The rise and rise of digital monitoring is raising eyebrows, so should you turn to technology to monitor your staff or is there a better way to keep tabs on workforce productivity?
Employee monitoring to measure productivity is not a new development – Japan’s Keihin Electric Express Railway Company started using technology in 2009 to monitor its staff. However, the explosion in remote working due to the pandemic has accelerated the uptake of digital surveillance by employers.
Lockdowns may be over (for now), but many companies have allowed staff to continue to work remotely. However, the physical distance from the office appears to be the source of some anxiety among employers about how productive their workforce is when working remotely.
Employer paranoia will no doubt have been further fuelled by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s recent comments that home working is an excuse to do little other than eat chunks of cheese from the fridge.
Perhaps not surprisingly, demand for remote employee monitoring software has soared in the past two years. One in three of the 2,400 workers polled by union Prospect reported being monitored at work in October 2021, up from a quarter in April 2021. In reality, it’s likely that use of these technologies is far more widespread than research suggests.
Meanwhile, a TUC report published in November 2020, Technology managing people, found that one in five companies have admitted to implementing or planning to introduce “secret software used to...
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