Remote work removes the incidental awareness of who is around, and some employers reach straight for monitoring to replace it. The better answer is lighter: track time against work rather than against people, make it visible to the person doing it, and collect no activity data at all.
Track time, not activity
Screenshots, keystroke counts and idle detection change the nature of the product entirely and are the features that generate resentment, resignations and regulatory attention. If you do not need them, switching them off is the single biggest thing you can do for adoption. What remains is a record of hours against work, which is what you wanted in the first place.
Say what it is for, once
Accurate pay, accurate client billing, or capacity planning. People accept a stated purpose and resist an unstated one, and the resistance shows up as forgotten entries rather than as an argument. Give everybody access to their own record, which costs nothing to configure and converts the tool from something done to people into something they use.
What the data is actually good for
Seeing that one person consistently absorbs the awkward hours across time zones, that a project is consuming twice its estimate, or that somebody is working unpaid extra hours nobody asked for. Those findings improve management decisions. A dashboard of activity percentages improves nothing and costs trust.
Questions people ask about time tracking for remote teams
Should salaried remote staff track time?
Only where time has to be charged to something, or where hours are a genuine risk. Tracking for its own sake generates data nobody uses.
Is monitoring remote workers lawful?
Proportionate, notified monitoring for a stated purpose generally is. Covert or continuous activity capture is much harder to justify.
Does tracking reduce productivity?
It can, if it adds friction or signals distrust. Low friction capture with a clear purpose is usually neutral.