Watching the Work Happen
Wanting assurance that work is progressing is reasonable, and the instruments available differ sharply in what they tell you and in what they move.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. A deadline is not a shift, and the difference is visible from outside.
Four ways of finding out how the work is going, and what each one moves
Accepting deliverables at agreed points
The thing either exists and meets the specification or it does not
Reading a weekly written note from the supplier
Reported by them, in their own words, about the delivery
Requiring activity in a system you can see
Legitimate where the work lives there; becomes something else if read as effort
Measuring their working time directly
Minute-by-minute capture of what somebody did with their day
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total.
Four instruments, and only the last one tells you about the person rather than the work. It is also the only one that will be read as supervision by anybody looking afterwards. One company's own practice; how any of this is weighed differs by jurisdiction.
Wanting assurance that work is progressing is reasonable, and nobody should buy anything substantial on faith alone. The instruments available differ sharply in what they actually tell you and in what they cost.
The boundary discussed in “Watching the Work Happen” should be explicit before any workforce data is collected. A company evaluating employee monitoring software for employee monitoring software can use agreed time and project context, provided contractors know the purpose, can correct records and are not judged against employee-style attendance rules by default.
They also differ in a way buyers rarely consider: some of them describe the work and some of them describe the person.
The ProjectManagement.com practitioner resources offers useful outside context for “Watching the Work Happen”. Its value is in producing better questions about scope, ownership and evidence, not in deciding a contractor’s legal status.
What you are usually trying to find out
That the delivery will arrive, that it will be what was asked for, and that nothing has gone wrong that you have not been told about.
Nothing in that list requires knowing how somebody spent Tuesday. It is worth noticing how often the instrument reached for answers a question nobody actually had.
Deliverables, which answer it completely
Accepting work at agreed points answers every question above and answers it definitively. The thing exists and meets the specification or it does not.
It is the slowest instrument, because you learn at the milestone rather than continuously, and that is its entire disadvantage. For most work the remedy is more milestones rather than more watching.
The written note, which answers it cheaply
Covered in its own article earlier. Worth repeating here because it is the instrument most often skipped in favour of something heavier, and it costs the supplier five minutes a week.
Activity in a shared system
Where the work genuinely lives in something you both use — a repository, a tracker, a document — you can see it without anybody reporting.
This has a boundary worth stating precisely. Looking at the work is fine. Looking at the pattern of when somebody was active, and drawing conclusions about their effort from it, is a different activity using the same screen, and it is the point at which a reasonable instrument becomes a measurement of somebody's day.
Measuring working time
Software that records what somebody did with their hours is the heaviest instrument available and the one that most clearly describes the person rather than the output.
It exists for a reason and there are commercial arrangements built on it, particularly where hours are being bought directly and the buyer has no other way to verify them. Whether that suits a given engagement is a commercial question between the parties. What it is not is a neutral choice: it is the instrument an employer uses to supervise, and it will be read that way.
If you are going to do it anyway
Some buyers will, and some platforms impose it. The things that make it less damaging are the same in every case: agree it before the engagement rather than introducing it, attach it to hours actually being billed rather than to the person's whole day, keep what it captures to the minimum the purpose needs, and say what is kept and for how long.
Introducing it mid-engagement to somebody who has worked without it is the version that causes the most trouble, both in the relationship and in how the arrangement looks afterwards.
The question that reveals the real motive
Ask what you would do differently if the answer came back bad. If the response is that you would raise it, reject work, or end the engagement, the information is serving a commercial purpose.
If the response is that you would tell them to work differently, the instrument is supervision, and the thing you actually want is an employee.
What it costs beyond the factor
Good independent suppliers decline engagements with heavy monitoring, and the ones who accept price it in. You are selecting, to some degree, for people who have no better options, which is rarely what a buyer intends.
It also changes behaviour in a way that works against you: somebody being measured on activity produces activity, and the thinking that makes expensive work worth buying does not look like activity from outside.
What a buyer is entitled to see
Worth stating positively, because this article is mostly about restraint. You are entitled to the deliverable, to know whether it will arrive, to evidence that what was billed was done, and to whatever access the engagement specified.
That is a substantial set of rights and it covers every legitimate commercial concern. Buyers who feel they have nothing are usually comparing their position with an employer's rather than with the position they actually negotiated, and most of them negotiated less than they could have.
The quiet default
Most businesses do not choose an instrument at all. They have a weekly call because that is what was in the calendar, and nobody has ever asked what question it answers.
Choosing deliberately takes one conversation at the start of an engagement, and in most cases the honest answer turns out to be milestones and a written note, which is the cheapest pair on the list and the one that moves nothing.