Remote Workers: Is Your Employer Monitoring You?
With the explosion of remote and hybrid workers, including those who cowork at spaces like My Space Downtown in Panama City, employers are wondering about productivity.
Are these workers really working the hours they report?
Employers want proof
From the employer’s point of view, employee monitoring is becoming essential now that the majority of employees don’t work onsite. Remote and hybrid workers make up 64% of the workforce in 2023, up from 49% in 2022. Companies are lucky to use half of their commercial office space and, rather than force workers back into the office, many are downsizing their footprints as fast as they can to cut costs. Remote work is here to stay.
Courtesy: The Oakland Press
As employers resign themselves to employing remote workers, employers know they can’t walk around the office to make sure their employees are working. Remote workers are harder to monitor. Bosses want to know if an employee is really at their computer. And even if employees are at their computers, employers want to be assured that employees are working and not engaged in social media, online shopping or binge watching a streaming service.
In short, employers want verification.
Employer spyware is already a billion-dollar industry
For that verification, employers are relying on new high-tech ways to monitor employee (and contractor) productivity. The technology to do this monitoring is quickly evolving and has become so popular it deserves its own category, called “tattleware” or “bossware.” The category names describe the software function: to report to a manager when employees are working, but also when employees say they are working but are really goofing off. The technology can tell the difference.
Most tattleware only works on company issued computers, tablets and phones. It’s installed on the devices and works by monitoring screen time, applications, websites, cursor movements, emails and keystrokes. Some employers monitor chat apps.
As it evolves, tattleware may be crossing the line of employee privacy. Such may be the case as tattleware now can use the devices built-in camera to take random screenshots and even photos of the worker as they work! It’s already a billion dollar industry, expected to double by 2030!
Employees are fighting back, but so are employers
Workers are discovering (or inventing) hacks to fool tattleware. Popular now is the “mouse jiggler” or a USB dongle that keeps the worker’s cursor moving even when the worker is at the mall shopping.
Workers also are accusing companies of relying on technology to monitor their productivity when the real problem is poor management that doesn’t know how to motivate and reward employees. Workers call up statistics showing that when working from home, they spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive than they do at the office, and overall are 47% more productive working remotely.
Workers also argue that bossware or tattleware:
Causes repetitive motion injuries
Lowers job satisfaction
Increases absenteeism
Leads to greater turnover
Undermines trust
Employers aren’t buying it. Bosses say they have grounds to fire the employee caught using productivity hacks, and employers are making sure such language is increasingly put into employment contracts. Employers note that even the American Civil Liberties Union agrees that employers have “a legitimate interest in monitoring employees’ work.”
Is spyware really necessary?
The larger concern around the value of tattleware is its reliance on Artificial Intelligence (AI).
With AI, workers are judged using algorithms. AI, as we know from programs like ChatGPT, has gaping flaws. For example, AI doesn’t know if an employee pause is due to strategic thinking time or a quick errand. Employers want productivity, but they also don’t want to fire the very people whose deep thinking is creating their intellectual property!
But that’s not the only concern about spyware. Most experts are now contending that employee monitoring is misplaced because it is based on false evidence. According to research conducted in 2020 by Mercer, an HR benefits and consulting firm, nearly all (94%) of the almost 800 companies surveyed who had large contingents of remote work said that they did not see a reduction in productivity. Some companies even reported that productivity had actually improved. Even if employees take more breaks during the workday, they still are more productive if remote, which should be the bottom line.
The future is uncertain
Ultimately, perhaps most influential in this debate about whether spyware is both useful and legal will be the decisions on employee lawsuits in the courts. So far, judges have ruled that worker surveillance breaches employee fundamental rights to privacy. But the practice of using tattleware is so new, it may survive court challenges, especially in right-to-work states. The future, as of now, is not clear.
Most worrisome to employees is that bosses at this point do not have to tell employees they are being spied on. For now, the practice seems to be growing, whether it is necessary or not.