Your boss is on to your “work from home” scheme.

The proliferation of surveillance is due, at least in part, to the rising sophistication and declining cost of spy technology: Employers monitor workers because they can. Michel Anteby, a Boston University sociologist and business scholar who has watched how monitoring affects employees at the TSA and other workplaces, has also noticed that the more employees are watched, the harder they try to avoid being watched, and the harder management tries to watch them. “Most TSA workers we observed do everything possible to stay under the radar, to essentially disappear,” he said. “They try to never speak up, never stick out, do nothing that might get noticed by management. This leads to a vicious cycle, whereby management grows more suspicious and feels justified in ratcheting up the surveillance.”

Perhaps the most common argument for surveillance—one often deployed by firms that make employee-monitoring products—is that it can make workers more productive. Purveyors of monitoring software claim they can help managers reduce the number of wasted hours and ensure that employees make better use of their time.

A Boston-based technology company called Humanyze applies what it calls “moneyball for business.” The term moneyball originated in Michael Lewis’s best seller about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager, Billy Beane, who used statistics to assemble a team of particularly gifted ballplayers. Humanyze gathers data by fitting employee ID badges with a microphone, location sensors, and an accelerometer to tease out patterns of employee behavior that affect a company’s performance. At one office, Humanyze’s data suggested that more frequent employee interactions improve productivity, so the employer installed larger, more central coffee stations to encourage those interactions.

How bosses can track their employees 24/7.

In his essay “In Praise of Electronically Monitoring Employees,” the MIT researcher Andrew McAfee describes a study of surveillance he conducted in collaboration with colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis and Brigham Young University. Using theft-detection software, the researchers monitored waitstaff (with their knowledge) at 392 casual-dining restaurants in the United States. The installation of the software correlated with a reduction in employee theft by less than $25 a week for each location—not a whole lot. What was significant was that revenue grew by $2,975 a week per location—nearly $1,000 from drink orders alone. Employee’s tips also grew, and this, McAfee writes, suggests a “win-win.” He speculates, “As far as we can tell, performance improved simply because people started doing their jobs better.” Perhaps once the “bad actors” understood they were being watched, they realized their best bet for making more money was to improve their service in the hope of garnering larger tips, McAfee surmises—and that good behavior caught on among other employees, too.