Tag: employee monitoring

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Why tattleware isn’t the solution for underperforming teams

Summary

  • Tattleware is not just intrusive; it is also ineffective, as your employees still have access to their own devices.

  • Employees who are being monitored can feel stressed and resentful, leading to higher turnover rates and lower productivity.

  • The use of tattleware makes your organization vulnerable to undesirable legal situations.

Employee monitoring has long been a topic of much interest and debate. In an attempt to find out the extent of employee productivity, employers have sought ways to keep tabs on their workers — from Henry Ford’s 1914 Sociological Department that was used to monitor practically every aspect (work and personal) of Ford workers’ lives to Elon Musk contracting a PR firm to monitor Tesla employees’ Facebook activity. 

As hybrid and remote work become more commonplace — spurred on by the COVID-19 pandemic — more employers are turning to employee monitoring software, also known as tattleware or bossware. Without the ability to physically see their employees hard at work at their desks, companies are turning to different apps, monitoring tools, and surveillance software.

According to a survey conducted by the IDC, 67.6% of North American employers with more than 500 employees are currently using employee monitoring software. In another study, ExpressVPN found that 78% of the employers it surveyed are using monitoring tools. 

Tattleware and monitoring software can take on many different forms. Some examples include monitoring:

  • When an employee steps away from their computer
  • Employees’ online activity (websites visited, time spent using specific software like Slack, etc.) 
  • What employees are typing and what keystrokes are being used
  • The topics of discussion amongst employees by taking screenshots or even screen recordings
  • The facial expressions of remote workers during video calls using video analytics tools (this supposedly helps employers determine who is contributing more than others in meetings) 
  • What employees are doing by watching and listening in through their laptop webcams or microphones

We spoke with Jon Hyman, a partner in the Employment & Labor practice at Wickens Herzer Panza, to get his take on the topic. He believes that “employers that try to regulate employees’ use of workplace technologies in this way are fighting a Sisyphean battle.” It is a futile and harmful practice that uses tech to police and punish employers instead of effectively addressing productivity issues.

Enforcement will always be a losing battle

One issue with tattleware is that it is actually quite ineffective in doing what it ultimately sets out to do – keep tabs on your employees. 

“I hate this type of employee monitoring. I call it the iPhone-ification of the American workforce,” says Hyman. “No matter your policy trying to monitor your technology and your employees’ related productivity, if your employees can take their smartphones out of their pockets to circumvent your efforts, how can you effectively police anything? Why have a policy you cannot police and enforce? It’s also incredibly creepy and intrusive.”

You have a performance issue, not a tech issue

Tattleware supposedly makes it easier for employers to identify employees who are slacking. But knowing the time spent on work tasks or whether they’re streaming the World Cup on another tab doesn’t tell you anything about why productivity is suffering. 

“Instead of regulating an issue you cannot hope to control, treat employees’ use of technology for what it is — a performance issue,” Hyman explains. “If an employee is not performing up to standards because he or she is spending too much time on non-work activities, then address the performance problem. Counsel, discipline, and ultimately layoff if the performance does not improve.” 

Employee monitoring breeds resentment and reduces employee engagement

“A slacking employee, however, will not become a star performer just because you limit their social media access, keep an eye on how often they shop on Amazon, or log their Spotify playlists,” Hyman says. Instead, “they will just find another way to slack off and will resent you for your intrusion of their privacy. Instead of wasting your resources to fight a battle you cannot win, reapportion them to win battles worth fighting.”

In its survey, ExpressVPN found that the use of tattleware can have negative effects on employee mental health and wellbeing. Most employees surveyed felt stress and anxiety about their employers monitoring their activities. Thirty-two percent of respondents said that they didn’t take breaks as often for fear of repercussions. 

The very tools that are meant to be addressing dips in productivity are ultimately breeding distrust amongst workers, reducing performance and employee engagement. 

In a period where employees are resigning in droves, how wise is it for your company to gain a reputation for spying on their staff? 

Employee monitoring can leave you vulnerable to legal issues

Although there are many employee monitoring service providers out there that work within the law, using tattleware can land you in some unpleasant legal situations. 

