As Returning Employees Face Fearful Tech Surveillance, Their Employers Face Legal Risks.

Organizations want to reassure employees and customers.

But they may end up alienating them instead  - and incurring legal penalties for excessive oversight in the process. JL

Jeremy Horwitz reports in Venture Beat:

Excessive oversight is leading to employee alienation. Productivity monitoring software raises the specter of a manager looking over your shoulder to be sure you’re on task. Even if a company’s motivations for health monitoring are benevolent, it’s creepy that private organizations track the health status of visitors, employees, relatives, and “interpersonal” contacts. (And) thanks to asymptomatic carriers, unreliable tests, and sketchy reporting, there are concerns about false positives and negatives leading systems to undercount and overcount infections. Companies that have private databases but don’t act on infection data might be held responsible for failing to protect employees.

As employees across the United States return to workplaces after months of coronavirus quarantine, many changes will be physical and obvious — face masks and clear protective shields, social distancing protocols, and stricter limits on customer access. But technology is quietly enabling a second layer of “defenses” that will likely have even larger impacts on modern workplaces: employee surveillance tools.

In the sort of meta-irony science fiction authors would have found delicious, fear of a physical virus has led employers to adopt productivity surveillance apps that barely differ from computer viruses, along with workplace safety monitoring technologies that only George Orwell might have considered inevitable. Users spent decades firewalling their PCs against keyloggers, activity-monitoring background processes, and clandestine video recorders. Now employers are turning to these very tools to keep an eye on their workers. Some tech companies are suggesting that businesses go further, monitoring both employees and personal contacts for COVID-19 using private tracing databases.

It’s easy to understand the underlying business concern: Companies want to protect themselves and their employees against risks, specifically declining worker productivity and the prospect of larger-scale infections as offices reopen. But in the wrong hands — and with questionable tools — the new workplace magnifying glass can become a laser, burning unreasonably micromanaged employees and businesses alike.

Salesforce’s Work.com is just one example of a platform that touts office-specific coronavirus contact tracing, promising to turn workplaces into COVID-19 infection and exposure data collection sources for “public and private sector leaders.” Its stated goal is to allow leaders to “gather the data needed to monitor and analyze employee and visitor health and wellness.” Even if a company’s motivations for health monitoring are entirely benevolent, it’s creepy that the service claims to help private organizations track the health status of visitors, employees, their relatives, and their “interpersonal” contacts. Today, many people (and some governments) don’t trust Apple and Google’s anonymized contact tracing system, so why would anyone feel comfortable being tracked by various corporate databases with amorphous privacy guarantees?

Above: Salesforce’s Work.com offers businesses tools to individually track COVID-19 exposures of employees, their relatives, and contacts — but is this wise?

Image Credit: Salesforce

Companies that maintain private COVID-19 databases may also face legal ramifications. Thanks to asymptomatic carriers, unreliable tests, and sketchy infection reporting, there are serious concerns about false positives and negatives leading tracing systems to simultaneously undercount and overcount infections. It’s no stretch to predict individual and class action lawsuits after employees lose hours or jobs over supposed COVID-19 exposure that didn’t actually affect their ability to work. Additionally, companies that have private databases but don’t act on infection data might be held responsible for failing to protect employees from “known” harm.

Businesses interested in keeping their workplaces healthy might better focus on worker safety measures. New safety tools such as AI workplace cameras promise to automatically measure worker distance or detect a lack of personal protective equipment. This may sound like 1984‘s Big Brother, but employees might not object to monitoring systems that use computers rather than humans to observe what’s happening, even if this introduces constant video recording into workspaces. Similarly, employees might embrace location-monitoring wearables and apps if these facilitate conveniences, such as easing access to locked areas or physical activity tracking.

As we enter a new stage of the pandemic, companies aren’t wholly or even mostly focusing on health and safety — they’re also concerned about productivity. Without physical offices, companies fear people working from home may be doing all sorts of things that aren’t productive. At a minimum, productivity monitoring software raises the specter of a manager looking over your shoulder to be sure you’re on task. But overreliance on monitoring — whether it’s handled through software or constant meetings and check-ins — can have the opposite impact on worker productivity, stifling employees to the point of protest.

A boss accustomed to physically patrolling cubicles may feel uneasy directing employees in remote home offices. It’s easy to imagine why such a person might mandate remote computer monitoring tools, peering at individual employee screens, checking time-on-task metrics, and issuing non-compliance warnings. Apply this passive monitoring atop mandatory team and individual check-in meetings, plus whatever collaborative chat system the company uses, and the system might almost resemble a traditional corporate office.

But as reports of employee work-life balance frustration stack up during the pandemic, it’s clear that excessive oversight is leading to employee alienation. Accustomed to flexibility to accomplish their targets, self-starters are getting distracted by endless meetings and various forms of managerial monitoring. Monitoring software can now deliver clock-in/out times that are “accurate” down to the second, and alerts when employees have work apps running in the background rather than the foreground. However, people tend to hate having their schedules micromanaged, and they will likely be out the door whenever better employment opportunities arise.

In the post-COVID-19 era, employers will have to adapt to a lot of new realities. But it’s increasingly clear that the mere existence of new workplace health, safety, and productivity surveillance tools doesn’t mean every employer should use them all — or even use carefully selected ones on full blast. An office-specific contact tracing platform might look great but introduce unexpected productivity and legal risks, just as an app that promises to track employee clock-ins or productivity levels may lead angry workers to game the system. It goes without saying that seeking too much workplace control can result in the loss of good employees, either preceded or followed by customers.

As tempting as it may be to search for technological silver bullets, enterprises hoping to recover quickly from the pandemic should look at the bigger picture. Rather than relying heavily on monitoring technologies, smart companies should seek humane work-life balances that reduce the need for surveillance, freeing everyone — workers and managers alike — to make better use of their business hours. At the same time, companies should feel comfortable adopting modern tools that increase workers’ safety while respecting their human dignity, as these solutions will likely stand the test of time.