Monitoring employees as they work, from the applications they access, to the websites they view, is become more common and a technology industry exists to provide the tools to allow this to happen. When it does happen, ideally the employer should tell its workers in advance about the oversight tools they are intending to use, including any potential for covert monitoring. This is not, however, always the case.
One in five U.K. technology workers is now subject to workplace surveillance software. It would appear that employee monitoring increases was spurred on by the shift to hybrid work and, as a result, so-termed ‘productivity paranoia’ has reached a new peak.
Employee monitoring via workplace software tools has doubled since the pandemic began, with recent Gartner data (reported in The Wall Street Journal) showing that 60 percent of large employers are using technologies to track employee productivity.
In terms of what ‘productivity paranoia’ is intended to mean, Microsoft describes it as “where leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings and other activity metrics have increased.”
Not every employer is going down this path and not every technology company thinks this is an appropriate use of software. Amid growing concerns about these practices invading workers’ privacy, one software company is responding by calling for an end to unnecessary tracking in the workplace.
This leads to Pendo, a software adoption platform. Pendo is urging technology bosses around the world to be transparent with employees about what they ‘do and don’t monitor’ – and why. The aim is to create digital workplaces built on trust, not surveillance.
As a result, Pendo has defined a pledge calling for an end to unnecessary, privacy-encroaching tracking, as they let Digital Journal know in a communication.
Recognising that managers need to manage, but in a less intrusive way, Pendo’s preferred approach is through the use of adoption software enables businesses to track anonymized software usage data (such as pages visited, workflows completed and so on).
This approach enables managers to understand how tools are being used and how they can be improved. This approach helps to avoid employee distrust and from damaging the work culture and relationships.
The resultant Pendo Employee Data Privacy Pledge asks business leaders across the world to be transparent about the data they are collecting, and its purpose Here Pendo is seeking to put the onus back on employers to use business-related data for good to improve their workplace apps, creating and guiding workers through the most effective workflows by evaluating metrics like page loads, event clicks and drop offs.
