Speaking of Psychology - ‘Bossware’ and burnout: The psychology of workplace surveillance, with Tara Behrend, PhD

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

From keystroke trackers and webcam monitoring to GPS devices, an increasing number of us -- across a wide range of jobs -- are being monitored while we work. Tara Behrend, PhD, discusses why employers use these tools; how constant monitoring changes workers’ behavior and attention and how it can increase stress and burnout; the growing role of AI in collecting and analyzing employee data; and whether any laws regulate the kinds of data employers can collect. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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If so, you're not alone. In recent years, an increasing number of employers have begun using electronic surveillance methods to keep tabs on their employees. From keystroke trackers and webcams that record remote workers every move, to video tools that look for signs of fatigue on truckers' faces, to devices that track the movement and location of warehouse workers, an increasing number of us across a wide range of jobs are being my own. monitored while we work. Employers say that the tools help improve productivity and in

some cases safety, but critics contend that monitoring invades workers' privacy and often does more harm than good. Today we're going to talk to a psychologist who studies workplace digital surveillance about how being watched changes workers' behavior, how common are these digital surveillance devices, and how are they being used in different industries?

How has the rise of AI tools changed workplace surveillance? and what laws and regulations govern whether and how your employers can monitor you at work. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Tara Barron, the John Richard Butler II, endowed professor at the School of Human Resources and Labor Relations at Michigan State University. She is an industrial organizational psychologist whose research focuses on the ethical, social, and psychological implications of workplace technologies, including electronic surveillance.

She's authored more than 100 academic journal articles and has written or edited four books. She's also a program director for the National Science Foundation, where she chaired the Future of Work Working Group and oversaw the Science of Organizations program. Dr. Barron, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. How common are digital surveillance technologies and workplaces today? I mentioned a few examples in the introduction, but can you give us a fuller sense of the range of technologies and the way that they're being used? Yeah, those were great examples that you mentioned in your intro, and what we know is that these are becoming common in more and more occupations. I think just this morning, there was a news story about meta using this sort of technology.

for their software engineers. And you can think of automation and surveillance as going hand in hand, because in order to automate a job, you have to know a lot about it. And so there's an incentive to collect a lot of information from workers so that you can design these automation. So as the technology improves to automate more and more work, people are more and more attempted to use these tracking devices on their current workers. What are the reasons do companies and organizations give for doing this? I mean, what do they say they're trying to accomplish? And what do they do with the data they're collecting? Sure. So in many cases, I would say organizations don't know why they're collecting the data, but they do know that there's a sense that data is powerful and they should have a lot of it

and they'll figure out what it all means later. So they collect anything they can collect without really having a question in mind that they're trying to answer. Beyond that, there's always an increasing drive for efficiency, and people believe that these tracking tools can identify areas that efficiency could be improved. Maybe you are tracking your drivers so that you can optimize the route that they take through a neighborhood, or maybe you are tracking the movements that people make throughout a warehouse, and you think you can shorten the route. So it can start from a fairly neutral place. Many companies take this way too far and end up creating really unsafe conditions as a result.

How do you mean? What kinds of unsafe conditions? Sure. Well, so what monitoring does is create a really clear incentive and a really strong signal about what kinds of things are important. So if I'm tracking how fast you drive, but not how safely you drive, then I'll pay more attention to speed. whether I make a full stop at a stop sign. So what you're doing when you're tracking these

behaviors is you're shaping people's attention and you're creating a really strong motivation for them to optimize that metric at any cost. So that can mean taking shortcuts or doing things that are really unsafe or creating really unhelpful competition between people if you're trying to win some leaderboard. And all of those things are not really in the organization's best interest and end up costing more money over time. But it's a natural consequence of how we think about motivation. How else do people's behavior change when they know they're being watched at work and are the effects different for different types of jobs?

Yeah, so the monitoring is definitely a source of distraction. And whether that harms your job performance is going to depend on the kind of job you're doing and how much it's important that you're paying really close attention to something. if you're a driver and some small part of your attention is not on the road because you're worried about what the camera can see, that's going to increase accidents, right? Because you need your full attention. If your job requires a lot of vigilance, so a common example of that would be a security screener at the airport who's watching the x-ray, like you really need to pay attention and not make mistakes. You want people to have their full attention available to them to do that job. And the, the, the, the, the, more cognitive effort a job takes, the more dangerous it is to potentially take away some of that, some of those resources. So my colleagues and I are currently working on a study of police officers who are monitored with their body cameras. And they need to have their full attention, obviously. The camera is on not just when they're on a call, but in many cases when they're in their car between

calls, taking a break. And what it means is that they can't, they can't do that decompression, that stress relief that they would ordinarily be doing in that time. So they're just at this really high, intense level of energy and adrenaline all the time because they don't have a chance to relax. Generally speaking, how do employees feel about being monitored? Do we know, do they hate it or do they understand there might be some good reasons? And are there differences when we're talking about white collar, blue collar, pink collar in terms of how people feel. Yeah, yeah. So if we think about the surveillance as a source of organizations exerting power over people,

