Big Brother is Watching - To See if You're in the Office

It seems that many, if not most, organizations have coalesced around allowing hybrid work for most positions where it is possible. And there seem to be a standard policy developing which requires hybrid workers to be on-site an average of three days a week. However, the question that faces many organizations is how stringently should they monitor compliance with that three day rule?

Monitoring

Employee monitoring is not new. It has been around as long as business itself; however, it is certainly easier to do when the manager is in close physical proximity to the employee. When they are seated next to each other, it is certainly easier for a manager to see what an employees is doing when physically together than when they are miles apart.

Management itself has four components: planning, organizing, leading and controlling. In the controlling part of management we measure where we are against a plan, and those measurements enabling us to take corrective action if we are off track. Monitoring, in some fashion, is critical to the success of the controlling process - but how far should that monitoring go?

Also, as I have written about in the past, close physical proximity helps in the management of culture with in an organization. Cultural issues are not impossible to manage in a remote environment - they are just harder that way. So much of culture is tacit - meaning that you only understand it when you observe it in action, and that observation is easier in-person.

At the start of the pandemic the sales of employ monitoring software sky rocketed. Most of these systems were tracking things such as mouse movements, keystrokes, and other simple activity measures. Some went further to capture screen shots of what employees were doing on a regular basis, or track applications use. However, possibly the most invasive was an application Microsoft ran. For a while Microsoft made use of smartwatches that captured bio-metric information, such as heart rate, blood pressure, and perspiration, to assess employee levels anxiety. . . Which might lead one to ask if we have gone too far. There is always a difference between what we can do and what we should do.

Employee On-Site Compliance

Recently there have been a number of companies (including: Tik Tok, Meta, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, . . .) that have begun to repurposed the company security badge. For decades many companies have used badges to swipe into and out of buildings, mostly for security purposes. Now this data, and other sources of data such as IP addresses of devices, smartphone locations, and even wight sensors attached to office chairs, are being used to track employee location for the purpose of on-site compliance.

Tracking on-site compliance can be extremely helpful in resource planning. It allows employers the reconfigure office for better use of space, and possibly even reduce the amount of office space rented which could have a significant effect on the bottom line.

However, there are some employees that see attendance tracking as a way to strong arm them into returning to the office. Some of these companies, such as Tik Tok, have apps that track employee attendance, and have threatened disciplinary action for those employees to do not comply with on-site policies. As one could imagine, such heavy handed tactics have been meet with some resistance by the employees.

Note

Note: I read the coverage of Tik Tok's policy in the print version of New York Times. The next columb over was an article about the regulatory challenges Tik Tok is facing in the EU, which is focused on their use of tracking data in their app. Funny that the people who are enabling that tracking are not happy about bing tracked themsleves

Results of Employee Monitoring

The most unfortunate thing about these heavy handed approaches is they are far more likely to have detrimental results than not. According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, "monitored employees were substantially more likely to take unapproved breaks, disregard instructions, damage workplace property, steal office equipment, and purposefully work at a slow pace, among other rule-breaking behaviors". According to a study done by SHRM, employees monitoring can simply destroy the trust employer might have with the employee, and employees justify gaming the system or working against the system as simple self protection. In addition, organizations need to consider how their data collection and monitoring could violate privacy laws, which can change dramatically from one jurisdiction to another.

If there is a good reason to monitor what an employees is doing - say for regulatory compliance - there should be serious consideration given to the moral, ethical, and legal implications for the organization. There should be transparency as to what is being collected and why. And before taking any action based on the metrics collected there should be serious evaluation if the metrics are valid and reliable, and as well as a discussion with the employee as to why they may be falling outside of anticipated range.

The real bottom-line is monitoring might not deliver what managers might have expected. Yes we should find a way to keep the organization pointed int eh right direction. Many, if not many if not most, rational managers might prefer to have everyone in the office, but if the business results are what we were hoping for, it would seem immaterial where the employees where when they achieved them.