YOUR BOSS MAY BE SPYING ON YOU!

It is unfortunate that some bosses feel they need to spy on their employees. Rather than embracing and empowering employees and implementing policies, initiatives, and programs that reflect a positive view of employees, some bosses are suspect of their employees and implement policies, initiatives, and programs as well as acquire spy software and systems that spy on their employees in ways that are stealth and mine employees' data in volumes unheard of till recently.

This is an issue that needs to be up front and center and on the lips of both employers and employees. THE DIALOGUE and ACTION STEPS to STOP this ill-directed use of employee spyware need to be implemented right now. The water cooler conversation will never be the same.

The onset of this phenomenon is unsettling and disturbing to me. I have forever advocated for the employee through my education, I/O consulting, clinical counseling, EAPs, harassment-free polices consulting, and now, employee well-being consulting. I truly believe that if your employees passed through your hiring process, and you took them on-board, you need to embrace them, provide them with regular job-related feedback, develop them, provide them with a safe working environment free of harassment and bullying, and provide them with ways to improve their well-being. Recognize that they are your second family and nurture them rather than control and turn them against you.

My thoughts and reactions were generated by an article The New Ways Your Boss is Spying on You published yesterday, July 19, 2019 in WSJ by Sarah Krouse (and contribution from Chip Cutter) and some of the responses to the article. The points she is making are very germane and we need to address these dark and reprehensible initiatives and advances before it is too late. This is her article:

The New Ways Your Boss Is Spying on You

It’s not just email. Employers are mining the data their workers generate to figure out what they’re up to, and with whom. There’s almost nothing you can do about it.

Your employer may know a lot more about you than you think.

The tone of your voice in a meeting. How often you’re away from your desk. How quickly you respond to emails. Where you roam in the office. What’s on your computer screen.

To be an employee of a large company in the U.S. now often means becoming a workforce data generator—from the first email sent from bed in the morning to the Wi-Fi hotspot used during lunch to the new business contact added before going home. Employers are parsing those interactions to learn who is influential, which teams are most productive and who is a flight risk.

Companies, which have wide legal latitude in the U.S. to monitor workers, don’t always tell them what they are tracking. When executives at McKesson Corp. wanted to know why some of its teams had higher turnover the pharmaceutical wholesaler last year worked with a people analytics startup to examine data on the sender, recipient and timing of over 130 million emails—not the content of the messages—from more than 20,000 U.S. employees to see what dots it could connect about relationships.

The analytics firm, TrustSphere, found that teams with lower turnover typically had a diverse mix of internal connections up and down the chain of command inside the company and with external contacts, while teams with higher turnover had stronger relationships outside the company and weaker relationships with colleagues at their level or lower inside the firm. McKesson says it only looked at groups of workers, not individual employees out of respect for worker privacy and opted not to disclose the analysis to employees at the time because it did not look at email content.

“The beauty of what we’re getting out of this is information to make our teams function better,” says R.J. Milnor, vice president, workforce planning and analytics at McKesson.

McKesson has not yet determined what changes it will make as a result of the findings, but has considered adopting a more open office plan to encourage more discussion between employees. It is also exploring ways to predict which teams are at risk of losing members based on their relationship patterns.

It’s not just emails that are being tallied and analyzed. Companies are increasingly sifting through texts, Slack chats and, in some cases, recorded and transcribed phone calls on mobile devices.

Microsoft Corp. tallies data on the frequency of chats, emails and meetings between its staff and clients using its own Office 365 services to measure employee productivity, management efficacy and work-life balance.

Tracking the email, chats and calendar appointments can paint a picture of how employees spend an average of 20 hours of their work time each week, says Natalie McCollough, a general manager at Microsoft who focuses on workplace analytics. The company only allows managers to look at groups of five or more workers.

Diana Hubbard, working from her home office in Texas, says she does not communicate about her private life on work devices at all. 

Earlier this year, Microsoft sales team members received personalized dashboards that show how they spend their time, insights that managers cannot see. The portal offers suggestions on how to build out their networks of contacts and spend more time with customers rather than in internal meetings.

Microsoft also sells that type of workplace analytics software to other companies, such as Macy's Inc., which crunched data on staff work-life balance by measuring how many hours employees spend sending emails and logged in outside of business hours. Mortgage giant Freddie Mac used Microsoft’s analysis to gauge how much time workers spent in meetings and try to determine whether some of those gatherings were redundant.

Advocates of using surveillance technology in the workplace say the insights allow companies to better allocate resources, spot problem employees earlier and suss out high performers. Critics warn that the proliferating tools may not be nuanced enough to result in fair, equitable judgments.

“There’s what’s legally right and what you need to do to maintain trusting relationships with your employees, and they are not always the same thing,” says Stacia Garr, co-founder of workforce research and advisory firm RedThread Research, which researches and advises companies on human resource-related issues.

Diana Hubbard, a 41-year-old user-experience designer and researcher in Fort Worth, Tex., does not communicate about her private life on work devices at all—not even to make a dinner reservation online. She keeps a personal smartphone and two personal laptops—one dedicated to gaming—in addition to her work-issued phone and computer. When she travels for work, Ms. Hubbard sometimes carries two phones and two laptops and avoids connecting her personal phone to any corporate Wi-Fi unless she sets up a virtual private network connection.

Diana Hubbard keeps a personal smartphone and two personal laptops in addition to her work-issued phone and computer as a way of maintaining privacy. 

“I’m not all tinfoil hat or anything,” she says, noting that she tries to avoid sharing personal data online altogether. “Data is so valuable that I don’t like to give it away for free, no matter who is trying to take it or access it. That’s really what it comes down to. This is mine. I own it.”

For years companies have made workers sign technology agreements detailing how any digital transmission that flows across a work-issued phone or computer is company property. U.S. employers are legally entitled to access any communications or intellectual property created in the workplace or on devices they pay for that employees use for work, employment lawyers say.

Now companies are getting smarter at analyzing the trove of worker data in their possession. One of the newest frontiers is dissecting phone calls and conference room conversations. In some cases, tonal analysis can help diagnose culture issues on a team, showing who dominates conversations, who demurs and who resists efforts to engage in emotional discussions.

Life Time Inc., which operates a chain of fitness facilities, uses language processing provided by a two-year-old company called Ambit Analytics to evaluate how newly hired club managers are able to solve problems in small groups. The training exercise surfaces information on how much a person talked over others and rates their speech and volume.

Five to eight participants and a group facilitator download an app on their phones and press a button to begin the recording. They are typically given a hypothetical problem to solve. Life Time then counsels its new hires about what skills to work on, whether becoming a better listener or speaking up more often, says David Pettrone Swalve, vice president of education at Life Time. Some people, he says, find it easier to hear feedback based on data rather than another person, which can seem subjective.

“Black Mirror is upon us,” Mr. Swalve says, referring to the popular futuristic Netflix show.

Using emails to decipher customer and internal relationship patterns helped Ramco Systems, a software maker based in Chennai, India, reduce the time it took to train new sales team staffers across its offices, which range from Princeton, N.J., to Singapore. When a sales executive left the company, for instance, Ramco could identify that person’s 50 strongest client relationships and quickly pass along the information to their replacement. Doing so meant it took weeks instead of up to five months to get new hires on the team up to speed, the company says.

Ramco used TrustSphere to help with its analysis of digital interactions. TrustSphere Chief Executive Manish Goel says his firm doesn’t look at the content of emails or chats but it can still highlight an organization’s internal influencers by identifying those whose messages get quick responses and who have strong, ongoing relationships with peers throughout the company. Mr. Goel says it’s possible to glean useful clues from data handled in ethical, transparent ways while respecting worker privacy.

Companies turn to TrustSphere to help with their analysis of digital interactions. TrustSphere Chief Executive Manish Goel says his company doesn’t look at the content of emails or chats but it can identify which employees have strong relationships with peers. 

Some executives and researchers warn that artificial intelligence in the workplace and natural language processing technology is still evolving and the data employers can capture paints only a partial picture of a worker’s day or relationships. While it’s easy to identify joy or anger, detecting more nuanced emotions is difficult.

Demand for workplace analytics have spawned dozens of other startup companies such as Bunch.ai, which analyses the tone of Slack channels to gauge team chemistry and morale. It declined to name its customers. More than 2,000 employers across industries including health care, energy, legal, automotive and government now use Aventura, Fla.-based Teramind’s monitoring technology, says Eli Sutton, vice president of global operations. Many have a particular focus on keeping documents and intellectual property from finding their way to competitors.

