Despite knowledge workers pleading for greater flexibility and autonomy in this messy post-pandemic period, and a clear shift to measuring outcomes rather than time, there has been a massive surge in worldwide demand for solutions to keep tabs on staff, wherever they are working.

“It’s shot up by 56% since the start of the coronavirus crisis,” said Lesley Holmes, data protection officer for MHR, a payroll software and services company in the U.K. and Ireland. Now businesses are firming up their hybrid working strategies there is even greater interest in various forms of monitoring tech. The research she cites, from Top10VPN, shows global demand for employee monitoring software jumped by 75% between January and March 2022, marking the biggest three-month increase since 2019.

Employers, eyeing the nibbled-at bottom line and anxious about optimizing productivity levels, are turning to this software. But Holmes is concerned about the insidiousness of this technology. “These apps have become increasingly intrusive, as they can register the time taken to read and respond to an email, monitor meeting attendance, and even film employees from their screen,” she continued.

Indeed, research published by Prospect — a union which represents engineers, scientists and civil servants — in November suggested that 32% of U.K. workers were being monitored at work using tracking software and remotely controlled webcams. Additionally, home workers monitored via webcams had leaped from 5% to 13% in just six months.

Keystrokes, behaviors and biometrics

Paul Kelly, head of employment law at Blacks Solicitors in Leeds, in the U.K., says the latest solutions include monitoring software that tracks how many hours an employee is logged on, what they are doing, what websites they visit and what keystrokes they make. “Some software can even take screenshots of the employee’s computer and access their webcam, allowing their boss to check they are at their workstation throughout the day,” he added.

If you thought that was disconcerting, look away now.

Monitoring software has evolved to the point where it can provide analytical data to employers to work out whether the employee has been productive based on their behaviors and biometrics (which includes fingerprint mapping, facial recognition and retina scans.)

More alarmingly, workplace monitoring platform Aware’s “large-scale sentiment analysis” goes even further: it can, according to the product description, “identify trends in conversation sentiment and behavior anomalies across your networks.” In essence, it can compute the overall mood of employees via their interactions.

Hong Kong-based Harold Li, vp of ExpressVPN, one of the world’s largest virtual private network providers, believes many businesses today are prioritizing profits over employee privacy. “As with many privacy issues, there are psychological effects of employee surveillance that are particularly worrying,” he said. His company’s research suggests that many employees would rather leave their …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron