Despite the shift we felt toward worker empowerment, flexibility, and a more humane way of working, there can still be a lot about living and working in 2023 that feels slightly dystopian. The news is filled with layoffs, economic uncertainty, and the rise of artificial intelligence impacting fields and skills once thought to be the domain of human-exclusive knowledge work.
Add to those concerns the rise in so-called bossware monitoring software that companies use to ensure that employees are staying productive. It’s not an anomaly at a few companies. Research found that eight of the ten largest private U.S. employers are using some form of employee surveillance software.
Unsurprisingly, employee surveillance rose as remote work did. When bosses couldn’t physically monitor employees, they put programs in place to do it. A study of more than 1,200 U.S. employers found 60% with remote employees are using some form of work monitoring software. And almost nine out of ten of the companies said they had fired workers after implementing monitoring software.
So exactly what are employers tracking and what tools are they using? Are there any regulations around employee surveillance? Does your boss even have to tell you that you are being monitored?
On the latest episode of The New Way We Work, I spoke to Albert Fox Cahn, the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. He says that, unfortunately for employees, knowing if and how your employer is tracking you can be a bit of a black box, because laws are mostly nonexistent and even when they are in place they vary widely from state to state. Overall, he says, there is no requirement for employers to disclose when employees are being tracked.
But even without hard numbers on how many employers are tracking their employees through some use of AI or other tracking software, Cahn notes that the market for employee surveillance tools has exploded in the last few years since the onset of the pandemic.
“All of this premised on the idea that if you couldn’t see your employee, you couldn’t trust them to do their job. But that fear wasn’t substantiated by hard evidence,” he says. “The truth is that this software demoralizes folks, and feels incredibly invasive when they are aware of it.”
In fact, Cahn points out, the products that are sold as productivity monitoring aren’t measuring the right thing. “Productivity is a really complicated concept. It’s all the different things that go into the quality of your work,” he says. “The software isn’t capable of making a holistic assessment of how good a job we’re doing. So it reduces our job performance to these really simple metrics.” In other words, Cahn says, this approach is a dumbed down version of job performance that leaves employees discouraged.
Listen to the full episode for advice to managers as alternatives to surveillance, details about state legislation to protect employees, and the next generation of employee surveillance tools, which includes facial sentiment analysis.
You can listen and subscribe to The New Way We Work on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, RadioPublic, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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