Beware of bossware
Issue 99 - 3 May 2022 (8-min read)
Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve been hearing of one or another company announcing its plans to go remote. Some are offering their employees the option to stay at home or come in to work as they want, others are emptying out their buildings and going fully remote.
No matter where you lie on the spectrum of work flexibility, you may want to pause and read this newsletter before you bring out the champagne to celebrate having your pet as your desk mate.
Remote working, it seems, may be too good to be true, especially if it comes with an office laptop.
This week, The Global Tiller dives into "bossware" — the technology giving rise to employee surveillance during the pandemic. We look into how the technology allows companies to monitor their employees’ activities, how it impacts their performance, and what actions are being taken to regulate this practice.
In the broadest sense, workplace surveillance is any form of employee surveillance undertaken by an employer, such as scanning your work ID to enter the office building or logging on and off your desktop at work. However, as technology has advanced, surveillance techniques have become more sophisticated.
Now, employers can monitor employees’ emails, browser history and saved files; monitor personal devices connected to the office WiFi; remotely activate employees' webcams; track keystrokes to measure how much employees are typing; record phone calls; and monitor employees’ use of social media even outside working hours on their personal profiles. Even a low-paid sanitation worker in India cannot escape round-the-clock tracking.
There are apps, such as Veriato, that gives employees a 'risk score' to determine how likely, or not, they are to pose a security threat, leak information or steal intellectual property. Or RemoteDesk, which seemingly caters to remote workers whose job requires a safe environment such as those dealing with personal health data or credit card information but, in fact, uses facial recognition on webcams to make sure the employee is looking at the screen at all times, that there is no one else around them and that they are not eating or drinking on the job.
As more and more employees were forced to — and later, chose to — work from home during the pandemic, the use of employee surveillance software has increased. UK’s Trades Union Congress survey showed that 60% of workers believe they are subject to workplace monitoring, up from 53% in 2020. Similarly, a survey of 1,250 US employers found that 60% of them are using remote monitoring software.
And what’s worse, nine out of 10 of these companies said they had terminated workers after implementing monitoring softwares. Some of these softwares use AI to score workers’ productivity. For example, Microsoft’s Productivity Score that tells your boss how often you attend video calls, send emails and how much you use other apps in its suite. Backlash on this product forced Microsoft to revamp the app and now workers can’t be identified. But a wrong productivity score through another similar app could very well seal your fate at your company.
Employers may insist that this is the only way for them to monitor remote workers and make sure they stay productive but employees on the receiving end are losing their will to work. Some workers have been surprised by their boss’ voice suddenly echoing in their living rooms, while others have been furloughed only because they refused to download the surveillance software when work suddenly went remote in 2020. There is also a psychological toll as being monitored can lower a worker’s sense of autonomy and contribute to stress. Even the WHO guidelines on remote work caution companies against excessive monitoring.
Despite the drawbacks, more and more companies are opting into bossware. Sweden tops the chart when it comes to bosses being curious about the most popular employee surveillance tools they can employ, followed by the United States and then Norway. But if they are actually able to employ those tools depends to a large degree on the laws around workers privacy.
Trade unions are asking for new rules to protect workers, demanding more transparency when monitoring softwares are installed. California is close to passing a bill that would protect workers from secret employer surveillance. And other data protection and human rights organisations are working to make sure all the data does not fall into wrong hands.
As we embrace remote work, perhaps it would be useful for employers to remember why they allowed work from home in the first place. Was it to make work flexible and interesting for their employees, or just a way to save rent on an expensive office building? Is monitoring keystrokes or counting the number of Zoom calls the best way to gauge how hard your employee is working? Can we trust AI to determine which employee poses the most risk when artificial intelligence is still struggling to correctly identify people of colour on camera?
If you are an employer using a monitoring software, we’d love to hear from you about how you manage trust within your teams. And if you are an employee who may be under surveillance, perhaps you can follow these tips on protecting your privacy.
Until next week, take care and stay safe.
Hira - Editor - The Global Tiller
Lord Fusitu'a on Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies and their role in the future of the Pacific
Don’t miss our latest Pacific Toks podcast episode in which Philippe sits down with Lord Fusitu’a, a Tongan politician and noble of the Kingdom of Tonga, who serves in multiple organisations and who is also a notorious bitcoin advocate in the Pacific. Our conversation has been fascinating and extensive as we delved deep into the challenges and benefits of cryptocurrencies and blockchain in the Pacific. I wanted to share with you the whole extent of our chat so this episode will be presented in three parts. Stay tuned for the coming parts in the weeks to come!
In this first part of our conversation, Lord Fusitu’a tells us about his career and how he came to realise the importance of Bitcoin for Tonga and the Pacific. He’s also sharing with us some news about Tonga following the major volcanic eruption in January and how the economy as well as the community has been coping.
…and now what?
Nature magazine recently concluded a study on the impact of remote working on our creative skills. The study looked at how being stuck in front of a screen in a Zoom session (or even worse on Teams!) could impact people’s creativity.
The results were damning. It’s really bad! When people are forced to look permanently at a screen, which Zoom sessions necessarily require, they lose their ability to create. Turns out, it’s looking and walking around that fuels our creativity, changes perspective and helps connect with visual cues.
Since creativity is a key element for performance in most jobs today, forcing people to be in front of their screens and monitoring them to become machines (by not talking, not eating, not drinking…) for long hours is anything but good for their performance.
Yet, since the onset of the pandemic, this is what WFH has turned out to be. Companies were reluctant to have employees out of their sight so they asked Big Brother to take care of it. The question is why? Why would you suddenly stop working just because you’re no longer locked in your cubicle?
It may come as a surprise to some but, to quote Jim Halpert from The Office, "…unless you’re a young child or a prison inmate, you don’t need anyone supervising you." And that’s true.
I’ve had experiences with this as an employer myself. For the last two years, I have had the opportunity to hire young employees fresh out of school to join our team. Like everyone else, they also had to work from home during the many lockdowns we had here in Tahiti. But it never occurred to me to ask them to be in front of their screen all day. My only requirement was: respect your assigned deadlines and stay reachable during the work day. I knew some of them were working during the night, some were working in between classes…but, overall, I never had any issue. Work was done and the employees were happy to have flexibility. And I’m talking here about people who didn’t have any prior work experience, who hadn’t been "disciplined" by the requirements of a professional life.
It seems that Jim Halpert was right. We don’t need to micromanage people. We don’t need our managers stuck reading surveillance reports on their teams. They can let go of this "bossware" attitude, free from this warden-like job that prevents them from doing what they should be doing: leading, building a vision, developing a strategy, taking a big picture perspective and finding ways to help their teams be and do better. Because an employee who’s motivated, engaged, happy to be given enough slack to be autonomous and treated as an adult, will outperform.
We have to let go of this culture of controlling people, even more so as the new generations are entering the workplace. They are not big on hierarchies. They’re used to flexibility and to be autonomous to operate in a clearly defined space.
WFH is an opportunity to make employees feel better about their work so let’s not repeat the same mistake. We’ve been trying before the pandemic to make workplaces less miserable, let’s not go down the path where even homes become inhumane.
Philippe - Founder & CEO - Pacific Ventury