Post-Covid 19 increase in Workplace Monitoring Software

Companies are progressively using technology to monitor employee activity and performance to ensure they remain productive when working from home.

Platforms track employees’ behaviour to assess how much work they are doing at any given time. Although it remains controversial, as detractors say it may infringe on individual freedom and privacy, if the laptop is company-owned then monitoring is legal in most cases.

Software such as WorkTime monitors employees’ computers to create “an exact picture of how employees use company computers when they are idle and active during working hours.”

This covers a range of services, from logging websites visited, and keystrokes to see exactly what was typed, and an employer can visually monitor their staff through the laptop’s built-in camera. For those of you who like to work in “very casual” attire while working from home, this is worth knowing. Likewise, WFH employers who loudly discuss last night’s football with their cat may also want to note that someone from IT may be watching and listening.

Perhaps more worryingly, if it is a company computer, employers can even use keystroke logging to monitor personal accounts and passwords. While 99% of employers would never use this for any nefarious means, there could well be an employee who leaves the company/country with the accounts and passwords of multiple staff members and then uses them for illegal purposes.

I’m not wearing a tinfoil hat here - this is becoming so common, PC Magazine ran an article in January of this year on “The Best Employee Monitoring Software for 2023.”

Top of the list was Teramind, that boasts some of the following selling points:

• Label apps & websites employees use as productive or unproductive to see when and where work happens
• Identify top- and low-performing employees and analyse their work habits
• Get alerts and send messages to employees when they’re being too unproductive for too long

It may as well also say, “Remote ability to release the hounds.”

The idea that you are there in a league table with your co-workers, all having your productivity monitored, moving up and down the list in real-time like you’re in a spin class is very dystopian. It could have been an episode of Black Mirror. If fact, it pretty much was.

This was somehow inevitable, but the increase in WFH thanks to Covid-19 appears to have accelerated the use of this monitoring software. A survey by Microsoft found that 85% of managers said they initially struggled during the Covid-19 lockdown to have confidence that their employees were being productive when working from home.

It seems that now the lack of confidence is being addressed with monitoring software.?