JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER recognised the importance of delegation: "I would rather earn 1% off a hundred people's efforts," he once said, "than 100% off my own efforts." But delegation can be difficult and tracking the progress of employees a burden. New ways are needed to let modern-day Rockefellers see who is sweating and who is slacking, though now they don't have to be as overbearing as the tyrannical, omnipotent bosses envisioned by Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times”. A new raft of apps have been developed that promise to improve productivity by encouraging staff and management to review and comment on an employee's work. Weekdone, a start-up founded by Juri Kaljundi in Tallinn, produces one such tool. It provides an interactive platform on which workers can record their labours and managers can track them, e-mailing sparsely-designed but data-rich reports to its users, some who work at Fortune 500 companies, every week. Firms pay Weekdone from as little as $15 up to $300 a month for its service.

Another service, iDoneThis, which is based in San Francisco, is a bit different. Created as a “personal-productivity tracker” by Rodrigo Guzman to make sure he stuck to a weight-busting exercise regime, it has grown into a business-focused management tool. The reason, explains Walter Chen, the other founder of iDoneThis, was that although the tool was meant to track personal achievements, the word that most popped up in users’ entries was “work”.

IDoneThis is used by 80,000 people, the majority of whom are tracking efforts in their personal lives in the same way Mr Guzman did when the firm was founded. More than 10m achievements have been tracked by users in their everyday lives since its launch in 2011.

But it is the business customers for iDoneThis who bring in most of the money. Around 4,000 businesspeople, spread across 700 companies, pay $5 each month to keep colleagues informed about the work they are doing. Many come to the service through line managers looking to improve productivity. Will Young, the director of the research and development arm of Zappos, an online retailer which is now part of Amazon, introduced it to his staff and 70 took it up to track their professional development.

For some, the notion of being immediately and constantly accountable to superiors may seem alarming. Even Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo, occasionally leans out rather than in at the end of a particularly wearing week. But iDoneThis is not designed to catch workers out. Rather, it places mutual encouragement and motivation at the heart of its service. An interface similar to Facebook's allows bosses and colleagues to “like” tasks that have been completed and add supportive comments. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, has found that motivation and happiness, through the support of your colleagues, improves productivity. Both Weekdone and iDoneThis aim to provide clear lines of communication between the boardroom and the office cubicle.

It is not quite gamification, says Mr Chen, but more about intrinsic incentives: listing the work you have completed during the day, and claiming ownership of it, spurs you on to do more. No wonder workers seem keen to use the service.