A growing number of businesses are monitoring their employees. What is the issue? It frequently causes more harm than good.
Mark had a lot of freedom in his job in the IT department of a US industrial firm before the pandemic. He and his colleagues were able to complete their tasks “without our manager doing much, you know, managing,” he claims.
That changed abruptly when the company began allowing employees to work from home. “The monitoring began on day one,” says Mark, whose surname has been withheld for professional reasons. The company began using software that enabled remote control of employees’ systems, and Mark says his team had to give their manager the password “so he could connect without us having to accept. If the password needed to be changed, he sent an email first thing in the morning”.
Mark’s manager explained the surveillance. was designed to ensure that everyone remained productive and maintained the same level of open communication that they had in the office. In reality, it made Mark anxious and contributed to him becoming overworked and burned out quickly. “It was just stressful because I felt like I had to be actively using the computer at all times for fear of him thinking something like a phone call or a bathroom break was me slacking off,” he says.
With the rise of remote work has come an increase in workplace monitoring; some 2022 estimates claim that the number of large firms monitoring workers has doubled since the pandemic began. Some monitoring programmes record keystrokes or track computer activity by taking screenshots on a regular basis. Other software records phone calls and meetings, and even has access to employees’ webcams. Alternatively, as in Mark’s case, some programmes allow full remote access to workers’ systems.
According to Karen Levy, associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, US, and author of the book Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, many companies are embracing monitoring because they believe it ensures the productivity of remote employees. However, there is mounting evidence that electronic surveillance can, in some cases, do more harm than good. Workers resent it, and it can cause stress, cause employees to quit, and even make workers do their jobs worse on purpose.
More workers being watched
According to a 2021 study conducted by internet security tool ExpressVPN of 2,000 employers and 2,000 employees working remotely or on a hybrid schedule, nearly 80% of bosses use monitoring software.
They think, ‘More and more and more, let’s use all these tools at our disposal.’ They want to have as much control as possible. And yet, of course, for employees, that control can often times feel oppressive – David Welsh
“Managers are increasingly interested in new ways to monitor employees’ keystrokes, activities, and attention,” Levy says. Some are even collecting “finer-grained data about workers’ communications – because so much of that happens on digital channels rather than face-to-face – and bodies, through wearable technologies and biometrics,” she adds. Some businesses, for example, have installed time clocks that use an employee’s fingerprint to clock in and out. Webcams are sometimes used to collect data on eye movement, which is then used to track an employee’s attention.
Still, other companies, according to Levy, are not only watching what employees are doing in a given moment, but also using that information to predict what they might do, using “predictive analytics about whether a worker is likely to, for example, ask for a raise or leave for another job”. Trackers that capture things like tone of voice can indicate a worker’s level of engagement, and software that monitors employee search history – and even social media – can reveal they’re on the job hunt.
Not every company that monitors its employees uses surveillance software out of suspicion; some do so “for security reasons, or to comply with laws or regulations in some industries,” according to Levy.
However, the majority of people who use these programmes do so voluntarily. “Managers frequently believe that knowing more about what employees are doing is useful for making decisions, eliminating waste, or compelling employees to conform to a firm’s goals,” Levy says. Some bosses are simply curious about what their employees are up to. According to Microsoft’s 2022 Work Trend Index survey, 85% of leaders have difficulty believing their employees are productive. (In the pandemic era, ‘productivity paranoia’ has become a major issue.)
David Welsh, a professor of organisational and behavioural ethics at Arizona State University in the United States, observes that companies frequently take a maximalist approach to employee monitoring. “They think, ‘More and more and more, let’s use all the tools we have.'” They desire as much power as possible. Of course, for employees, that control can feel oppressive at times.”
A preference for privacy
According to research, surveilling employees frequently backfires. Welsh and his colleagues hypothesised that being monitored might make employees more likely to break rules. In one study, he and his colleagues discovered that employees in the United States who were under surveillance took more unapproved breaks, worked more slowly on purpose, and stole more office equipment than their unmonitored counterparts.
The team devised a second study in which workers were given a series of tasks and the opportunity to cheat on them in order to determine causation rather than just correlation. They discovered that the half who were aware they were being watched were more likely to cheat.
According to Welsh, the monitoring made the subjects feel a lack of agency and responsibility, which led to bad behaviour. They were more likely to cheat when they were being watched because they “felt controlled, and they had less of a sense of personal responsibility because of how they were being monitored,” he says. It’s a difficult to quantify but simple to understand phenomenon: when workers are denied dignity and agency, they suffer. They frequently break workplace rules in order to regain control.
Welsh, too, says he confirmed “this counterintuitive idea that monitoring could actually lead people to break the rules more in some circumstances, or create the very types of behaviours it was designed to prevent”.
“What was really surprising is that we found no positive effect on performance,” says Rudolf Siegel, a researcher at Universität des Saarlandes in Germany and co-author of a recent meta-analysis on the effects of electronic monitoring. In other words, the data demonstrated that monitoring employees provided no benefits, but instead harmed workplace culture and encouraged counterproductive behaviour.
Workers who are being watched may devote more energy to devising creative ways to circumvent the very controls that their employers have put in place. In one instance, Siegel recalled, A GPS-equipped truck driver covered the tracking system’s antenna with tin foil. Employees who were being monitored were more likely to kick and box the robots they used at work, according to another case from the field of automation.
“Being under constant surveillance raises our stress levels and impinges on our sense of autonomy and dignity,” says Levy. “As a result, managers who over-monitor employees may see people leave for jobs where they feel more respected.”