Is your employer watching you? Scanning emails, tracking phones, taking screenshots on the rise

Few things raise hackles faster than the touchy subject of using technology to keep tabs on employees. Even the language used to describe it is loaded, with “employee monitoring” considered more benign than “employee surveillance”, which has more sinister overtones.

Employers have always kept an eye on their workers in one way or another. But the advent of increasingly sophisticated technologies that can do it for them automatically, relentlessly and sometimes covertly has upped the ante on a process that’s seen as necessary by those in favour and stressful and invasive by those against.

Industrialist Henry Ford may be best known for making cars, but he was also well ahead of the game when it came to monitoring employees. He used to pace the factory floor with a stopwatch to record their productivity, and considered it perfectly okay to have oversight of his employees’ personal lives as well. To this end, he set up a team of investigators whose job was making sure his workers were living a moral existence. This involved home visits to spot-check alcohol consumption, kids’ school attendance, family finances and domestic cleanliness.

People got antsy about Uncle Henry knowing all about them more than 100 years ago, but these days employee monitoring systems and tracking apps put his tactics in the shade, with their ability to measure everything from how fast a cashier rings up goods to how many breaks a delivery driver takes in a day.

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The switch to remote working saw a spike in the demand for worker surveillance tools

There’s automatic software to scan employee emails and internet searches, take random screenshots of work computers, assume control of webcams and track phone data and keystrokes. Systems can also flag actions such as employees searching recruitment sites on company time, and their use of certain words or phrases not deemed acceptable by their employer.

The switch to remote working saw a spike in the demand for worker surveillance tools, with research by the internet security and digital rights firm Top10VPN published last month showing a rise in demand of 55 per cent since the pandemic began.

Surveillance is big business and expected to grow exponentially by 2030. Putting a value on it is harder as estimates vary. But it’s already a billion dollar business with India-based Spherical Insights & Consulting predicting it will be worth over $2 billion (€1.88 billion) within seven years.

“Where problems can arise is when it’s not clear why monitoring is being carried out and what’s happening to the data being collected,” says Ed Rossiter, co-CEO of Irish recruitment company Phoenix. “Communication with employees about what is being monitored and how the information is being used is really important. Transparency goes a long way.”

Rossiter’s view is backed up by a report produced by last year by Gartner management consultants which found that 40 per cent of employees being monitored had received no communication about it from their employer. Even when they had, the quality of the communication was poor leaving employees largely in the dark.

In December 2021, Sara Riso of the EU-backed European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions authored a post-Covid study on employee surveillance in which she noted: “There is a body of research showing that excessive and pervasive employee monitoring and surveillance have many negative implications for workers, as they inhibit creative and independent thinking, limit autonomy, induce stress and erode trust in management… When monitoring is extended beyond what employees consider reasonable or necessary, it chips away at their trust in management.”

Rossiter is on the same page. “It comes down to two things, productivity and trust, and is the juice worth the squeeze?” he says. “Yes, there are studies showing that if a company has this software in place and employees know about it, productivity has increased by 10 to 15 per cent in some cases. But then you have the flip side which is a high percentage of employees feeling a decrease in motivation and engagement. So, you may get more productivity but also more attrition.

“It comes back to the trust versus productivity balance and how you weigh this against legitimate risk when people have access to sensitive data.”

Many of the tools have built-in analytical features that can be used to ensure people working from home are happy and not overworking

There are, of course, two sides to the monitoring story. It’s not all about “spying” on people. Many of the tools have built-in analytical features that can be used to ensure people working from home are happy and not overworking. In some situations, monitoring is there to protect employees and, in certain high-risk sectors, it is there to protect the business.

Monitoring tools can also be used to protect against malware attacks, improve processes and productivity, troubleshoot before problems escalate and to cut down on fraud.

This is pertinent as, according to Fortune Business Insights, “losses due to employee fraud, internal data theft and internal organisational fraud are increasing significantly”, with the global loss from employee fraud and theft estimated at $2.9 trillion annually. In the US, the report claims, almost a third of corporate bankruptcies are associated with employee fraud.

What seems clear is that, with wearables and biometric technologies set to become permanent features of the workplace, employee monitoring and surveillance may be about to step up a gear, as Riso points out in her report.

“In this area, rapid developments in AI technologies are enabling so-called ‘people analytics’ and ‘profiling’ (algorithmic inferences drawn from personal data) and powering data-driven and intensive work management and human resources practices,” she says.