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As leaders continue managing remote or hybrid teams and their workloads, technology vendors have dangled more and more tantalizing options for enhanced employee monitoring. Employers can now track everything from keystrokes to badge swipes to GPS location — and everything in between. Organizations can use technology to snap screenshots to see if employees are visiting sites unrelated to work or install web cameras to confirm people are at their workstations.
According to a recent study from ExpressVPN, 78% of employers use monitoring software to track their staff’s online activity and productivity. And 73% of respondents admitted that stored recordings of workers’ calls, emails or messages influenced employee performance reviews.
Another recent report from The New York Times showed that eight of the 10 largest private US employers use technology to monitor productivity.
And while many organizations may say they only collect data to ensure legal compliance, protect against cybercrime, improve processes or recognize team achievements, experts say there’s often little transparency about the process. This can adversely affect employee engagement, leading people to the nearest exit.
So, where’s the line between acceptable and excessive employee monitoring?
Checking up on Employees Is Becoming Routine
Tracking team members is nothing new, said Dr. Nita Chhinzer, a professor in human resources and management consulting at the University of Guelph in Ontario.
“Electronic monitoring has been going on for decades; what's new is we have more sophisticated systems now,” she said. “For example, in a place like Starbucks or McDonald's, it can tell us which employee is producing at what level in relatively real time using AI tracking, the rate of service, what their delay is and how long they're taking to fill in an order. So, it's moving us away from this idea that we can personalize work to a rat race where we know our metrics matter.”
The metrics can be useful for companies. For example, Chhinzer explained, if an established performance-based system shows a retail salesperson can sell $100 worth of clothing in an hour, organizations might decide that to evaluate workers against the average.
But there’s also a downside.
“E-monitoring is creating an environment that’s perpetuating work overload because of these immediate tracking mechanisms,” she said.
Amazon was recently fined the equivalent of $34.5 million by the French data protection authority, CNIL, for allegedly going overboard when monitoring 20,000 workers in its French warehouse for using an “excessively intrusive” system: Employees were given scanners that kept tabs on their work performance and break times, and CNIL deemed having to justify breaks illegal.
Employees are nervous about job security, said Chhinzer, and not knowing whether or how they’re being monitored can exacerbate those feelings.
“In today’s uncertain environment, individuals feel they could be targeted. Many of the employees I’ve spent time with think this will be used as a tool to justify their termination,” she said.
“So, even though policies are in place where leaders say they won’t look at this unless they have a legitimate reason to, people are now saying, ‘But you haven't defined what a reason is, and I'm nervous because you might use this as your mechanism to exit employees.’”
The Importance of Transparency in Maintaining Trust
Tracking things like attendance and mouse clicks can lead to a workplace culture built on distrust, with employees feeling stressed about constantly being watched. Instead, balancing the need to justify reasonable monitoring with fostering positive engagement and wellbeing might be a better option, said Alexandra Levit, a workforce futurist in Chicago and author of Deep Talent.
“We can monitor all sorts of things and the pull to do this is strong because CEOs wanted people to come back to the office five days a week and they’ve lost that battle. People are in two or three days, and leaders are concerned about what people are doing the rest of that time. Employee monitoring provides a solution to that, but is it worth it?” she said.
“It's a very sticky issue for employees because most people have no idea what they’re being monitored for. They don't understand the rationale, and it takes people by surprise. That's where I think a lot of work could be done, and hopefully we can convince leaders to communicate transparently about it.”
Chhinzer said that while the province of Ontario passed the Working for Workers Act in 2022, which mandates companies with more than 25 employees to disclose their electronic monitoring policies to staff, she feels it doesn’t go far enough.
“It's all bark, no bite. The rule says you need to articulate your policy to your employees, but it doesn’t tell you what your policy must be. It’s just saying that electronic monitoring is happening, and employees need to know what your policy is, but you have full freedom to develop any policy you like,” said Chhinzer.
“So, if I felt my privacy was violated, I still have to go through certain channels, hire a lawyer, go through my union. There's no additional protection.”
Related Article: Here’s a Novel Idea for Leaders: Don’t Monitor, Participate
If You Monitor, Do It for the Right Reasons
Intent can make a difference when organizations use monitoring software. If a leader’s only goal is figuring out who’s goofing off to then reprimand them, that isn’t likely to help employee retention or motivation.
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“If you’re going to check mouse toggles or keyword strokes, that’s an invalid predictor for productivity; it’s not a measure of anything,” Chhinzer said.
However, if the technology is meant to improve policies or workflow on a company-wide basis or help supervisors detect early signs of overwhelm or burnout, that's something employees can understand and get onboard with.
“There is legitimate tracking available and it's often about employee safety. For example, if you have someone working in an isolated or dangerous environment, or we use a surveillance system because we're trying to protect our employees from something, there's an occupational health and safety angle, which is very beneficial,” she added, noting that employee wellbeing can also be tracked this way.
“If I was a manager and I noticed that every day a remote worker was logging in from midnight until 3 [am] and completing work or logging in for 12 hours consistently, that might indicate this person is taking an unhealthy approach to work, and that could flag things for me to consider.”
Chhinzer warns that employees don’t evaluate an organization’s good intentions — which are intangible and uncertain to them — but rather the outcomes of corporate decision-making.
“So, the second we say to our employees, ‘We have the intent to use this for good’, and someone gets fired because we've been able to show they've been unproductive, that outcome of one person being evaluated is going to be judged based on whether that was a legitimate evaluation or not.”
Even if the intention is good, when organizations stay quiet when monitoring their workers, that silence leads to perceptions of misinformation and mistrust, increasing the perception that the company is doing harm to their employees, she added.
Related Article: Workplace Monitoring and Employee Data Privacy Are on a Collision Course
Don’t Collect Data Just Because You Can
Employees are more likely to accept being monitored if they understand the motive behind the plan, said Levit.
“Have a clear business reason for wanting to know all this information: Why are we implementing this? What problem are we hoping to solve for it? And then making sure you communicate that intent very clearly,” she said.
The problem, she said, is that few organizations know why they’re even doing it. And few even need to.
“If your people are getting their work done and meeting performance objectives and organizational goals, does it even matter if they were playing SimCity for two hours during the workday?” she said. “I think it's very difficult for tenured leaders to get their arms around the idea that no, we don't really need to know what people are doing.”
Levit notes that because employee monitoring increases the risk of diminished engagement and complaints over a loss of privacy, leaders should instead consider directing their investment dollars toward building a robust employee experience that fosters autonomy and trust while tapping into your employees’ perspectives.
“You could do a focus group and say, ‘Hey, this new HR tech company came to us and said they can monitor how good you're feeling’, and you could find out what your employees really think about that before implementing it,” she said. Businesses should make these decisions in partnership with employees rather than imposing it on them. “Focus on making your employees want to do their best work so they're meeting expectations.”
Related Article: Is Employee Monitoring Software Worth the Trouble?
Where to Go From Here
Employee monitoring is commonplace, but during a continuing labor shortage where workers can take their pick of jobs, the negative impact of this practice on engagement and retention can outweigh the benefits of tracking your staff.
“Managers need to wake up and stop expecting the technology to do the performance monitoring,” said Chhinzer.
“Managers have not been caught up on how to manage hybrid workplaces, remote workers and knowledge workers,” she said. “They’re thinking, ‘If I measure keystroke or hours worked, that will tell me person A is more productive than person B’ but that's not the true measure of productivity or of performance. Technology is never going to be a replacement for a real manager.”
