“Always eyes watching you … Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”
These words from George Orwell’s novel “1984” may seem to have foreshadowed our post-pandemic world, in which employers use monitoring software programs to keep tabs on remote workers. But the truth is, productivity monitoring isn’t new – and it’s still far from Orwell’s fictional Oceania and its ever-watchful "Big Brother" if employers keep a few legal considerations in mind.
First, a little background. Monitoring software programs entered the workplace a decade or so ago and initially were popular in call centers and warehouses. Fast forward to 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the monitoring industry exploded as employers in nearly every sector saw an urgent need to monitor employees who were suddenly working from home.
Today, many employees still want to work from home, and employers feel justified in undertaking more extreme levels of productivity surveillance to keep tabs on their remote workers.
Types of monitoring software
Employers use various monitoring software programs to track how employees spend their day. For example, some programs run in the background of an employee’s work computer and simply allow employers to perform spot checks of employee activity and then dig in deeper if there are performance concerns. Other programs track employees’ idle time, aggregate it and send reports to the employer. A third type takes a snapshot of activity at random...
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