Contents
The remote office led to a new ethic. Now many employers find it necessary to monitor their employees with the help of special programs.
About the Author: Sergey Zhdanov, economist, technology ethicist, host of the Devil’s Leg Break telegram channel
A study conducted by experts from the World Economic Forum showed that 98% of people surveyed around the world want to work remotely at least part of the time. Google and Facebook have allowed employees to work from home until the summer of 2021, while Microsoft and Twitter have allowed certain groups of workers to never show up to the office. Millions of people around the world are forced to learn remote work and try on the concept of a virtual office.
It takes time and experience to understand how to use technology effectively in such an environment. But it is already clear that people will have to make great sacrifices in order to fit into the new order. Especially in matters of privacy.
Managers are concerned about performance control
Employees consider “collaboration and communication”, “loneliness” and “the inability to disconnect from work” as the main challenges of remote work. But 80% of executive managers are most afraid that remote work will have a bad effect on the focus of workers and their productivity. Managers were faced with the issue of remote monitoring of efficiency.
Despite the fact that people have left a single space where their work was controlled by managers, it has become easier to monitor them from a distance. And if supervision and control in the office were regulated by at least some labor laws, then in the conditions of virtual offices, supervision over the actions of employees is not yet limited by anything.
Employee Monitoring Programs: The Digital Whip
One of the leading employee tracking software makers, Awareness Technologies, says its customer base has tripled in the first weeks since the pandemic began.
The programs that the market offers to employers to monitor employee productivity bear a striking resemblance to illegal hacking programs. Only here everything is legitimate: unlike hacker hacking, in a virtual remote office, everything happens with the consent of both parties.
Bossware is a generic name for software that allows bosses to monitor employees. They can be pre-installed on devices that companies give out to employees, or they can be forced to be installed on personal devices.
Some bossware programs can be controlled by users themselves. Employees themselves turn them on when they get to work, and turn them off when they want to take a break or end the working day.
But there are also background programs over which the employee does not have direct control – and they are popular with employers. Such programs can be installed on computers provided by the employer. But they can also be installed on a person’s personal computer without his knowledge, asking him to change the security settings of his computer.
Safety and efficiency
Bossware collects data about an employee’s digital activity, from keystrokes and clicks made to video recordings of everything that happens on their screen. Employee activity monitoring: tracking work time, productivity, compliance with the company’s information security, preventing the disclosure of work secrets is the main goal of such programs.
With security, everything is more or less clear: knowing that his actions are being recorded, an employee is less likely to want to steal valuable data or commit other fraud. However, not everyone follows their employees openly. Some bossware companies offer employers programs that can be “silently and remotely installed to conduct undercover investigations into employee activities and collect evidence of violations without alerting a suspected attacker.”
We must also understand that each employer understands security in its own way. For example, Amazon is developing its own bossware, designed, among other things, to spy on the attempts of company employees to unite in a group in order to demand together, for example, better working conditions. Technically, the unions do not threaten the security of the company. But it seems that Amazon owner Jeff Bezos sees the demand for higher wages as a threat.
Increasing labor efficiency is still more difficult. For example, accurate time spent at work allows employees to be paid only for the hours actively spent in certain programs. In physical offices, workers often had to check in when they came and left work, while digital offices might check in every ten minutes. A number of programs allow the webcam to automatically film an employee at certain – sometimes random – intervals. If the employee is not at the computer at the time of the snapshot, the unit of working time is not counted.
However, not all productivity can be measured by clicks and keystrokes, so everything else comes into play: from web history and social media activity to collecting personal passwords, tracking employees’ movements, and even activating cameras and microphones on their smartphones.
global experiment
Privacy has long been sacrificed for efficiency. “If the postman checked the contents of your letters, he would be in prison. But email services like Gmail have made it a daily practice. Previously, devices for tracking geolocation were built into bracelets on the legs of prisoners, but now every smartphone has such a mechanism. Well, what used to be considered illegal wiretapping is now a standard feature in many apps,” says former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie in his book Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot To Break The World.
We are now seeing a reassessment of privacy norms in the workplace. In Germany, a number of laws are being developed that should make the option of working from home a legal right for every employee. But while we are in a transitional period, when remote surveillance of employees is still not limited by law. This is a test for all participants in the process.
How far are employers willing to go in their surveillance of employees? How many rights and freedoms are workers willing to give up? How does the state view this, which until recently had a monopoly on such detailed surveillance of citizens?
There is also the question that employers are, in fact, also people, often conflicting and tyrannical. Even a slight difference in the job hierarchy can put one worker (observer) in a position of power over another (observed). There is no guarantee that people will not use surveillance tools abusively and unnecessarily.
There are tens of thousands of companies that have invested in bossware. Even if remote work ends and everyone returns to the office, they will not be motivated to stop using such an effective oversight tool. So corporate surveillance will be part of the new normal anyway.
But what this norm will become depends on how we behave during this transitional period.
Subscribe also to the Trends Telegram channel and stay up to date with current trends and forecasts about the future of technology, economics, education and innovation.