Teramind deploys a suite of software that can take a live look at employees’ screens, capture real-time keystrokes, record video of their activities and break down how they spend their time. Some employers opt to set up alert systems so that if a worker opens certain documents and tries to print them, software will attempt to prevent such an action and notify an administrator. Teramind can also classify employees’ hours as productive or unproductive, based on activities like scrolling through Facebook.

The technology shows companies how work actually gets accomplished, Mr. Sutton says, and most clients notify workers that they may be monitored. A number of firms also are using Teramind to keep tabs on their remote workers. Teramind declined to name its customers.

Under Scrutiny

Some employers now rely on things like calendar appointments and medical data to track their employees.

Share of organizations using each type of employee information

91% - Performance Evaluation

75% - Employee Survey Data

58% - Past Employee Experiences

54% - Non-people Business Data

49% - Leadership Assessments

40% - Recruiting Assessments

36% - Publicly Available Professional Data

33% - Employee Medical Data

33% - Qualitative Feedback and Information

22% - Employee Movement Data

17% - Work Computer Usage Data

16% - Microsoft Outlook or Calendar Usage Data

13% - Employee Fitness Data

12% - Work Phone Usage Data

11% - Work Computer Location Data

(Source: 2018 Gartner survey of 239 companies based in the U.S., Europe and Canada)

Others are testing the boundaries of how much privacy workers will relinquish. Ben Waber, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-founder of a Boston startup named Humanyze, led a group of MIT researchers that tested microphone-equipped badges to record the tone of worker voices and sensed changes in their stress levels. The technology was tested by a Fortune 500 bank in the U.S. and several companies in Japan, where workplace stress-induced suicide is a problem. The badges proved effective, though hard to scale, Mr. Waber says.

“Your employer controls your livelihood and if they say ‘give me this data’, it’s very hard to say no,” Mr. Waber says.

During the research project, employees fitted with the recording badges signed up for the experiment and knew they were being monitored.

Humanyze shifted its focus to Bluetooth badges that can track a worker’s movements throughout the office and found success. It pairs that data with information on the frequency of their emails to help companies measure staff collaboration and productivity. Humanyze would not disclose the identity of its customers. Mr. Waber says the U.S. still needs clearer regulation of employee monitoring and data collection.

Executives at communications provider 8x8 Inc. say they can identify when staff start working on their employer-subsidized mobile devices at the beginning of the day, when they stop for lunch and when they send the last chat or email in the evening. Its customers include Condé Nast, which uses it to analyze how many calls are made on mobile phones versus desktop phones and the Alzheimer’s Association, which uses it to study the tone of calls from patients and their caretakers.

Workplace communications services from 8x8 help employers measure performance, and maintain intellectual property when employees leave because communications like phone calls can be transcribed, its executives say.

“How do you know that they are not using bad language? That they didn’t say something stupid,” says Dejan Deklich, chief product officer at 8x8.

Laszlo Bock, who helped found the concept of “people analytics” during his tenure at Alphabet Inc. ’s Google, warns that employers are in danger of making their workers uncomfortable by monitoring their every move and message. He is now CEO of an employee survey company called Humu.

“You don’t have to hook every employee up to an MRI to find out how to make them work better,” he says.

HOW TO KEEP YOUR PRIVATE LIFE MOSTLY PRIVATE

What should you do if you want to keep your personal data private in the workplace? Here are some tips from privacy experts.

1. Maintain separate devices: Only use your employer-issued phone and laptop for work and keep a separate phone and computer for personal use.

2. Avoid linking your personal devices to corporate Wi-Fi networks: “Companies routinely log network activity to protect business interests, and most policies make clear there is no expectation of privacy of company equipment,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center.

3. Be careful what you share on your resume: Privacy consultant Michael Bazzell tells clients to anticipate that every piece of personal information shared during the recruitment process could become public through a data breach. He recommends using a Google Voice or internet-based calling phone number rather than your cellphone number, and a commercial mail receiving address like a UPS store.

4. Use a USB data-blocker: These devices look like thumb drives and sit between a smartphone and a charging cord or dock. They protect smartphone data from being transferred to public charging stations, rental cars or company-owned computers.

5. Avoid leaking information: Don’t publish information about your personal life on public social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter profiles, which can be mined for potentially damaging information by your employer or a company where you have applied for a job.

