Employee Monitoring: 78% of employers monitor worker performance and online activity

Employee monitoring has become a new normal as employees work from home. There are plenty of reasons to monitor employees including encouraging engagement and improving security.

These benefits are attractive and Express VPN found that, after surveying 2,000 employers and 2,000 employees, 78%of companies have monitoring software of some kind.

However, employee monitoring also has a darker side.

Employers can monitor the messages of staff, their online activity, and their workplace performance. Unfortunately, this activity isn’t reserved for technology firms with sci-fi aspirations, and despite ethical concerns, employers also use stored email, calls, messages, or videos to inform their decisions on performance reviews (73%) and to monitor the potential formation of workers’ unions (46%).

What is monitored and why?

The study by Express VPN found that over 50% of companies say they are implementing non-traditional monitoring techniques and 94% track emails. On top of that, 87% monitor video and audio calls while 85% look at messages.

To get further insight into what is monitored, StandOut CV launched a study comparing the data collection features of 32 popular team member monitoring tools. The study noted that 94% of tools track how much time employees spend on tasks, 75% can take screengrabs of workers’ desktops, and 59% collate and report on keyboard and mouse movements.

These measures can be used in an attempt to boost productivity, prevent inappropriate behavior, and stop phishing scams. However, 56% of employees feel stress and anxiety about their employer surveilling their communications.

Legally surveilling employees

When it comes to the legality of monitoring the activities of employees, there are great variations in different regions. For example, in the US workplace surveillance laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 allow companies to track employees’ oral and electronic communication activities legally.

Nonetheless, the ECPA claims that personal calls can not be monitored.

With that said, states in the US have varying privacy regulations as do individual countries in Europe.

The future of employee monitoring

The anxieties of the workforce are important to address, as it can negatively impact engagement and counter the positive intentions of surveillance.

With that in mind, employers need to practice the art of transparency and discuss what they collect and why. These kinds of discussions can make sure that employees are comfortable and improve their journey.

Mark Turner, chief technology officer at the Instant Group, commented on the situation and what employers can do.

Turner said: “The rise in remote working and an influx of new technology means monitoring has ramped up. When used strategically, this tracking benefits all – businesses can identify resourcing issues, streamline processes and identify gaps, while employees can use the data to prioritize, manage workloads and track productivity.

“The key to using monitoring tools successfully is transparency and communication. If you can show your teams that using a piece of tracking technology not only benefits the business, but them too, then you’re on the right track.”