My retort would be: If you have a singular employee doing a certain unique job, or a very small handful, then it's pretty trivial to instead manage them direct

My retort would be: If you have a singular employee doing a certain unique job, or a very small handful, then it's pretty trivial to instead manage them directly on a human level. You don't need Orwellian tech tools to have conversations with them and make a one-off evaluation as to whether they're giving it the effort and authenticity it should, and again: results matter. What were your expectations (in terms of accomplishments) in hiring this role, and are they being approximately met? But if you have a lot of employees doing a similar job, then it just gets increasingly easier to be objective about it. Look at their actual outputs statistically, and find the outliers and focus effort on those cases. Does Joe's output sit two standard deviations below the median? Why? Maybe there's a good reason and you document it and move on, or maybe they're just being deceitful. I still don't think mouse/eyeball tracking or virtual timecards are going to help much.