Does more data mean more value in Employee Experience Online Monitoring?

We are living in a high-tech era, with a lot of web-based tools and programs designed to increase and augment employee’s experience arriving to the market. These tools are able to provide real-time data analysis of task performance, interactions, wellbeing and collaboration of employees.

Should organisations have access to all this information? How far can management go when using these measurements to access real-time behaviours of their own workforce? Are these data insights to be taken at face value? Is this even ethical?

It’s true that current systems that collect data are more widespread and have more data protection of employee data, but these solutions can also increasingly collect more detailed information about employee’s life and work behaviours, and people can perceive these tools as a way of tracking their life and their work, and clearly invading their privacy.

Firstly, it’s important to have in consideration that these tools can measure many aspects about the employees’ behaviours and interactions, some positive aspects, but also negative aspects, having several consequences for their performance and engagement evaluation.

For organisations, employee data analysis can contribute for a more competitive position in the market and increasing levels of performance but also job satisfaction. So, these tools are viewed to make it possible for managers to know what the employees are doing, and in what areas and tasks/projects they are more productive, and what needs improvement.

For employees, data insights that these tools offer can also be very important, since they provide real time feedback that could boost their productivity, wellbeing, and efficacy.

However, these monitoring softwares can make employees feel insecure due to the lack of confidence in their own capacity to manage their productivity and by jeopardising their competences/skills and making them work under intense supervision, anchored in data blind work demands, where everything they do is measured to the second and sometimes suggestions or recommendations, aggregated in a weekly feedback e-mail for instances, are senseless.

With COVID-19, many organisations started working fully remote, at least for some periods and management felt an increased need to acquire new tools and programs that could promote wellbeing, job performance, and continuously monitor other key employee indicators.

In sum, management demanded tools that make the organisations able to control their employees and guarantee that everybody is working aligned to organisation goals and milestones, fulfilling requirements and time schedules, making work as productive as possible and guaranteeing resiliency of the workforce.

Recent research shows that this added work intensity brought new fundamental problems such as unsustainable cognitive workload, difficulty to disconnect from work, and significant increase of mental health risk of employees.

In sum, organisations seem to want to evaluate employees’ performance to guarantee that they are working as if they were in the office, applying the same approach, although using digital tools, for controlling the employee in their new workplace, in most cases their own house.

Data protection, security and confidentiality regulations may actually be compromised with most of the tools currently used, by providing information to managers that can induce poorer flexibility and unethical work demands. Also, lack of trust in employees impacts the employee’s performance, creating a vulnerable and fragile organisational culture and increments mental and physical issues of employees.

In Portugal, in order to protect employees rights when working at home, new regulations were debated in parliament to define the conditions of remote working and will be implemented beginning of 2022. Firstly, remote work needs to be decided by mutual agreement between the employer and the employee, as well as aspects related to this type of work (e.g., place and hours of work) (article 166.º). Furthermore, an employee working remotely has the same rights and duties as an employee that work in the office (article 169.º).

On the other hand, it is considered illegal to capture private data of the employee without his consent (e.g., voice recordings, computer screens or even internet traffic). In addition, the workplace of these employees cannot be assessed without prior notice and must be carried out within the employee’s working hours (article 170.º-A). Similarly, the employer must refrain from contacting him/her after the working hours agreed upon in the contract (article 169.º-B).

Another relevant point is that the organisation must give employees the equipment and systems they need to do their job (article 168.º). However, as mentioned earlier, the organisation cannot track its employees, even if they just want to make sure they are doing their job or assess their performance and health.

Actually, some of these tools advocate that they can promote mental and physical health, increase productivity and work-life balance, although, if we think critically, they also can have a significant negative impact. When employees have a tool that measures everything that they are doing online when they are working, they feel stressed and self-conscious about working, they are not in flow since they know their organisation is trying to control every digital movement of their workday and this, in turn, actually decreases their wellbeing and also interfere with their work life integration, in part because the organisations does not provide them with the necessary flexibility (e.g., having a predetermined time to eat or having breaks).

This kind of instruments and tools aren’t always adapted to organisations current reality, challenges, and culture, which can prove troublesome and risky. Also, it’s important for organisations to understand that this process needs to be transparent and always have the employee’s informed consent.

This is a critical point when implementing any monitoring tool, since once its present in all workflows in the organisation it has a strong impact in employees’ behaviour. Sometimes, employees don’t have all the information to make an informed decision to accept or not a tool like that, and, in other cases, they accept because they feel a social pressure to do so (i.e., social conformism, condition for employment), organisations must avoid both issues, the lack of information and any form of social pressure to adopt new tools.

In this sense, there are some key reflection points that management can have in consideration when implementing an employee experience and behavior digital monitoring instrument in the organization:

• Firstly, it’s important to trust in employees and the work that they are doing, and their capacity to learn. Do you really need a tool to measure the meeting times and predefine breaks or focused time?
• Validate if you want to measure meaningless data, such as time spent listening to music or watching videos, or on social media if goals and tasks are being completed. Such information will not actually control for the deliverables or quality of work, its the managers’ job to control for these outputs.
• Never in any circumstance compromise the anonymity, individuality, rights, and privacy of employees.
• It’s important to consider in any new tool to implement the critical informed consent, meaning it is crucial to tell employees what is being monitoring, how the data collected will be treated, who will be aggregating it and what type of actions these measurements will impact in the organisation.
• Think seriously and critically about the ethical issues that a tool like this can bring and if you really need to implement it in your organisation at this moment. Ask for legal advice and really brainstorm about all the advantages and pitfalls of each solution to implement.

References

Comissão de Trabalho e Segurança Social (2021). Texto de Substituição dos Projetos de Lei. Disponível a partir de https://www.parlamento.pt/

Do’s and don’ts of using employee data. (2019). Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/dos-and-donts-of-using-employee-data

Executives ignore valuable employee actions that they can’t measure. (2014). Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2013/12/executives-ignore-valuable-employee-actions-that-they-cant-measure

Greenwald, H. P., & Zukoski, A. P. (2018). Assessing collaboration. American Journal of Evaluation, 39(3), 322–335. https://doi.org/10.1177/1098214017743813

Is your company using employee data ethically? (2017, March 20). Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/03/is-your-company-using-employee-data-ethically

Sahqani, W., & Turchet, L. (2021). Co-designing employees’ data privacy: A techonology consultancy company use case. 28th conference of fruct association.

Sharma, N., & Hosein, P. (2020). A comparison of Data-Driven and traditional approaches to employee performance assessment. 2020 International Conference on Intelligent Data Science Technologies and Applications (IDSTA).

Yeung, A., & Ulrich, D. (2019). Information sharing: How can you share information, data, and tools within the ecosystem? In Reinventing the Organization : How Companies Can Deliver Radically Greater Value in Fast-Changing Markets (pp. 97–103). Harvard Business Review press.