Big Brother goes hybrid: why organisations can't afford to rely on employee surveillance

Employee surveillance is nothing new; businesses have long used video surveillance for safety and security, including monitoring staff emails during work hours. Yet, the desire to maintain productivity in our new hybrid era is powering a fresh wave of investment in these technologies. In fact, recent research discovered that 70 per cent of companies have either already implemented, or are planning to implement, surveillance measures.

Under the guise of keeping employees safe online, these technologies are monitoring activity on a new level, through web browsing and recording the amount of time spent on an application. Some businesses are even using attention tracking through webcams and keyloggers, as well as video surveillance.

However, the truth is that surveillance measures often fall short of their productivity promise. At best, they are intrusive and counterproductive, negatively impacting motivation levels and business culture. At worst, they are immoral and verge on breaching employee rights - with many individuals initially unaware of the extent to which they are being watched.

Hybrid watching has backfired

The pandemic threw the traditional working model into chaos. As boardrooms across the world scrambled to maintain some level of business-as-usual and ensure productivity through one of the toughest periods in history, it's understandable that many would do anything to get back some level of control.

However, as we emerge into our new hybrid landscape - with 84 per cent of UK businesses planning to implement some form of remote working moving forward - investment in surveillance technologies has only intensified, becoming more invasive than ever. In fact, recent research discovered that the use of webcam monitoring doubled in the six-month period between April and October 2021.

In trying to emulate some form of office management in the remote setting, many businesses have achieved the exact opposite. This extreme level of tracking is seen by many as an invasion of employee privacy; both intrusive and offensive. Investing in such systems is having an adverse effect, creating a barrier of distrust between employers and their workforces. Employees feel less trusted, less creative, and less loyal to the business. The pressure to deliver often leads to teams feeling like they are pitted against each other. This is extremely bad for morale and, in the worst cases, can destroy company culture.

To make matters worse, organisations using surveillance tools could also find themselves falling foul of regulations - such as the GDPR - if they are not careful. In its simplest form, most elements of employee monitoring are legal under GDPR, if employees are both aware and in agreement. That said, there are several situational factors that can make employee surveillance a minefield to navigate and those that fail to do so effectively face potentially devastating fines.

Creating a culture of transparency-from-anywhere

There's no doubt that working-from-anywhere takes discipline. When employees are not in the office, there are inevitably a lot more distractions. Balancing home and work life can be difficult when both are taking place under the same roof. But businesses need to trust their employees, supporting them and ensuring that they complete tasks to the highest possible standard, without monitoring their every move.

The most critical step towards establishing a positive hybrid working culture is ensuring transparency throughout an organisation, regardless of where employees are based. Setting very clear, specific, and measurable objectives is a good starting point. By relaying those objectives to the organisation, everyone understands where the finish line is. Coupling that understanding of goals with the ‘why', helps with motivation, alignment, and better decision-making along the way. And breaking those goals down into steps and tracking that progress in real time gives a success blueprint to the employees, the right level of visibility to the management, and the opportunity to be agile and pivot quickly if need be.

Scrum is a great approach that hybrid organisations can leverage to accomplish transparency. Whilst originally built for teams sitting in the same room, when coupled with work management platforms and synchronous tools for daily stand-up, it fits the distributed team perfectly. There are clear objectives with each sprint; there's transparency via work management and daily stand-ups; there's cross-functional collaborative teamwork to resolve any road-blocks in sprints; and there's agile retrospective, learning and adjustment after every sprint.

To carry this out, organisations should look to solutions like collaborative work management platforms that centralise work and act as a single source of truth, whilst providing 360-degree visibility into project status on one end and goal-tracking on the other. This helps to ensure that everyone within a business is on the same page, regardless of employee work location. Automated reminders, real-time dashboards, and a single view of tasks will mean that everyone can select the tools and technologies that they prefer, bringing in an element of choice and putting employees back in the driving seat.

Once the solutions for collaboration are in place, it's important that employees feel empowered to use them. There needs to be clear and consistent messaging around why employees should feel able to work from wherever they want to and how the business trusts them to do so. There should also be training to ensure that all employees understand how to make the most of this new hybrid landscape.

In our new hybrid world, the lure of surveillance technologies is more tempting than ever before. However, the stress and anxiety they cause for employees is only matched by the potential legal risk they pose for businesses. They are not the answer to long-term productivity; a culture that encourages transparency at all levels is. Employees need to know their goals, have a clear plan of reaching said goals, and work in a coordinated way with their peers and managers. It is only then that they will feel both engaged and empowered to go the extra mile.

Andrew Filev is the founder of Wrike