy middle managers looking to justify their position.
    via DigitalRoman486
  • no_name113 Time to start the bare minimum maybe get a glass mouse pad that makes the moyse move a bit when the y ask why your productivity dropped tell them you had to make sure the mouse kept moving
    via no_name113
  • darthcoder When do we get to see the managers reports? Along with their browser history?
    via darthcoder
  • madkins007 I was able to defeat my tracker with a small weight on the space bar. Pages and pages of blank documents on a side screen as i did the actual non-computer work.
    via madkins007

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tracking boss workplace-stories employee manager job productivity system ceo computer workplace company
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