Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Some workplace innovations can seem like a good idea in a management meeting and take a completely different shape when rolled out to employees.

One remote worker might spend 3 productive hours working non-stop without ever touching their keyboard, while another might trigger hundreds of thousands of mouse movements with no meaningful output; that is the problem with monitoring remote work through surveillance: activity and productivity are not always synonymous.

As part of our ongoing updates & enhancements, we have introduced a more flexible way for you to configure your utilization rate targets. Managers can now choose whether to set and view utilization rate targets as a percentage or by hour, making it easier to align utilization goals with how their teams measure and benchmark productive work.

In 2026, as hybrid and remote work continue to affect the modern workplace, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are once again considering how to manage and keep track of their dispersed workforces. The Gallup 2026 Hybrid Work Indicator shows that 78% of U.S. employees in jobs that allow them to work from home either work in a hybrid arrangement (52%) or are entirely remote (26%), with flexible work having become the main working model for roles in the knowledge sector.

What if the greatest security threat is not a virus, but an application an employee has been given permission to install without the IT team’s knowledge? From AI assistants and cloud storage to instant messaging, project management, and browser plug-ins, employees use and navigate across a dozen different applications each workday, from instantaneous communication and collaboration to preparing documents, completing projects, accessing business systems, and interacting with their data.

The control of web access and the execution of applications are fundamental components of cybersecurity, data loss prevention (DLP), and workforce productivity in today’s enterprise IT environments. In 2026, as businesses move towards hybrid working models, IT administrators need centralized control methods that integrate seamlessly with their existing Microsoft systems.

Visibility for smaller businesses can be complicated. A team manager might want to know how their employees spend the workday, which applications are most in use, whether remote workers actually adhere to the schedule they work under, or whether sensitive company data exists outside their corporate network. These are valid needs for any small business manager. Unfortunately, an overburdened small IT team likely does not have weeks to spend setting up a complex enterprise monitoring tool.

What if your remote desktop environment gave you a window into how work is being done and who is doing it? While many organizations are moving to Citrix VDI, Remote Desktop Services (RDS), Azure Virtual Desktop, or other virtual workspace environments, IT professionals struggle with one overarching question: How do we keep an eye on employees’ activities, but respect privacy, privacy, and production?

Managing distributed workforces in highly regulated industries requires implementing strict technical precautions to balance security, productivity, and privacy.

Meta made headlines this week when Reuters reported the company is installing tracking software on U.S. employee computers, capturing mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and periodic screen snapshots as training data for its AI models. The program, called the Model Capability Initiative, sits inside Meta's broader push to build AI agents capable of performing knowledge work autonomously. Meta was quick to add a qualifier: the data will not be used for performance evaluations.