then the effects on you depend on how much power you have in that organization. So in some of our recent research, we were able to show that the people with the least power in the organizations are the most negatively affected by the surveillance, meaning it is being used to control them, to remove their autonomy, to remove their ability to use their judgment, to do their job, to punish them for things that they shouldn't be punished for, to really just control and micromanage them. But if you're in a job that has more power, say you're a surgeon, then that tracking is done for your safety, for your patient's safety. It might be used to give you feedback so that you can improve your job. But it's not being used in the same way to

to punish and control and second guess your judgment. But, I mean, speaking of surgeons, now that data belongs, say, to the hospital. So if the surgeon left an instrument in a person's body and the hospital has that information, I mean, they're not obligated to turn that over anybody, are they? No. Well, it's an interesting legal landscape. There's really not a lot of protections for workers in the U.S., but there's also not a lot of guidance in terms of who owns that data and how long they have to hold on to it and who they have to disclose.

Unless it overlaps with another area where we already have law, like FERPA or HIPAA would be two examples, where we already have rules about how to control patient data and student data in those two cases. But unless it falls into a category where we already have protections, their workers can be tracked for any reason under any circumstances and what the organization does, that data is really up to them. What about laws and regulations around this right now? I mean, our employers, there's certain things that they're allowed, I mean, you just made it sound like they can watch anything.

Are they obligated to tell you what they're doing? Right. So currently, no. There are a few states that have some requirements about transparency, meaning that that people are notified about what is being tracked, but there's no federal guidance on this issue. If you compare that to the EU or Canada or Australia, all of those places require disclosure of what is being monitored and also that only work-related behaviors are monitored. So you can't look at people's personal emails just because you can. You can't follow them with their company

device using their GPS. You can't do these things that are not job-related, but there are no restrictions or protections in the U.S. federally currently. We're going to take a short break. When we return, I'll talk with Dr. Barron about how AI is changing workplace monitoring and about how employees handle the stress of being monitored. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca.

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diversity is a strength that helps L'Oreal Group create the best beauty products for all people. Visit laurel.com to learn more. Now, we all know that people are pretty clever and that they can figure out workarounds. For example, I know someone who figured out that they could put a weight on the space bar of their computer, and it would look like they were working when they weren't, and in fact, they went on vacation. But anyway, are we as employees allowed to do anything to block surveillance? As it cut both ways. Sure. So I love that example of the space bar on the weight, because what it does is help us see very clearly that the things being monitored are not the things

that are most important to job performance. How many buttons I push on my keyboard is not a good measure of whether I'm doing my job well. And for many remote workers in particular, their availability icon is being used as a proxy to understand their performance. Like on teams, your little icon can turn from green to yellow if you're idle. And people worry about that. They worry about looking like they're not productive. And so there are devices you can buy online that will just move your mouse around for you all day so that you aren't looking unproductive. Right? But this is a, it's, it works because people are measuring the wrong things. Like,

they're measuring things that don't matter. So can you work around it? Well, sure, unless you get caught, and then you can probably be fired for that. But, but if you are being monitored in the way that you should be, which is to say evaluating aspects of your performance that actually do matter, then those incentives to get around it don't really exist anymore. Given all that, is surveillance getting more sophisticated? I mean, are people using AI, for example, to look at things that really make a difference, not whether you're typing on your keyboard, but the quality of the work that you're producing? Yes, the technologies are getting more sophisticated, but no, that does not mean that they're necessarily measuring things that matter now. It's just that they're grabbing potentially more

incidental data or more invasive data. So if I'm tracking your facial expressions and I can figure out that maybe you're displaying signs of illness and then I say, well, this person is not going to be productive. They've got a chronic illness that I can detect with my facial recognition and fire them. I mean, that's not better because it's more sophisticated. So people still have to think carefully about what a job is and how it should be evaluated. But the temptation is just to use these technologies to grab any information you can and make sense of it later. And it's really a dangerous game. But now this surveillance can be completely invisible to people. You might not know what's being captured for what purpose, who has access to it, what they're doing with it. They're not required

to tell you and you wouldn't necessarily see any evidence of that unless you noticed that your friend got fired and you start, you know, you start wondering and speculating. I wonder why they get fired. And so people will certainly come to their own conclusions about what's being tracked, but it doesn't mean that they're doing that based on any data. Given that companies can't really analyze all this data that they're collecting, should we just not worry at this point? I mean, you know, I'm just wondering, you know, how concerned should our listeners be if Big Brother is watching them? I think that's a fair question, that there are plenty of people who would argue that privacy is a thing of the past, that everything we do and say online is there forever and that we can't really control that. And I do think it's true that privacy is much harder to attain.

