Digital monitoring software = our new time clocks? Employers are stepping up their surveillance over employees, but it's raising concerns about privacy and trust.
The rise of remote work during the pandemic has spurred some employers, faced with a lack of control over a scattered workforce, to tighten their grip or introduce new ways of monitoring employees. But some say the brunt of employee surveillance still falls on those working in brick-and-mortar settings.
“There may be a big uptick, but if anything, there’s just more of an awareness of it,” Laurie Ruettimann, an author and human-resources consultant in Raleigh, N.C., told MarketWatch. “People are more aware of corporate systems being applied to a new type of work environment.” Controversial examples of such monitoring have emerged: The London outlet Financial News reported in June, for example, that the audit firm PwC had designed a facial-recognition tool to track when finance-firm employees were away from their computers, “including for bathroom breaks.
Other emerging COVID-19-related workplace innovations include wearables worn around employees’ necks to notify them when they’re in close proximity to a coworker, as well as heat-detection cameras to screen workers’ body temperatures, CNBC reported Monday. Companies want to safeguard against corporate espionage and destructive behavior, she said, as well as keep troves of data that can be retroactively accessed during investigations into harassment or other misconduct. “For the most part, corporate professionals are just part of a large data-collection effort,” she said. “Then if something goes askew, people can go back into the data and figure out what’s going on.
Randy, a 30-year-old inventory clerk for an e-commerce company who lives in Kent, Wash., told MarketWatch he undergoes a temperature check when he walks through the door at the start of his shift and must sanitize his hands. Whenever he steps out of his office into the open office, break room, conference room or warehouse, or ventures outside the building — during up to 40% of his shift — he is on camera. Members of the warehouse crew are on camera 100% of the time, he said.
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