At the Dentons Davis Brown annual labor and employment law seminar last month, employers discussed a large array of topics, many of which were issues that occurred during COVID or were pre-existing but were exacerbated by COVID. One such issue is employee monitoring. Employers normally monitor employees extensively from timekeeping, project billing, and performance evaluations, but the explosion of remote work during COVID created a lucrative market for more extensive monitoring processes.
Monitoring can take a number of forms from increased project oversight to geotagging, attention productivity measures (tracks speed, screen activity, and if you navigate away from certain things on your screen) to screen mirroring (the remote screen is mirrored onto another screen or another system) as well as a wide array of other processes and technologies. A number of employers also reported greater use of other long-standing processes such as video monitoring and reviewing customer calls.
Internal public relations and risk mitigation go hand in hand. You cannot research the monitoring of employees without running into a large number of articles about how employees feel about monitoring. If you want a summary of a few thousand articles - employees don’t like it very much.
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