Written by
Owen Hughes, Senior Editor
Owen Hughes
Senior Editor
Senior Editor
Full Bio
on December 9, 2021
| Topic: Business
Employee monitoring is on the rise. Should we be worried?
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Remote-monitoring and surveillance tools could devastate employee relations unless efforts are made to put more power into the hands of workers, the author of a report by the European Commission’s Joint Research Council (JRC) warns.
Kirstie Ball, who spent five months compiling the JRC’s extensive Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in the Workplace report, says an increase in employee surveillance threatens to undermine trust and commitment to work amongst staff who are left in the dark about why and how data on them is gathered.
“When it’s quick and cheap, it is going to be a temptation. Because at the end of the day, the remote working [during the pandemic] did present a control challenge. How do you keep track of people? You want to keep them in a job, but how do you keep track of what they’re doing? How do you understand what they’re doing?”
SEE: What is digital transformation? Everything you need to know about how technology is reshaping business
However, Ball says that technology is not a replacement for proper management techniques: “If you’re a manager in an organization who is trying to suddenly scramble to work from home and you’ve been given technology that tells you what your colleagues are doing at their desks, and take pictures of them, that might be seen as a surrogate for the performance side of it. It’s not.”
Even as surveillance creeps into employees’ homes, workers are being left in the dark about the exact nature and intention of the data being gathered on them. This situation threatens to erode trust and create resistance from employees, driving turnover rates upwards at a time when many workers are already thinking about leaving their jobs.
“The main problem with workplace surveillance is that people can sometimes feel it’s either invasive, authoritarian or excessive,” says Ball.
“When people start to feel that way about the surveillance that they’re subject to, they get a sense that work conditions are less fair and less just, they have lower job satisfaction, they have lower commitment, they have lower creativity and autonomy, and they feel they’re not trusted. Their stress levels go up, and what that means is that they are more likely to quit.”
The creeps
Function creep is another problem presented by monitoring technologies, whereby employers gradually begin to gather more data on their workers that goes beyond what is necessary.
This issue has also been exacerbated by the COVID-19 health crisis, with some organizations having rushed to deploy remote management and monitoring tools without robust policies or clear directives around their use.
“When people start to perceive surveillance as authoritarian intrusiveness… it can sometimes be because the purpose is not clear, or it’s suspected that the purpose has been exceeded, or not properly communicated,” says Ball.
The way that monitoring is perceived by people is also connected with how feedback is used. Organizations can determine a better course for surveillance tools – which Ball accepts “isn’t going to go away” – by looking to empower employees, as opposed to questioning their ability to do their job or their moral integrity.
“The big question for me is whether it will ever be possible for organizations to make worker data available to workers and equip them with the skills and knowledge to look at the data… so that they themselves may start to make decisions about their own personal development and career development, rather than it just being harnessed by organizations to turn the screw?”
When it comes to the growth of AI-driven decision making in the workplace, organizations should be wary of the very real issue of data bias and discrimination. Interrogating decisions made by algorithms should likewise be held to very high scrutiny, argues Ball.
“There should be more of a culture of actually questioning these outputs and interrogating them, in terms of their consequences and veracity… we need to be transparent about how our data is processed, we need to know that it’s not a dangerous or harmful process, and discuss it and challenge it if we wish.”
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