The Employee Surveillance State

Sadly, especially within COVID, employee surveillance became a huge, growing market. The tongue-in-cheek beauty way to describe it is “performance management,” which makes it seem like you really care about the career development of these drones and peons. In reality, it’s a core middle management tactic to exert control over white-collar workers, which is logical, since work is predominantly about control. It’s starting to get a bit more “mainstream” attention as a concept, though, with New York Times diving deep on it last week and The Atlantic covering it a bit ago as well.

Obviously this is happening, and the fact that it’s happening shouldn’t be a surprise. Employers have long distrusted workers, and Bezos/Amazon made a cottage industry out of religious time-tracking in the name of “productivity,” and lots of managers and decision-makers pretty much just ape what guys like Bezos are doing because “I mean, man, he’s rich?” The thing is, delivery and box-packing times are very objective measures, and you can easily argue that we shouldn’t be hardcore tracking those because drivers are jumping red lights and hitting grandma, etc. But, we still do. We have a long-held confusion about what “productivity” even is.

The problem in white-collar work is that it’s very subjective, and a lot of white-collar work is honestly “hurry up and wait” work, whereby you do something and have to wait five days for someone with more authority and power to “weigh in” on it. So, there is some downtime. And people do have lives outside of work, as much as we don’t want to discuss that. To arbitrarily take a picture of someone’s face every 40 minutes to “see if they’re working” doesn’t really work in white-collar, knowledge work as much as it works in a factory.

People are loafers and lazy, for sure. I am often. But … this is the wrong approach, especially in a trust-deprived environment.

What are all the factors driving employee surveillance?

If I had to make a list, I’d go with:

• Employers don’t trust employees.
• Employers are confused about what constitutes “productivity.”
• Employers have been fed the narrative that tech will “save everything” for two decades now, so they figure they can apply that narrative to “getting the most out of workers.”
• Copying/ape’ing what Amazon did even though the stakes and type of work are very different.
• Bosses trying to maintain a form of control as opposed to focusing on quality of output, working with employees, guiding them, coaching them, etc.
• It feels very powerful and omnipotent to bosses, many of whom only derive relevance from their work fiefdom.
• Thinking this is how you get “bang for your buck.”
• Continued prioritization of “busy” over all else.
• Continued prioritization of “tasks” above all else.
• It feels like a natural bridge from surveillance to full-scale automation, which is what most companies desire to move towards anyway.

What might be a better plan here?

What if we did this instead?

• Hire people based on what you actually need done and what is important to moving the organization forward, as opposed to the real reasons people hire for (which aren’t those).
• Give them context for their role when they begin.
• Start giving them independent work to do.
• If they are bad at that work, or seem to be loafing, then consider using some surveillance tactics on them — after you talk to them, coach them, consider their life in the context of work, see where you can help.
• If they remain bad, fire them.
• If they get better, let them work as they like to work, so long as the work you need done is getting done.
• The goal should be productivity (true productivity) and growth, not tasks, busy, and presenteeism.
• Go back to the beginning of this list.

Obviously surveillance will only increase as a segment, but isn’t that quite telling about what managers really care about?

Takes?