According to the law firm Skadden, there are five potential legal issues to consider before implementing tattleware:

  • Invasion of privacy. An employee could take legal action against you if your monitoring activities are found to be highly offensive or end up revealing facts about their personal lives outside of work. 
  • Unfair labor practice charges. Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, employers can be charged if their monitoring reveals information about labor organizing efforts. 
  • Employment discrimination. Tools like facial recognition software may reveal characteristics about employees that are legally protected. Facial expression tools may not take cultural differences into account and make unfair assumptions about certain staff members. 
  • Unpaid wages and overtime. Just because an employee isn’t at their computer, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t working. Using monitoring software to pay hourly employees could result in unpaid wages and overtime for time spent doing things like reading, writing, taking phone calls, etc. 
  • Workplace injuries. Monitoring software can lead to overworked and burnt-out employees. Physical injury may also occur. In March 2022, a large e-commerce company using monitoring tools was fined $60,000 for causing employees’ joint and muscle injuries. These injuries were a result of employees overworking in order to meet deliverables.   

Build an environment of trust instead of fear

“We ask so much of our employees, even more so during COVID. The 9-to-5 is no longer relevant. If my employee, who is giving up nights and weekends for me, wants to spend a few minutes during the workday posting to Facebook, or checking the score of last night’s game, or buying something on Amazon, I just don’t care. I only care when it reaches the level of distraction and impacts performance. Then, however, we are treating the performance problem, not the technology problem—which is the appropriate and practical solution.”

“To put it another way, if you don’t trust your employees enough to do their jobs, why are you employing them in the first place?” Hyman concludes. Ultimately, spying on your employees damages your reputation and breeds mistrust. A happy, productive, and engaged workforce is attainable through trust, transparency, and capable leadership.

An engaged workforce is a productive workforce

The best way to ensure your team stays productive and maintains good performance is to keep them engaged. Workforce management software sets you up to get the basics of employee engagement right. 

Scheduling must be done in a way that is fair, efficient, and transparent. It must be flexible, allowing for adjustments like shift swaps and shift bids to be made on the fly. You also need a precise time and attendance system in place that makes it easy for employees to review their hours and see what they’re owed.

For more tips on how to drive employee engagement, watch our webinar – How to Drive Engagement for Hourly Employees

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Workforce tracking solutions do not always track with company culture

HR tech, spy, monitor

Workforce tracking solutions for employers continues to grow, especially as remote work has become more commonplace in 2020.

One reason for this is that organizations worry that employees aren’t as productive when they’re working remotely and that managers can’t peek around the office to see who’s working and who’s online shopping, said Matt Stevenson, partner and leader of Mercer’s Workforce Strategy and Analytics practice. 

Additionally, now there’s just more data as more people work online. For example, with more health care delivered through telehealth now, he said, there’s much more data on patient interactions that used to just be recorded in doctors’ notes. And it’s possible to connect this data with actual patient outcomes. 

Also read: Labor analytics add power to workforce management tools

In health care and beyond, organizations are beginning to invest more in this technology, Stevenson said. As workforce tracking becomes more commonplace, there are some key considerations employers must keep in mind to use it correctly.

Track productivity, not activity

There is a lot of metadata that organizations and vendors can track, like how many clicks per day or meetings per day an employee has. Either party can tap into this data and interpret it, but one important consideration is they are tracking the right thing, said Matt Stevenson, partner and leader of Mercer’s Workforce Strategy and Analytics practice. 

“if your’e just tracking activity and micromanaging activity, that probably won’t end well. But if you have a way of seeing whether activity is a leading indicator of productivity, that’s fantastic,” Stevenson said. 

He gave the example of judging athletes’ “productivity” by how much time they spent on the field rather than how many goals they scored. There is  a big distinction between activity and productivity, and it can be a difficult distinction to make in the workplace.

Also read: Monitor Responsibly: How Employers Are Using Workplace Surveillance Devices

Consider how much you trust who you’ve hired

John Lacy, chief operating officer at Idea Grove, said that at his organization, they do not believe in workforce tracking. Rather, there should be a culture of trust.

employee monitoring; workforce tracking; productivity; employee trust

“We don’t believe monitoring tools of that nature are necessary to ensure people are doing their jobs. It comes down to the culture we’re building. When we looked at going fully remote, that question came up as not so much ‘What technology do we need to track them?’ but ‘How will we know work is getting done?’ and ‘How will we know we’re still meeting client needs?’ ” he said. 

