Yahoo Finance Why work-from-home monitoring is worse than you think: ‘Affects virtually every employee’
Web cam monitoring, location tracking and screen recording your online activity. The tentacles of workplace tracking are reaching into your personal life.
The surveillance Australians working from home are aware of is “just the tip of the iceberg” and software likely installed on your devices is capable of far more than just keyboard and location tracking.
You can be tracked in the workplace in most parts of Australia and have no clue of what’s happening. Right now, if you're on a work phone or laptop, there's a good chance your employer could be watching.
New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory are the only jurisdictions where there’s a requirement to notify a worker that they will be surveilled. And that’s just notified, not asked for consent or told how the information collected could potentially be used against you.
The issue of workplace surveillance is “quite complex”. Originating as a way for businesses to protect themselves against cybercrime at a time workers were sent home during the pandemic, it’s been left to the wolves in terms of regulation and protection for workers.
So, can your boss log in and watch you via your webcam, track your location or listen in to the audio picked up on your work phone? Is your Facebook browsing or generally innocuous “skiving off” recorded and able to be used to argue termination? Yahoo Finance talked to Professor of Practice Peter Leonard from UNSW Business School to find out.
Rise of capable software with little regulatory protections
“It's fair to say we only have an idea of the tip of the iceberg of how much employee surveillance is happening out there,” Leonard said.
The number of employers tracking their staff has doubled since the start of the pandemic to 60 per cent, a number Gartner research indicated would continue to rise.
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Software available to employers is now easily accessible, cheap and can monitor where you are and what you’re looking at - whether it be your Facebook messages or work emails. Screenshots or recordings can be taken over time, along with checking where you are.
Leonard said more invasive techniques, like mirroring a screen to see what workers are looking at, tapping into a webcam or listening to audio picked up by a corporate device are “actually not that complicated” and, according to lawyer Johnathon Hadley, their application as a means of assessing productivity are “yet to be tested”.
“It just seems remarkable something that affects virtually every employee in Australia is not more clearly and consistently regulated across Australia,” Leonard said.
The threat against cyber security is reason enough to justify why Law firm Herbert Smith Freehills said 91 per cent of Australian employers surveyed monitor their remote workers’ locations.
But it’s the rest of the information collected and how it can be used against employees that is more problematic, according to Leonard.
“There's been a view that people don't work as hard at home as they do in the office,” he said. “So there's been a temptation for people to use it.”
Insurance Australia Group (IAG) analyst Suzie Chieko was not aware her keystrokes were being tracked or that the information could be used against her when she tried to sue for unfair dismissal. She lost.
“IAG had the monitoring in place that enabled them to give quantitative evidence about how active she was on the computer. So that leads to a question of, if they have it for that purpose, [for] what other purposes might they use it?” Leonard said.
“Is it now a reasonable expectation that it can be used if an employer has reason to believe an employee is skiving off on the job?”
Just this week, the Fair Work Commission threw out an appeal from a council gardener who was fired after being tracked through his work ute’s GPS. He accused his boss of setting up an anonymous tip-off to give him the right to access the data, but he had in fact already signed an employee agreement that said he could be surveilled. As have many Australians.
Can my boss monitor my webcam or see my Facebook and WhatsApp messages?
Whether you are at home or in the office, if you are on an employer-provided phone or laptop, the answer is yes.
“Remember, when issuing those devices, the employer can set up the default surveillance settings however they choose,” Leonard said.
He said there were even ways to monitor people on their personal devices.
“If you’re using a version of Microsoft 365 at home your employer is paying for, they can monitor your use of those technologies or even the device.”
How we use technology has completely changed now too. It’s very likely you are signed in to multiple personal accounts on your work computer. And given how fluidly we skip from work emails to social media, and how hard it is to determine what your exact work hours are, people are opening themselves up to deeper levels of exposure.
“If you choose to skive off for 10 minutes to see what's happening on WhatsApp, it's hard for the employer to know that you're no longer at work so the monitoring is likely to continue,” Leonard said.
“So, there is that problem as well - whether the employer actually intends to monitor these things or not. There's a significant likelihood monitoring put in place to address what you're doing ‘at work’ will also inadvertently pick up things that you are incidentally doing.”
How can I know if I am being monitored and if it will be used against me?
There being no requirements for employers to discuss how workers are tracked, or how that information will be stored or used is problematic, Leonard said.
He said it was hard to work out how deep employers were delving into the personal lives of their staff, but warned there needed to be safeguards against dodgy bosses.
Even under the Privacy Act, there are exceptions in the legality of monitoring, including “the defence of a legal or equitable claim”.
“For example, if an employer was sued by an employee for wrongful dismissal, then the employer would be entitled to rely upon that exception to access those records in the course of their reasonable-defence claim,” he said.
This does play into an argument of increasing productivity, and it has been found that people are often tracked because they are showing sub-par performance. How retroactively that information can be accessed, or even manipulated to show an employer’s side of an argument could be an issue.
The council worker mentioned previously did apply to see the data collected on him, to determine when he started being tracked and for what reasons. He was rebuffed once and, five months later, when the data was released, it did not define who had accessed it or for what purposes, leaving a grey area of whether it was for normal work-auditing processes, or to build a disciplinary case against him.
If you want to know how your company approaches it, be proactive and ask for a full description of employee practices.
Warning for bosses: Tracking employees could cost you
Leonard said there should be requirements for all bosses to outline what information was being collected, how it was being stored and what it could potentially be used for so employees had a better idea of the landscape and how to protect themselves.
He said most employees would find it quite reasonable for their location to be tracked to query if an international ‘bad actor’ is trying to hack the company, and maybe they would about productivity as well. But the conversation needs to be had.
Aaron McEwan, vice-president of research and advisory at Gartner HR, issued a warning for bosses that tracking employees fostered a level of distrust that could work against productivity in the long run.
“Nobody likes to be monitored and that’s very clear. Any attempt to monitor employees just further erodes some already-existing trust issues,” McEwan told Yahoo Finance.
“When employees are monitored they tend to have a higher propensity to do the wrong thing, they might slow their work down or, in the worst-case scenario, they might steal from the company.”
But, more concerningly, they focus only on those activities being monitored - like work emails or virtual meetings - which often does not reflect doing a good job all round.
“They're really just playing the game and that doesn't lead to employees engaging in the type of work or tasks that are going to actually drive impact and value in the business. So it's a bit of a wasted effort.”
He agrees there needs to be better regulation around workplace-privacy laws as we “absolutely know this is happening”. Alternatively, trust your employees.
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