Editorial
I've written before about some of the right (and wrong) ways to measure remote workers, as the boom in remote working during the pandemic coincided with a boom in sales of employee monitoring products. I noted that the surveillance of remote workers not only harms trust and employee engagement, but also leads to poorer mental health among remote workers. This is often because it's introduced surreptitiously, and takes a sense of autonomy away from employees.
A recent study from MIT, The Effects of Digital Surveillance and Managerial Clarity on Performance, provides a fresh look at the topic, as well as a salient reminder that surveillance is a terrible substitute for good management. At a time when many organizations are introducing return-to-office mandates — due in large part to the failure to adapt managerial practices to employee preferences — this is an important message.
Improving Remote Employee Performance
Researchers wanted to explore whether using software to monitor remote workers helped or hindered their performance. Unsurprisingly, results suggest that simply introducing surveillance software doesn't help productivity. Instead, the best results occur when employees have a strong relationship with their manager and managerial decisions are made transparently.
"A lot of organizations adopted new digital tools to manage remote work — for example, digital monitoring tools and new communication platforms, but in the absence of complementary management practices, these tools do not necessarily support remote work success," the researchers explain.
"Our results suggest the money spent on these digital tools may not have been money well spent, and that might be one of the reasons so many firms are saying that 'in the longer run, remote work hasn't really worked out.'"
This may explain why return-to-office mandates often do more harm than good. When managers fail to adapt to changing employee needs, it breaks down the relationship that is so important to employee success. A better approach is to invest in managerial capability so managers have the skills to manage remote or hybrid teams effectively.
Details of the Remote Employee Productivity Study
MIT researchers examined several hundred workers recruited via the Upwork platform, each of whom was monitored to try to ensure their performance and productivity was up to scratch. The researchers accurately identified those with high and low productivity before randomly placing them into three groups: Justified, Unjustified and a control group.
For instance, in the first group, high performers were told they no longer needed to be monitored due to high productivity, whereas poor performers were told they needed to remain monitored because of low productivity.
In the second group, high performers could opt out of monitoring without tying this option to their productivity. By contrast, low performers required monitoring without linking the decision to their performance.
The control group saw high performers continue to be monitored without any option to opt out, while low performers were permitted to work without monitoring.
How Transparency Affects Employee Productivity
The results? When high performers had surveillance decisions made without justification, their performance fell by 17%. This wasn't just confined to high performers, however. Low performers also saw a decline in their performance when unjustified decisions were made around surveillance. It's also important to note that high performers were less likely to accept work from the employer when changes weren't justified.
In contrast, when any changes in surveillance were made based on clearly articulated reasons, performance levels remained stable.
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"These results reveal that simply applying surveillance is not enough to improve productivity," the researchers explain. "They also suggest that managers need to provide a clear justification for requiring or not requiring their staff to use surveillance if they want it to enhance productivity."
The results remind us that justification is important to workers. If there is a sense that people understand managerial actions, and even have a hand in them, they’re more likely to accept them. This applies whether we're talking about digital surveillance or return-to-office mandates. This may be what many managers are struggling to understand as they continue with a command-and-control style of management that no longer works — if it ever has.
Editor's Note: Interested in other perspectives on employee monitoring? Read on:
- Is Responsible Employee Surveillance Possible? — When does responsible employee monitoring cross the line into unwelcome surveillance?
- All AI-Based Monitoring Isn't Received the Same Way — Employees have very different reactions to AI-based monitoring tools rooted in whether they feel it increases or decreases their autonomy.
- Workplace Monitoring and Employee Data Privacy Are on a Collision Course — When bossware and data privacy meet, it's going to hit US-based employers right at the intersection of HR, legal, compliance, EX and IT.
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