And it’ll encourage the high performers to look elsewhere as soon as they learn their boss is doing creepy stuff like installing spyware on their machines.

I think a lot of these “solutions” are rooted in the fact that managers—like the spyware-considering person above—are genuinely not good at interacting with other people. This person already knows who’s not getting work done, but for some reason isn’t comfortable having a direct conversation about it. “You’re not meeting your goals, and you don’t seem to be improving, so I think you should find another job” is a more mature, professional way of addressing the problem than surreptitiously collecting statistics on how much time your employees spend in the toilet.

Keeping in mind who I’m talking to here, I think a far better approach would be to step away from the tools and data-mining for a moment and deal with people like people, not machines.