Does employee surveillance lead to turnover?

With the massive move to work from home in the pandemic, employers have had to boost their trust levels when it comes to staff performance.

But others have gone the other route by boosting surveillance of workers in areas such as emails, web browsing or collaboration tools. And that could be a problem.

In Canada, 36 per cent of employers that have implemented device monitoring are reporting “drastically increased” or “increased” employee turnover. The number is similar (37 per cent) for those in the process of implementing such tools, finds a survey by VMWare.

It’s hard to say if it’s more the corporate culture than the technology that’s causing the problem, but the stats are still concerning given labour shortages in some sectors.

“We're in this strong employees’ market where those [people] with skills have the ability to ply their trade almost anywhere, at this point. And so I think a big part of the attractiveness of any organization is when you feel like you are personally invested and you feel a connection to the overall organization, to the goals, objectives, mission, and have some alignment,” says Kevin Strohmeyer, senior director of marketing at VMware in Lafayette, Calif., a cloud computing and virtualization technology company.

“The idea of surveillance is probably antithesis of building that sense of trust and connection that's going to want to keep an employee working for a particular organization.”

One global company faced backlash recently when it notified at-home employees in the U.K. that it would be using webcams to monitor their performance.

But many employees (90 per cent) working from home said they were open to their employer having visibility into their daily productivity, according to a recent U.S. survey.

Types of employee surveillance

In looking at how Canadian employers are monitoring employees, the top area is emails (45 per cent), followed by web browsing (42 per cent), collaboration tools (42 per cent), keylogger software (22 per cent), video surveillance (21 per cent) and webcams (20 per cent), finds VMWare.

What’s interesting is that many workers don’t think their employers are doing this kind of monitoring, even if they have the right, says Klumpenhouwer.

“There are so many misperceptions about what IT, what employers can see and not see. And if that is not really transparent, then we get objections into being able to really adopt technology to its fullest, because there's pushback among employees who believe that somehow their rights would be infringed [upon] by adopting new digital policies.”

Any monitoring should be at an objective level relative to the real output of the employee, he says, “versus trying to come up with some technology that [says] the person is working because the keyboard is moving or whatever.”

Canadian HR Reporter spoke with Ottawa lawyer Heather Cameron, partner at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada, to discuss the issue of employers wishing to keep track of what an employee is doing.

‘Intrusive’ surveillance not the answer

But this kind of heavy-handed surveillance may not always be in compliance with Canada’s privacy laws, says Rick Klumpenhouwer, partner at HR consultancy Cenera in Calgary.

“You’re going to have a tough time putting that kind of a system in place and… as a deterrence, it's not very effective for that anyway. It's just too much scrutiny for the purpose of employee management,” he says.

“Performance management doesn't equal surveillance.”

The use of video surveillance by employers in the workplace has been a contentious issue for decades, says one legal expert, in addressing what’s allowed by employers in Canada.

While the hybrid approach makes sense — with employees working both from home and the office — surveillance isn't the answer, says Klumpenhouwer.

“You're basically trying to emulate an on-site workplace environment that isn't as intrusive as that anyway. So it doesn't it doesn't really make sense: you're adding more surveillance to a situation that wasn't there before, for most employers.”

Then there’s the idea of establishing trust and dignity with people working in an employment environment, he says.

“The whole idea of surveillance, it just takes in way too much personal information that's irrelevant to their jobs, and irrelevant to the performance management as a whole. And it may give employees a feeling of being constantly watched, like a prison.”

“I have heard of employers… who said, ‘I don't like people working away from the office, I don't trust them and I'm tracking their keystrokes’ and things like that. And it's really to alleviate anxiety. It's just not a good management strategy for that kind of situation. And you're undermining your relationship with your employees.”

The VMWare survey also found that newer approaches to monitoring include:

• regular catchups to discuss workload (62 per cent)
• assessing output and agreed-upon deliverables (52 per cent)
• using project management software (36 per cent)

Monitoring such as video surveillance really only makes sense when it’s for safety purposes, such as employees working in a remote setting by themselves, says Klumpenhouwer.

Plus, if employers are going to be doing all that tracking, they need somebody to review and analyze the findings, he says. “That's a huge, usually difficult, thing to do.”