Being Willing to Be Monitored by Employer Surveillance Software to Work From Home
A conversation about a question posed on LinkedIn which asks whether you would be willing to be monitored if it meant you could work at home
"Would you be willing to be monitored by employer surveillance software if doing so meant you would be able to work from home?"
That pointed question was recently asked in a LinkedIn poll to determine just how much privacy people are willing to cede to create or maintain the work environment — remote — that satisfies them.
Before Communication Intelligence, the Newsletter engages in a conversation about this subject with two sources, let’s look at research shared by StandOut CV that came from a study ran in 2021 and 2023 and analyzed the capabilities of 50 of the most popular employee monitoring tools.
Did you know:
—78% of productivity tools take screenshots of an employee’s screen, based on employer-set conditions.
—38% of monitoring tools use stealth modes to remain hidden from employees, which is a decrease compared to 2021 which is a decrease of 23.37% compared to 2021.
—Over a third (34%) of tools now track employees’ exact GPS location, an increase of 44.85% compared to 2021.
The question asked at the top of this article tests human concerns about how they would prefer to be treated and psychological safety.
“Yes, I certainly expect the response from most people to be ‘no,’” says Anant Sood, co-founder of worxogo, a behavior design and AI company that offers a digital coach to sales, customer support and back-office teams in large enterprises.
“Experiencing trust and freedom,” he adds, “is a fundamental driver of engagement and motivation at work. Employer Surveillance software exudes mistrust and feels shady at best and downright intrusive at worst.”
This is a point that was presented by best-selling author Daniel Pink, Sood says.
“He talks about motivation in his book ‘Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates us at Work.’ He lists three factors that drive motivation: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Surveillance software does not promote a feeling of autonomy at work,” Sood points out.
A second source answers what appears to be a rhetorical question, then counters the impression that people likely have but isn’t entirely accurate.
“I would not expect most people to agree or say ‘yes’ to it because that’s too vague and intrusive sounding,” says Geoff Whiting, the content strategy manager for Hubstaff, a workforce development software company that makes tools designed to enable remote and hybrid work. “It conjures up an image of someone peering over your shoulder at every moment, which generally isn’t how this tech works.
“It isn’t feasible for companies to have someone review every single person’s hours and activities at every moment. No quality employer wants to hire that position and have it on their organizational chart. So, much of it is automated, and that’s just looking for behavior patterns and other elements.”
There are different metrics of course when evaluating employees, ones that employers and workers both would benefit from learning. “One important note is that these elements, including things we track at Hubstaff, like activity levels, should never be the sole way a role is judged,” Whiting says. “They’re pieces of information managers need to create a nuanced understanding of someone’s work.”
It’s important to understand how the conversation is framed and goes, to build and nurture relationships with employees instead of damage them to the point of resentment or turnover.
“How we talk about remote work and how we offer these choices will 100% dictate how people respond,” Whiting says. “And if someone wants to make a case for-or-against remote work, they need to be honest about what it looks like and what is expected.”
With the impulse to use surveillance software, employees and other critics might wonder what employers are most fearing.
“Primarily, from a personal point of view, a loss of privacy, a feeling of being unsafe,” Sood says, asking, “What is being done with the data collected? How is it safeguarded from illegal use? How can it be used against me?”
Then, of course, what is talked about the most. “An actual reduction in productivity,” Sood admits, yet adding, “Feeling watched creates anxiety and stress and contributes to workers doing their work with less commitment and sincerity. Employees know they will not be able to give their best under such conditions.”
Whiting says leaders know what has proven successful and is traditional.
“They have established practices and policies that they know work and have been used for years or decades to create a baseline for their company,” Whiting says. “They were asked to make many changes during the pandemic with a promise of returning to normal at some point, but that isn’t happening. So now they’re struggling with adapting and turning something temporary into something permanent.
“Another reason this is tricky is because the pandemic was a wild ride for revenue. You likely struggled significantly if you had a business that mainly made in-store sales. E-commerce brands did huge numbers for a few years and are now trying to maintain growth while forecasts could dip. Major economic shifts happened while remote work was introduced, so it’s hard for people not to link the two mentally. If remote coincided with a downturn — correlation, not causation — it takes purposeful work to separate the two.
“This fear and uncertainty often get couched in business terms such as productivity, disengagement and work ethic, but the data doesn’t bear this out. If you look at Gallup’s long-term tracking, you’ll see that employee engagement is fluid and higher now than at any point from 2000 to 2014,” Whiting says.
What can help is not necessarily being done, at least not well.
“Communication is how you tackle these fears and we’re seeing companies not yet know how to communicate in a remote environment,” Whiting points out.
Going back to the question — "Would you be willing to be monitored by employer surveillance software if doing so meant you would be able to work from home?’ — what does it communicate to employees?
“It communicates mistrust,” Sood flatly says. “It essentially says, ‘You need to be watched or you'll slack off.’ It also communicates, indirectly, that you don't think the work your employees do is something they want to do. It's something they're forced to do, not something they enjoy doing. That's why they need to be watched.”
“Phrasing matters and the word ‘surveillance’ is a terrible choice here,” Whiting advises. “That’s because using it tells employees that you don’t trust them. It communicates that people need to give up autonomy and personal responsibility. Instead, they will always be watched and judged harshly for every second.”
He mentions particular situations:
“Did you daydream for a minute on a call? Or did an offhand comment make you jump on the phone, which the software doesn’t track, and dings you as inactive? Did someone share something cool on Slack and you went down a rabbit hole? And why does all that matter if you’re still hitting your goals?”
The lack of trust or the mistrust, as Sood and Whiting say, is bad for leadership and the culture.
“When you don’t have trust, your entire organization and workforce are at risk because they don’t believe you’ll be on their side when it comes to those questions,” Whiting says. “People won’t trust a company that doesn’t trust them, and why should they?”
Maybe there is a smarter, better question that can be formulated and asked of employees that would assist employers in learning and determining if the protection and peace of mind they seek would be present and that employees would feel more trusting about and would "yes, I can do that.”
“Find a meaningful way to connect with employees and their performance when they work remotely,” Sood recommends. “Ask employees if they would be willing to use a digital coach that allows their team leader to monitor their KPIs daily, rather than their actual screens. Monitoring their results on a daily basis will help team leads identify potential issues and make adjustments along the way.”
He continues with his advisory. “A digital coach acts as a bridge between employers and employees, connecting them for support and creating a channel for managers to appreciate their teams more regularly, as they would if they were working in the same location.”
In short, Sood says, “Something supportive, rather than intrusive, would help employers protect their interests and employees feel trusted.”
Whiting says this query is oversimplified and unrealistic.
“There’s not a single question that will address all of that,” Whiting says. “Companies need remote work policies that clearly set expectations and tell people about their rights and protections.
“If I were going to try and put it down as simply as possible, I’d go with something like: ‘We want to offer remote work opportunities for roles like yours, but we need to use some software to track and learn how people work to set expectations and ensure teams meet big-picture goals. Would you be interested in working remotely if it meant using a tool that tracks some things like hours worked or websites visited, but no screenshots or keylogging, so we can better understand how remote work fits our company?”
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