Be Aware Of Employee Monitoring. Your Company Might Be Spying On You.
One of the positive outcomes of lockdown was the shift to remote working: avoiding the miserable commute, time wasted in travelling, and micromanaging line managers suffocating your every move. But as we start to emerge from the lockdown fog, more and more people are now set to continue their work away from the office. Companies and their staff have trialled a remote way of working using communication and collaboration apps. And the general consensus seems to be let’s ditch the 5 day commute where possible and improve overall work/life balance.
Depending on your organisation, it’s culture, and the individuals involved, many bosses are keen to keep an eye on staff activity. Some managers are deploying increasing levels of employee surveillance in an attempt to recreate the oversight of the office at home. This can feel pretty abhorrent to many and an invasion of privacy.
How Do Employers Monitor Their Employees?
According to Forbes employers have been monitoring employees since the dawn of the employer-employee relationship. In the Internet age, with the ubiquity of laptops, tablets and smartphones, what the employer can do has gone up a notch.
With the sudden increase of home working these surveillance and dedicated monitoring tools are rising rapidly in popularity. Perhaps this is fair enough where security through home working could be an issue. But it also seems to be getting personal. And this is where Big Brother takes a real step up. Depending on the device and motivation of your employer, you could expect to be monitored by:
- Keeping track of what you type
- Recording Internet activity
- Taking screenshots
- Using your device’s webcam
- Noting which files you access and when
- Monitoring your location using GPS
- Recording the audio and transcribing your meetings
- Measuring your productivity, such as noting your computer’s idle time or how long an app or piece of software remains open
That’s some pretty invasive stuff so it’s sometimes hard to believe that it’s mostly legal.
We’ll cover the more sinister monitoring tools in another dedicated article. For now, we’ll take a look at the measuring of your remote productivity using the most well known applications – Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.
Firstly, what’s the difference between the Microsoft applications: Skype, Skype for Business, Skypetime, and Teams?
Skype is mainly for use at home and good for smaller businesses of up to 20 employees. It is also generally free to use.
Skype for Business accommodates up to 250 people to online meetings, and provides enterprise-grade security. However, Microsoft Teams is replacing Skype for Business.
Microsoft Teams hosts audio, video, and web conferences for anyone in one place. Files can be easily shared, and Teams also comes with enterprise-grade security.
And then there’s Skypetime which is a fully featured employee monitoring software system. It collects employees’ work statistics based on changes to their Skype status (online, offline, inactive, away etc) and based on information about the device from which the status is obtained.
SkypeTime uses the information received to build accurate work schedule reports that include the following:
- Start of work day
- Lunch breaks
- End of work day
- Total number of hours worked versus the expected number of hours
- Work performed from home
What about Slack?
Slack is a pretty similar tool and messaging platform. With Slack, people can work, collaborate, connect all their software tools and services, and share files – all within a secure, enterprise-grade environment.
Believe it or not, Slack is an acronym, and its full name would make George Orwell proud: Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. As Jacob Silverman observed in the Baffler, that’s a rather ominous title hiding behind the company’s “chill” front and quippy morning greetings.
How are all these platforms being used for employee monitoring?
We covered Skypetime above which is dedicated towards providing companies with information and reports on their employees productivity. But all these collaboration platforms also have one other thing in common. They all share a little status about your availability or working status. For such a small indicator, it really is causing a major headache for many. This little traffic light system let’s your whole group know whether you’re available, away, on a call, busy, or even offline.
Dr Claudia Pagliari, a researcher into digital health and society at the University of Edinburgh says tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams report when an employee is “active”, and failure to open apps first thing in the morning is often taken by managers as the same as being late for work.
While this is a helpful tool for bosses trying to keep track of their employees; it’s also the enemy of workers who are just trying to work from home whilst balancing the challenges of home life at the same time. That little telltale status can tell a story. Even if it’s not the correct one.
Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Protocol magazine in an interview: “The area to expend that effort is not in tools to monitor employee behavior, but in culture and basic management so that you don’t need to do that … If you suddenly have three kids at home and you’re trying to share the kitchen table with your spouse to do video conferencing, that’s a tough situation to be in. And if you try to manage a group of knowledge workers the way that, like, a shift supervisor manages fast food employees, you’re not going to get the best out of people.” That great Stewart but like it or not, this is often how Slack and the other Microsoft apps are being used.
Are People Really Facing This Issue?
The conversation is quite prevalent over the internet. We had a quick google and here are a couple of the scenarios people are facing as discussed on just one thread on REDDIT
Posted by Grandpajoo
“Does anyone know of any ways to avoid going idle on Microsoft Teams? It seems my boss has an assumption I’m not working if I’m not green on Teams, and I’m sick of constantly keeping an eye on my status. I use the mobile version as well as on my laptop.”
Posted by frtfli
“Could my boss be using Microsoft Teams for surveillance? To what extent is it possible?
My question is less a technical question but more of an understanding of how Teams is being used by senior management in organisations. Since moving to full time remote working, I can’t shake the feeling my boss is using Teams to monitor and evaluate our productivity. Is this something I should be concerned about or am I paranoid? We just got Teams yesterday. This morning, I closed out of the app and almost immediately received an email from a senior person in my unit pointing out that Teams was showing me to be offline….I’ve never felt more micromanaged in my life!”
Argh, Is There Anything I Can Do?
As a general rule, if you’re on your own device and using your own Internet connection, legally, it’s a grey area if your employer monitors you. But when using your company’s computer while on your employer’s network, your employer will have the right to monitor what you do. So, if you’re working from home while balancing everything else going on around you, you may be concerned your employee monitoring and your productivity being assessed. If that’s the case your safest bet is to make sure those collaboration tools aren’t giving a false impression. Give yourself peace of mind. Give yourself a Wee Shoogle.
