Time.news – Probably the boss of each of us has enough data on our digital activities to get an exact picture of our working day, without having to “use any special monitoring software”.
The Washington Post writes that “commonly used network-connected apps like Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Office give managers the ability to find anything from the number of video meetings you’ve actively participated in, to how much you’ve chatted online with colleagues and the number of documents you have saved in the cloud ”.
Violation of privacy? The question is another: Are these snippets of a worker’s digital day an exact representation of the amount of work done by employees? The answer, according to work and privacy experts, is that data from these work apps should be considered “only a fraction of the larger picture employee productivity “.
But faced with the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have adopted new ways of working during the pandemic, spending several days or a whole working week at home, employers have looked for new ways to manage and ensure productivity, with a number growing of them turning to surveillance software, so much so that, at the beginning of 2022, “the global demand for employee monitoring software increased by 65% compared to 2019, according to the Internet security company and Top10VPN digital rights.
“Measuring productivity based on surface activities such as ‘sent messages’ gives us an extraordinarily limited view of a person’s contributions to their organization,” said Brian Elliott, senior vice president of Slack and executive leader of the Slack-led consortium focused on the future of work, but this “is not only arbitrary, it is usually also counterproductive”.
Also because, as various workplace experts testify, the data does not correctly represent a worker’s productivity. Activities like mentoring the person, time to brainstorm, drafting a plan, or using offline software won’t show up in the data. And measuring quantity could detract from the quality of one’s work or interactions.
The reality, according to a widespread opinion, is that “there are many experiments in progress and no transparency” while it should be said aloud and in advance what is being monitored and for what purpose. It would be the right thing to do.