TikTok tracks employee office attendance using a new internal tool called MyRTO

• TikTok is breaking its return-to-the-office policy by introducing new employee monitoring tools.

• The social media application has implemented a new tool called MyRTO that monitors personal presence in the office.

• MyRTO tracks badge swipes and asks staff to explain “deviations” from expected in-person attendance.

TikTok doesn’t just track users’ locations. Now it has switched to monitoring the whereabouts of its employees.

The New York Times reports that the social media company has implemented new internal software called MyRTO to track and enforce strict return-to-the-office policies. According to the facility, MyRTO monitors employees checking their IDs when entering the office and asks employees to explain “deviations” from the expected in-person presence.

After implementing a personal attendance policy last October requiring U.S.-based employees to come to the office at least three times a week after coronavirus concerns subsided, the company threatened to fire employees whose home address did not match their assigned office address, Insider previously reported reported.

TikTok has previously faced criticism and been banned in several countries over its use of “Big Brother-type surveillance” after Forbes reported that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, plans to use the app to track Americans using GPS information collected via the application. But this week, the company notified employees that it is unveiling new internal tracking software designed to “provide both employees and leaders with greater transparency and context regarding RTO expectations and work schedules, and to help ensure more transparent communication,” a ByteDance spokesperson he told Insider.

Representatives for TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider.

Managers across industries are increasingly turning to software to monitor the productivity of remote and hybrid workers, checking how long users are logged in while working from home and capturing random screenshots of employee screens. For people forced to return to the office, some companies are rolling out new attendance tracking software and deploying sensors to measure office occupancy and determine when a person is sitting at a desk and when a conference room is being used.

But while CEOs of high-profile companies are increasingly promoting back-to-work policies as the best way to do business – Elon Musk, for example, went so far as to call remote work “morally wrong” – employees at tech companies pushing this mandate approach have expressed their dissatisfaction in the form of quitting , or even quitting their jobs to maintain employees’ views on employee benefits, equivalent to an 8% raise.

“When you allow for flexibility, it expands your talent pool,” Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and remote work expert, previously told Insider.

“Whether the economy is shrinking or growing, top workers always have outside options. So I believe that if you, as a company, use a model that doesn’t give your best employees flexibility, some of them – not all of them, but some of them will be poached by competitors.”

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