“It came back to that level of trust,” he added. “If we don’t trust [employees] to do what they need to do — whether they’re working at the office or from a remote location — we believe we’ve hired the wrong person.”

To ensure that people are getting work done, Idea Grove instead uses a series of tech tools that help with project management. Team members track their progress on projects with the project tracking tool Teamwork. They communicate with each other via Slack. And the organization regularly gets employee feedback about how employees are feeling about the office culture through the culture tracking tool Officevibe. 

 Lacy also said that the organization uses The Great Game of Business to help educate employees on how to run a business, how their work contributes to the organization and how exactly their successes can lead to rewards and bonuses. 

“A philosophy I truly believe in is that everyone can understand business. It’s not that hard,” he said. “A lot of companies hide that from their employees, but we want to empower employees with that knowledge so that they understand that if they want long-term employment with the company, we have to make sure we have a company that is healthy, profitable and engaging, and they can participate in that directly.”

Avoid micromanaging

A real risk of workforce tracking is the presence of micromanaging, Stevenson said. He suggested “nudging” as a solution to micromanaging. 

For example, perhaps a company found out that employees’ sending emails after 10 p.m. led to burnout and lower productivity. If a manager finds out through workforce tracking that an employee is regularly sending emails at this time, the solution wouldn’t be to have a stern discussion with the employee and tell them to stop. Rather, the employee could receive “nudges” through pop-ups on their computer that encourage them to sign off at a certain time.

Also read: Employee performance shines bright with valuable, continuous shift feedback

There’s a good deal of research supporting that nudges help with behavior change rather than direct orders. Stevenson said. 

With this logic, what organizations should do first is find that link between activity and productivity. Once they’ve figured out that link, they could use that insight to create nudges rather than try to directly guide employee behavior, he added.

“It’s a two-fold problem,” he explained. “What predicts the things you care about, and if you have those predictions, what do you do about it without making things worse?”

The conversation about micromanaging ultimately comes back to trust, Lacy said.

“Everything starts with culture,” he said. “If you’re in an environment where trust is not the baseline, I could see a more command-and-control type manager having trouble with not knowing if everyone’s doing what they need to do.” 

“My advice to them is to take an inward look,” he added. “What is it about your internal self that is not trusting your team to get its work done?” 

How to calm employee’s concerns

Some employees may have concerns about workforce tracking, which comes down to is company culture and how employee data is being used, Stevenson said. Some cultures may breed more suspicion in employees while others are more trusting. 

Also read: Give managers the time they need to sharpen up their all-around skills

Things get tougher in organizations where there is a more adversarial relationship between employees and employer. “And, in my personal opinion, that’s where you may see more labor organizations showing up,” Stevenson said. 

He gave the historical example of Henry Ford and the creation of assembly lines. Strikes would often happen when factory operators sped up production. A similar trend happened with coal miners, who were paid by their output of coal every hour. They would strike when the number was supposed to go up, if they were concerned it was unsafe for them to do so. 

Using “speeding up the assembly line” as a metaphor for “increasing productivity” in the 21st century, Stevenson said that when organizations attempt to “speed it up” by tracking emails or whatever other metric, people notice. 

“If you’re the sort of organization that will take this data to speed up the assembly line, you’ll get pushback,” he said. “If you’re on the sort that will use this data to make the product on the assembly line better then you won’t get push back.”

Further, he added, sometimes it’s legitimate to speed up the assembly line and look for higher productivity. What’s key here is how an organization shares the benefit of increased productivity. If it speeds up productivity and shares the profits with employees, those employees may very well be satisfied. But if profits mostly go somewhere else, like to shareholders or executives, then there will be less of a positive reaction, he said. 

 

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Coronavirus update: This example of WFH is WTF

HR tech, spy, monitor

Alison Green, who pens the super engaging and helpful Ask A Manager blog, reached out to me to help with a reader question.

