Private eye: the rise of employee surveillance software

Working from home? You may be being watched. The use of surveillance software is on the rise, writes Susan Horsburgh, as anxious employers check in on their workers’ productivity.

I have to admit, the dashboard numbers don’t look good. Not only am I hovering around a 35 per cent “activity” rate, there’s a bar graph showcasing all my lowbrow online predilections. Among multiple misdemeanours yesterday, I squandered two minutes looking at photos of nursing home residents re-creating classic album covers (93-year-old Vera posing as singer Adele!) and another four minutes trawling Far Side cartoons (“The crêpes of wrath”!).

Teramind, the employee surveillance software I’ve downloaded, urges bosses to “see who your winners and laggards are, and optimize your workforce”. It seems I fall firmly into the laggard camp so perhaps it’s just as well the only time this freelancer is wasting is her own.

For many employers, though, the stakes are high, especially in these shaky economic times. Now that staff have retreated from the office and the eagle eyes of their managers, the idea of cat videos and Facebook binges eating into company time is enough to make any boss edgy – hence this year’s boom in “employee monitoring tools”.

Teramind reports that Australian trials and subscriptions both tripled from

January to March, while Hubstaff, a popular time-tracking tool, has seen its number of Australian customers increase by 400 per cent since the onset of the pandemic, in industries from construction to ecommerce. “Many people were able to retain their jobs,” says Teramind vice-president of global operations Eli Sutton, “because management [found] a tool that could help them operate normally.”

But where does “supervision” end and “spying” begin? Is this software an invaluable accountability tool or a creepy laptop Big Brother? Of course, monitoring isn’t new – 80 years ago Bendigo miners had their clothes examined by the company caretaker for smuggled gold specks, while factory and office workers have routinely used cards to clock in and out of shifts – but the intensity now is next-level.

The latest software can log apps, websites and keystrokes; take regular screenshots; track locations; and record emails and phone calls – even show a manager in real time what’s happening on a worker’s screen – all potentially without the employee knowing it. It can then crunch the numbers to come up with an individual productivity score.

With Teramind, the computer/worker is deemed “idle” in as little as five minutes if there’s no keystroke or mouse click so it’s a strong motivation to make those coffee breaks snappy.

It sounds draconian but Sutton isn’t having it; he argues that, despite the “misguided notion that [it] exists to find dirt on employees so they can get fired”, surveillance software offers employers a crucial understanding of their human resources. BlueRock, a Melbourne business advisory firm with a staff of about 170, swears by an app owned by New Zealand company Xero that it uses to log employee hours. “If we didn’t have something like WorkflowMax we’d be in all sorts,” says Ryan Kagan, director of digital. “We’d be hoping that people were doing the right thing at the right time, whereas this tool conclusively tells us how people are really working and their level of commitment can then be correlated.”

BlueRock chose WorkflowMax, primarily a project-management tool, over more intrusive staff surveillance apps (“If I didn’t trust them, I wouldn’t have hired them,” says Kagan) but some companies are evangelical

about the more high-capability software. According to one review on comparison website Capterra, Texas-based IT company Globonics uses Teramind to identify remote workers who routinely waste their first hour on the job. It also scours emails for keywords, uses screen recordings in performance appraisals and springs employees for combing job-seeking sites. “Needless to say,” writes Globonics founder Brandon Griffin, “we LOVE it!”

The software may work but with productivity improvement can come fear and resentment – neither of which are known for enhancing workplace morale. “It was like a prison bracelet,” says one Melbourne consultant, who used a time tracker on a public art project. “I had to log on when I worked but the parameters became very narrow as to what ‘work’ was.” The boss told her to log off for toilet breaks and even for phone calls about the project. “It was probably not so much the software as her mismanagement of it,” says the freelancer. “It contrasted with a council art project a year later when I worked from home – they gave me a timeline and a set number of hours. I probably put in an extra 20 hours but it was a pleasure to do that because the trust was there.”

Matt Beard, a fellow at Sydney’s Ethics Centre, describes the software’s use as ethically dubious, especially if it’s secret. “An employer’s relationship with staff is not just one of resource extraction,” he says. “It’s an easy way out to say, ‘We are paying for your time, therefore we are entitled to your unfettered attention for eight hours.’ Employees still have rights.”

Faced with an oppressive system, employees inevitably find workarounds, using their personal phones in the office, for example. The more invasive surveillance software is “nefarious and overstates the sophistication of what is actually possible”, adds Beard. “If you get three screenshots from someone and they appear to have social media tabs open, that tells you nothing about the quality of their work.”

The software certainly doesn’t tell the whole story. Chunks of this article were composed in my head while tossing in bed at 2am or flinging a tennis ball at my cavoodle – and that time isn’t logged anywhere. By Teramind’s reckoning, I’m also “idle” while speaking to experts, reading printouts of research studies and poring over interview transcripts.

Perhaps the software works better in, say, call centres, where workers have long been monitored and have strict productivity targets. “That’s the kind of model being replicated across different industries,” says Jathan Sadowski, author of Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling our Lives, and Taking Over the World. “The intensity of surveillance is concerning but even more so is this ramping up of a managerial mindset – the idea that employers not only own the value that workers create but every second of their day.”

No-one likes being micromanaged – in fact, studies show electronic surveillance heightens employee stress and anxiety – but that’s almost irrelevant, according to Sadowski. “As long as productivity is kept up, that’s really what companies are looking at, especially now when margins are tighter than ever. These technologies are ultimately about discipline and domination.”

In Australia there’s a mess of outdated state and federal laws but workplace surveillance is generally legal provided staff are informed. That notice, however, can often come in the fine print of an employment contract at the start of a job. Every worker should now assume they’re being watched, according to employment lawyer Giri Sivaraman from class action practice Maurice Blackburn – yet he says clients are still shocked when they’re busted for watching pornography or spouting controversial opinions on social media. Companies are obsessed with brand protection, adds Sivaraman, and that apparently trumps an employee’s legitimate right to privacy. “Employers make it their business to know everything,” he says.

For those working at their kitchen table, home may not be the safe haven they think it is – not that they’re necessarily conscious of their employers encroaching on it. “If you stopped to think about it, it would be crippling,” says Sivaraman. “And it’s not like Big Brother, where there’s a camera directly above you. It’s much more insidious.”

As for me, I’ve taken the all-seeing Teramind “agent” off my computer and reclaimed my privacy – because not even the joy of working in trackpants is enough to compensate for the loss of that.