Finland’s social insurance agency Kela tracked employees’ computer mouse clicks to assess their productivity, monitoring how staff handled benefit applications and used their working hours, according to an investigation by Yle’s investigative journalism unit MOT.
The monitoring took place in the summer of 2023 and covered approximately 2,000 employees. Kela examined data from the previous two to six months to assess how workers spent their time, including when they opened cases, made decisions and moved between tasks.
Although Kela described the exercise as a one-off trial, the findings had serious consequences for some employees. The monitoring contributed to reprimands, warnings and dismissals, affecting dozens of workers. MOT spoke to former Kela employees who lost their jobs after the data suggested that they had not been working efficiently enough.
Kela employs almost 4,000 benefits processors, who handle applications and decisions relating to social security benefits. More than 300 managers oversee their work, making the monitoring exercise significant in an organisation where much of the daily work involves processing individual cases.
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One employee, identified by the first name Suvi, had only recently started working as a benefits processor when the monitoring began in 2023. She told MOT that she did not fully understand the extent of the exercise until the results were presented to employees.
She described the experience as distressing, particularly after seeing how closely her computer activity had been recorded.
“It was a very detailed account of what you had clicked with your mouse, when you had taken a case from the queue, made a decision, or whether the case had been left sitting,” she told MOT.
The monitoring went beyond counting completed tasks. Managers were also encouraged to look for signs they considered unusual, including unexplained or unclear absences, employees’ reluctance to attend office days and long periods when their Skype status appeared yellow or red.
Details of the exercise were included in a PowerPoint presentation prepared in connection with the 2023 monitoring. The presentation identified patterns such as long gaps between tasks and employees selecting which cases they wanted to handle rather than working through them in order.
Kela had become concerned about an increase in the misuse of working time. The monitoring was part of its efforts to investigate the issue, and the agency dismissed ten employees in 2024.
However, the reliability of the monitoring data has since come under legal scrutiny. In spring 2026, Finland’s Labour Court ruled that the dismissal of one benefits processor was unlawful.
The court found that the reports used to assess the employee’s working time did not provide a reliable picture of how that person actually spent their working hours. The ruling raises questions about how employers interpret computer activity data when making decisions about employee performance and dismissals.