A Potpourri of Initial Reactions:

• Imagine, back in those paleolithic pre-internet days if you will, your reaction were you to arrive in the office to find your boss blithely sifting through your mail, rifling your desk drawers, and wiring up a monitoring camera on the opposite wall, while assuring you that it's all "just routine" to improve efficiency. How long before you'd have been packed up and outta there?  Yes, it's beginning to look like the Brave New World --and not one that's very appealing. 
• Be aware that as long as you're carrying that company supplied cell phone, they are physically tracking you! Where you go, how long you're at every location, how fast you're driving your car (or the company's). And of course all your phone's traffic, s/a email, texting, web search, and more, is THEIRS.
• Apps are now available that allow your employer provided (and pre-programmed) smart phone to be remotely and covertly turned ON. You can be audio-video monitored and tracked even when you [think] you've turned your phone OFF. Leave your employer provided phone ON, but locked in your office desk drawer. Just leave it to forward calls and etc, to your personal phone, one that YOU pay the bill on and solely control access to! 
• 'm self-employed. I guess technically, my boss knows what I'm doing every minute of every day...even knows what I'm dreaming! But I seldom get reprimanded for doing things like reading the WSJ in the middle of the day :-)
• Building on this thread of spying, even the water cooler will have hidden audio and video with voice and face recognition.
• In some way I am shocked that this can take place to this degree, but on the other hand it doesn't surprise me that this is starting to happen in the workplace.  Personally though, I think analyzing almost all actions that an employee makes is a step too far because it is an idea that reduces people to numbers. Each individual has much more capability than what they produce in terms of data, productivity, and etc.  On top that, it reduces trust in the workplace. A lack of trust will only create friction between coworkers and the firm which can wither overall productivity. 
• As a CIO for 30+ years I never mixed corporate and personal use. IT did not ‘spy’ on employees but was frequently asked to provide access to others for internal and external investigations. Despite frequent reminders that communications were not confidential, some employees used poor judgment when communicating.
• Over-the-Road truck drivers are the least supervised, highest paid, employees imaginable. In the early 80s, we installed vehicle recorders in our units to track starts, stops, speeds, hard-braking, and other aspects of travel. Conscientious employees appreciated the feedback to correct dubious activities, and we were much better off with the people leaving because they didn’t like the involvement. Often processes were changed to support the information that would otherwise be unavailable to staff and management. It was always a two-way street.
• Employers also routinely look at social media postings of employees, particularly if there is some suspicion of wrong doing or violation of company policies, or even simply potential embarrassment to a company. It seems every day there is a news article about an employee facing consequences from postings not done using company devices or systems.  
• Something we learned at our company long ago - we don't watch over employees, we watch over results. The end result is all that matters.
• One of the best sales people I have ever known spends less than 1/2 a work day working - and accomplishes amazing numbers in that time. Who cares what he does with the other half. He's happy and we're happy. Management has better things to do than spying on their people - maybe setting better goals and assisting them on reaching them. And someone who doesn't because they are "distracted"? YOU should know that by rote.
• When I was working, I always carried a personal smart phone. I had my employer's Blackberry and laptop, and when traveling, I sometimes carried a personal laptop as well. My employer's log on screen was quite clear: there is no expectation of privacy when using the company issued devices. Hence, no sympathy at all for an employee using company assets for non-business purposes.
• Diana Hubbard is smart and quite correct not to conduct any personal activity on corporate equipment or networks. As far as I'm concerned, her employer is not entitled to any of that information.
• I work on an extremely sensitive, classified government program, so we don't allow many of the types of connectivity described in this article. It would be nearly impossible to gather this type of information.
• Employers are ever more intrusive in their pursuit of productivity. I'm just trying to hold on for 10 more years until retirement.

In summary, some employers buying into these stealth and unobtrusive techniques, yet obtrusive to employees and even sometimes private and personal lives (and it will get worse), are drawn to them under the guise of understanding and making the workplace more productive. Makers and sellers of spying software create and convince bosses of this guise. These software spying techniques have a "bells and whistles" and techy appeal to bosses. And flat-out and without hesitation and reservation, there are some bosses that think and feel employees are out to cheat them, no matter what.

The creep effect! Can we make a correction in our workplace trajectory? What SAFEGUARDS do you recommend? Will safeguards work? How do we ensure that they are not just words?