How Workplace Surveillance Can Backfire on Your Company
With the rise of remote and hybrid work, 80% of businesses are using some form of employee monitoring or surveillance. This is a massive mindset shift for employees, who were used to little to no monitoring before 2020, except for a few niche industries.
If your business wants to implement employee monitoring, it is essential to do it the right way so you don’t end up cratering employee engagement. That means striking a balance and choosing the right solution for your team.
Companies that don’t could face blowback in the form of employee disengagement and costly turnover. If not done right, employee monitoring often provides little value to employees, managers, and the company as a whole.
Potential Challenges With Employee Monitoring Software
The wrong employee monitoring solution and implementation can cause staff to feel infantilized and focused on the wrong kinds of work to meet the monitoring solution’s metrics.
1. Feeling like they’re being treated like children
Spotify recently rocked the tech world after a massive round of layoffs by stating that its employees weren’t children and they wouldn’t be mandating a return-to-office (RTO). While this could be viewed as a decision that makes sense for Spotify, given that they want to retain their remaining post-layoff employees, it does call out the general vibe that employees can’t be trusted to do their jobs without monitoring.
A requirement to return to in-office work may be driven in some cases by commercial real estate leases, but there’s also a belief from upper management that desk walk-bys will keep workers honest.
Invasive monitoring solutions cause the same negative feelings. As Katarina Berg, Spotify’s CHRO says, “You can’t spend a lot of time hiring grown-ups and then treat them like children.”
2. Feeling like they have a second boss
When invasive monitoring is in place, employees may feel like they have two metrics to work towards: those laid out for them by management and the metrics that get monitored by software. This can result in employees engaging and focusing on less critical tasks, like responding quickly to emails instead of deep work.
3. Increased stress
Managing multiple deadlines, projects, people, and KPIs is already stressful enough. Knowing that your every move may be watched on the job adds unnecessary stress.
Overall, employees who are being invasively monitored feel disrespected and more stressed than those who are not. Neither are good for employee engagement and retention.
How Invasive Monitoring Can Work Against Your Company
This study found that those under invasive monitoring were more likely to take retaliatory action against the company, from something as innocuous as a longer bathroom break to something as serious as theft. Subverting workplace rules gave them the sense of control the monitoring had taken away.
There is also the critical area of employee attraction and retention. Half of the tech workers in this survey said they would rather quit than be invasively monitored at work. Since businesses put so much time, money, and effort into hiring and retaining top talent, it only makes sense to avoid turning people off because of software that offers little value.
Invasive Versus Non-Invasive Monitoring
Most of these surveys and studies were done with people and companies who used workplace surveillance rather than employee productivity monitoring. Surveillance involves full access to computers, keystroke logging, and in some cases, screenshots of your work. Sometimes, video surveillance may also be used during in-office days for hybrid or onsite workers.
Employee productivity monitoring software does not use these gimmicks. We at Prodoscore believe they hamper productivity and do not support a successful and happy workforce. Our solution offers complete transparency to employees and only captures business software to ensure employee privacy and mitigate noise.
Staff can use the data as a self-coaching tool to help improve their work and support their ongoing development. Meanwhile, you get priceless data about processes, workflow, tool utilization, internal collaboration, and so much more.
