Most Kiwis working from home fear bosses spy on every move

Bosses beware: if you think your company will benefit from surveilling employees working from home, think again.

That’s the message from AUT Professor of Human Resource Management Jarrod Haar, who oversaw the first major survey of remote workers in the age of Covid- 19.

Just over 1000 employees were surveyed in the first month of lockdown; about 250 were surveyed one month later.

As work from home ( WFH) becomes the norm for many employees, efforts to monitor their activities are also becoming normalised, Haar says.

Reports suggest more companies are using different approaches, including technology, to track how much time remote workers spend on the job.

Haar’s study shows that just after the first Covid lockdown, Kiwi employees felt their bosses were more likely to be surveilling them, with 52 per cent believing this was happening to an extent. Nearly two- thirds of the employees ( 62 per cent) said the most common surveillance came via their supervisor checking on them “to control my task completion”. Employees also believed they were being monitored online — but at a lower rate ( 46 per cent).

Online monitoring is certainly on the rise. The maker of one remotemonitoring tool, Hubstaff ( which can also be used for time increment-based billing) says sales have tripled since the first lockdowns in April.

Like many such programmes, which run in the background, every few minutes Hubstaff takes a snapshot of the websites you’ve browsed, the documents you have open and the social media sites you’ve visited. .

The study found that those who felt “spied on” were more likely to put in some extra effort at work — but they were also more likely to consider job hunting, and they had higher anxiety, depression, and stress.

Haar says Kiwi managers appear to be struggling with the WFH boom. He says this so- called clash of cultures — the pre- Covid “checking up on” employees versus the post- Covid “checking in with” them — can be problematic for individuals and organisations.

“The study shows attempts to monitor employees’ WFH activities have more drawbacks than advantages, harkening back to the old days of companies trying to command and control,” Haar said. “If organisations want to get the best of out their people, they need to trust them.

“Businesses that engage in such surveillance are eroding their workers’ trust and mental health — at a time when both are needed more than ever.”

Privacy commissioner John Edwards said employers were required to inform staff if collecting personal information in the form of monitoring software. Employers must be clear about what information is being collected, what it will be used for, and who it will be shared with.

“Employers should only collect information if it is necessary to fulfil a lawful purpose. Collecting masses of extraneous personal information to confirm your staff are working prescribed hours or completing required tasks may be unnecessary and raise issues under the Privacy Act.”

Edwards said he had received inquiries about whether an employer could require employees to keep their laptop cameras on at all times.

His office replied that, under employment law, an employee must comply with any reasonable instruction, but asking an employee to have a home camera on at all times raised major privacy concerns and was unlikely to be considered reasonable as it placed the employee under constant surveillance.

“Having a camera in a workplace for security and monitoring and insisting on having one on in an employee’s home are very different things. The employee would quite rightly have a heightened expectation of privacy in the home,” he says.

Principle 4 of the Privacy Act says the means of collection should not be unfair or unreasonably intrusive. Insisting an employee working from home keep a laptop camera on was likely to breach this principle.

“Instead, they could look at other ways keeping in touch with employees working remotely and gauging their work progress,” he said.

Collecting masses of extraneous personal information . . . may raise issues under the Privacy Act.

Privacy commissioner John Edwards