The Insanity of Electronic Surveillance of Home Workers

Some background first. 

I am retired (from the "regular" workforce) after 38 years in HR management. While my retirement occurred prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I had some experience with remote working pre-Covid, and vicarious experience through my wife's remote working during Covid. Allow me to say, then, that I don't think the surveillance issue has so much to do with where the employee does his/her work. I believe it has mostly to do with how the employee's supervisor or manager does his/her work.

As I read about and reflect on the burgeoning employer practice of WFH surveillance of employees I am disturbed but not surprised by the knee-jerk panic of some managers who are afraid they suddenly are going to be taken advantage of by people working from home. I suspect those same managers already were taken advantage of by the same employees who formerly worked in cubicles within the manager's line-of-sight. 

Surveillance Did Not Work Before the Pandemic

Before I make this part of my argument, I should point out that I am not talking about the general kind of surveillance—the "good" or "natural" observational surveillance all managers should partake of—but the kinds of "bad" or "artificial" surveillance many supervisors and managers have contemplated and attempted since the advent of the First Industrial Revolution. The former consists of "walking around" and engaging your employees in productive conversations regarding how things are going and inquiring if there is any support they need from you to make them more effective or productive. This kind of "natural" surveillance also involves taking into account whether the employee generally gets work done within an acceptable time frame and at an acceptable level of accuracy, etc. The latter—"artificial" surveillance—includes tracking someone's time on non-work-related web sites, monitoring their non-work-related phone calls, making observations about how many texts they might be sending, etc. In the WFH or hybrid scheme, "artificial" surveillance includes productivity-scoring software, virtual monitoring, tracking computer mouse "idleness" and unplanned visits to home offices, the latter being a new twist on a similar practice that we thought died some time early into the Second Industrial Revolution more than 120 years ago. 

"Artificial" or "unnatural" surveillance is a waste of time and more an indication of managerial incompetence than an accurate indicator of employee misuse of work time. A good manager has plenty of tools at her disposal for determining if someone is productive and not taking advantage of the employer, without having to resort to electronic or other unnecessarily intrusive artificial surveillance devices. How about the old-fashioned practice of discussing expectations, setting goals, reviewing performance, and making adjustments where justified? If those things worked in the old office, how is it, exactly, that they cannot or will not work in the WFH-hybrid environment? I suspect that managers who have trouble doing those things remotely also were bad at doing them when the employee was physically nearby in the same office.

Distance Does Not Dictate Dishonesty

Any employee who will take advantage of the employer from a distance of ten miles probably did the same from a distance of ten feet. Corollary: Any supervisor who cannot effectively manage people who work within eye-sight and ear-shot in an office is ill-equipped to manage people who work remotely. I would suggest that in this case the trouble is with the supervisor and not the worker, so logically the management should implement surveillance of the supervisor, not the employee.

The Field Service Worker Model

I have had the experience and pleasure of working with Field Service employees in several work situations. Most of those field employees' jobs were critical in the sense that if they did not do their work in a timely, complete and safe manner the company, the customer, and sometimes the community or even the industry might suffer a critical monetary or human loss. (And I should mention that I have worked in organizations, sometimes the same ones, where the same criticality of good performance was true of office workers.) In none of those organizations where the expectations for field workers was extremely high did the company think it necessary to track the employee electronically for the primary purpose of determining whether the field service employee was doing his job. Either the field service tech showed up on time and completed the work to everyone's satisfaction, or he did not. Rather than engender feelings of distrust, the Field Service Employee model relies almost entirely on performance outcomes. Most employers who have engaged a large number of field service workers for a considerable amount of time would probably agree that managing-by-distance requires a level of trust and communications that often is not found in office work environments, but should be. Supervisors who suddenly find themselves in WFH or hybrid scenarios would do well to study the Field Service model.

Lazy and Uncommunicative Managers

I want to return again briefly to the idea that it is perhaps the manager or supervisor and not the employee who needs surveillance. While I say "lazy," perhaps that word is too pejorative; "complacent" might be more palatable, while "lazy" might be more accurate. At any rate, my take is that the lack of trust caused by the sudden shift in where work gets done is more an indictment of sub-par supervision and management training than a reflection on the employee's willingness or ability to do her job well. Obviously, the opposite could be true in many cases; but if so, then it begs the question of how poorly people must have been selected and managed prior to the Pandemic if the assumption or even the reality is that once out of the line-of-sight of management a significant number of employees (as some would have us believe) started taking advantage of their employers and stopped delivering as they once presumably did.