You should jump over to Alison’s post to read the whole bonkers scenario, but the TL;DR is that an employee’s spouse asked about the legality of an employer-installed app on her work-from-home husband’s phone that audio recorded everything happening in the home (whether work related or not).

My answer:

First things first. Legal or illegal I’d get away from that employer right now. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Just get your resume in order and start job hunting ASAP. This is a horrible HR practice that tells me this is not an employer I want to work for any longer

As for the legality of the practice, it depends on the state in which you live. Recording or otherwise listening to the conversations of others are covered and regulated by state wiretap statutes. These laws come in two flavor – one-party consent laws, and two-party consent laws.

Most state wiretap statutes are one-party consent laws. This means that as long as one of the parties to the conversation has consented to the recording, no law has been violated. In the scenario presented, I’d want to know whether the husband has consented (expressly or implicitly) to the recording. If so, in a one-party consent state, no statute has been violated. I would still, however, have concerns over a common law invasion of privacy tort claim since the employer is unreasonable intruding into the private lives of your family, legal wiretap notwithstanding.

A minority of states (11 to be precise — California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, plus Hawaii, which requires two-party consent if the recording device is in a private residence) have two-party consent laws. This means that unless all parties being listened to or recorded have consented to it, an illegal wiretap is occurring. If you are in one of these states, the recording described would likely be illegal, since the spouse and anyone else within earshot of the phone other than the employee would not have provided consent. In this case, I’d raise the issue with the company, and if you can’t get satisfaction, I’d talk to an attorney.

A recent story in the New York Times asked if COVID-19 has forever changed the office. It has, and largely for the better. For example, lots of companies who were resistant to work-from-home have had to bend.

But this example bends so far that it breaks the employer/employee relationship.

If you have so little trust in your employees that you need to monitor everything they do by eavesdropping on conversations in their homes, you shouldn’t be in the business of employing others. You are simply not suited to be an employer. The employer/employee relationship is one of mutual trust, and without that trust there is no relationship of value, period.

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Monitoring Emotions at Work

With emotional well-being in the workplace, “prevention is better than intervention,” said one author and entrepreneur.

Steve Curtis

Marc Brackett, founder and director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, argues in his new book “Permission to Feel” that the workplace tends to deny healing.

“You check your feelings at the door because you’re there to do business,” he said. “What people have to realize is emotions don’t get checked at the door. They are at the seat of every table. They’re on the phone with every client and are influencing all aspects of performance.”

Emerging technologies are helping employees assess the impact of their emotional state on work performance.

One platform in the development stage, Evolve Biologix, uses the heart’s electrical signals through an ECG measurement tool wrapped around the chest to correlate with a range of emotions to develop emotional awareness and learn techniques to manage it individually and in relationship to others.

People already are using devices connected to the body such as a watch, but having something connected closer to their heart is new, said Evolve Biologix CEO Steve Curtis.

Evolve Biologix differs from other platforms in that while others are self-reporting, its focus is on gathering real-time electrical signals from each heartbeat.

“An ECG wave has different peaks with electrical signals firing through our brain,” said Curtis, whose company is in a corporate environment beta stage as Curtis seeks partners to collaborate on the notion that it can serve as a health benefit. “We’re utilizing data science and machine algorithms to understand the specific signatures of these body systems to draw out emotions, build a group performance dashboard and optimize algorithms that drive content interventions and suggestions at an organizational level.”

Marc Brackett

An Evolve Power Index score, which is displayed on a phone, represents the user’s emotional level. The higher the score, the more the end user is believed to be in alignment with their emotional state, which can range from shame and guilt to peace and enlightenment.

Regarding privacy concerns, Curtis said results aren’t connected to individuals but provide a picture of group dynamics down to work groups of three.

“[HR] departments are continually challenged with how to keep innovation alive in their organization, increase the change readiness, manage empathy in environments where people are becoming progressively more technical in nature and how to get people to care about each other and function as a cohesive team,” he said. “It’s imperative to be able to view these kinds of metrics.”

Brackett foresees a time when employee benefits will include more emotional wellness technologies.

“There’s a benefit-cost analysis to taking seriously people’s development of skills, teaching emotional self-awareness and emotion regulation as opposed to treating it once you have a full-blown anxiety disorder or depression,” he said.