Working with home monitoring and the employee’s privacy – a balance is needed – says the lecturer

Companies have the right to monitor employees to ensure productivity, but they must also protect employee privacy, says a lecturer at the University of Auckland’s Business School.

Last week, US banking giant Wells Fargo fired more than a dozen people for allegedly faking keyboard operations by pretending they were working from home when they weren’t.

The bank did not say how it approached the problem.

However, a survey of 1,000 U.S.-based companies last year found that 96 percent of them use some type of monitoring to check whether employees are working from home.

All of this raises questions about ethics and productivity.

University of Auckland Business School lecturer Dr Emmy van Esch said there were many tools on the market today to monitor employees, particularly those working from home, to check whether they were actually working.

“To monitor productivity, you need to access software that can measure proxy metrics such as the number of emails sent, websites visited, documents opened, keystrokes, but more extreme software is also available, as some employers take screen snapshots employees at specific intervals or take webcam photos of employees working from home.”

Companies have the right to monitor employees to protect company data or ensure their productivity, but they should do so within reasonable limits, she said.

“But organizations should also respect employees’ privacy rights, so they need to strike a balance.”

Van Esch said she thinks employee monitoring will always be an issue.

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), some home-based employees may even use AI to do their job instead of doing it themselves, she added.

“So I think companies need monitoring tools to make sure that people are actually doing the work themselves.”

Employers must inform their employees about any monitoring carried out and be transparent, she added.

Ensuring that employees work as they should is a matter of trust, she added.

“I think if a company treats you with respect and trust, you can expect trust and respect from its employees in return.”

Unfortunately, some companies did not treat their employees well and had unrealistic expectations of them, she added.

This may have resulted in people pretending to work at Wells Fargo, she added.

“They know that if they don’t meet their goals, you could lose your job, so many people will start behaving in unethical ways, like in this case faking a job just to keep it. This is especially true in companies that do not treat their employees with respect and trust.”