Think your boss is spying on you? If you work from home, you may not have as much privacy as you think while you’re on the clock. At the beginning of the pandemic when most white-collar professionals went from working in the office to their homes, many employers turned to monitoring software to track their workers’ moves and make sure they weren’t doing personal activities on company time. And it seems many of them are still doing it.
A new survey of a thousand companies with remote or hybrid workforces finds that employee tracking tools like video feeds and keystroke monitoring are still the norm.
- Always-on, live video feed is by far the most intrusive form of employee monitoring and 37% of employers say they require their staff to appear on a live video feed when they’re not working in the office.
- Video feed monitors spend an average of two to four hours a day monitoring those feeds, but 5% of employers admit they keep an eye on the feeds for the entire work day.
- But the most common forms of monitoring don’t need cameras to spy on workers, they track employees’ Internet activity and app use (62%) or limit workers’ access to certain sites or apps, like video streaming platforms (49%).
- Companies also capture random screenshots and log workers’ keystrokes, in an effort to find out if they’re actually doing work activities during work hours, but employees don’t exactly appreciate being watched all the time.
- As a result, 70% of companies say employees have quit over monitoring concerns.
- And more than 70% of companies have used data from monitoring to fire workers they considered unproductive.
- The data monitoring programs collect also reveal that workers spend an average of three hours a day on non-work activities, referred to as “time theft” by some companies.
photo: Getty Images Source: CBS News