I mean, now there are maybe people walking down the street wearing glasses that are recording you and providing personal information to you and you have no way of providing consent or not consent. for that kind of activity. So there's certainly just an onslaught of threats to privacy, but I don't think that means we shouldn't care about it. We should certainly still be thoughtful about the kinds of things that we put online, for example, or what we write with our company device, even if it's our personal email. I mean, I think maintaining boundaries is maybe even more important than ever. And taking that seriously as a way of protecting yourself. Do you have any other advice for employees who are being monitored just in terms of handling the stress and staying aware of how it might affect their work? Yeah. To the extent that there's a benefit from being monitored, it would be about receiving feedback potentially in real time and using that to improve your performance to keep you safer. And I think adopting it for that purpose can potentially be valuable. there's a natural tendency that a lot of people have, which is that when your freedom is restricted, you have a sense of needing to fix the balance by asserting your freedom. And in some ways, that can just really not be in your own best interest. The idea that we might get our employers back, right, by like, I'm going to show you because you micromanage me.

And now I'm not really helping my own career. I'm not helping my colleagues by doing that. I'm just sort of acting out emotionally. I think we can resist that temptation, but I also think it's really important to advance protections for workers. I mean, there is currently a really dramatic power imbalance. And the way to do that is not for individual people to get into fights with their bosses, but rather to try to achieve federal protections. And are there efforts on that front right now that you're aware of?

There are. I will actually direct people to the GAO put out a great report, the government accountability office, just recently, about best practices related to organizational monitoring. And there are some recommendations in that report that I think are really excellent that various other agencies can adopt. So other agencies that think about worker safety would be OSHA, NIOSH, the CDC, all of these organizations. are thinking about work or safety, and they can incorporate rules about monitoring into what they already do to keep people safe at work. What do you see long term? I mean, is this something that is here to stay and will it get better, or is it just going to become even more pervasive? I wish I could see the future. I think it's hard for any of us to know what the future brings these days. I think in the absence of any intervention, what I see is people being treated more and more like interchangeable machine swapped out at a moment's notice. And I think that's a

really negative trend. In order to work alongside automation, people need to constrain their behavior. They have to behave in predictable ways so the automation knows what to do. And this surveillance is essentially accelerating that outcome to say that the people are having their behavior constrained more and more and more so that they are becoming more like machines so that the automation can understand them and work with them and potentially replace them. I think a lot of companies are counting on that. They're betting on that. I'm personally very skeptical about claims that this job can be automated or this task can be automated. I think it shows a real lack of understanding about how complex work really is. And people will start learning their lessons as they try to automate

things and then discover the consequences of that. But I think we'll have to go through a period where people are learning the hard way about what can and cannot be automated. Do you have any tips for employees who are basically creeped out by being watched? I mean, should you turn off the camera during Zoom or team meetings or don't carry your phone with you to the bathroom? I mean, what, you know, what should you do to try to protect some modicum of privacy? Yeah, I think being aware of what your devices can capture about you is really important. I think a lot of people don't appreciate that their cell phone is a listening device, whether it's any app is activated or not. It's listening to you.

It's recording what you. you search, who you email, who you're standing near, where you are, if you're a driver, how fast you're going. So being aware of what information is being captured by devices that you are aware of is really important. And making sure that you practice good boundaries and you're not conducting personal conversations in the office. I think it's already a good habit. But it's even more important now, given that the walls could be listening to you at any moment. Keeping your cameras off during meetings is an interesting one because that's a, that's something that affects your coworkers too, right? So that's a conversation that should be

happening at the team level, potentially about about team level practices. But I think that's a reasonable thing to initiate with your, with your work group or with your manager to say, what are some things we can do collectively to, to have better boundaries and limit the amount of personal information that's being stored. What got you interested in this line of research? Well, that's interesting. So I've been working on this for a very long time. And the first few projects were in the context of training, that surveillance or monitoring,

to give it a more neutral name, could be potentially really valuable in training research because it's giving people instant feedback that they can act on instead of waiting until you make a bunch of mistakes, and then a week later people tell you what you did wrong. It can be a personal coach potentially. But from the beginning, there was a question about whether this feedback would be beneficial or distracting. And from there, as more and more evidence accumulated about the potential harms of surveillance, like in a societal sense, then the focus of the question really changed to be more about the consequences and not about this sort of might. micro context of personalized training.

For listeners who want to know more about this kind of surveillance software, who's making it? I mean, how would I find out more about it if I wanted to know where it's coming from and what potentially might be used for? There are just thousands and thousands of vendors who will sell you devices to do this kind of tracking. What's interesting is that the device might not be manufactured for that purpose, but you can still use it for that once it's created. And there's a great example of a device that was created to be an environmental monitor so that people could control the climate control at a building,

like whatever went home, you could turn down the air conditioning for the day. So it had a really very pro-social intent, but some people figured out that you could use that information to decide or to determine who was staying late at the office, who was sneaking out early. And so that once the data there, you can make all kinds of other inferences from it. So any device can be used for this. There are also lots and lots of vendors who will sell devices specifically for this purpose. And they might be marketed as dashboards, for example. So a hospital might be sold a dashboard so they can monitor the movements of their personnel more efficiently, deploy somebody more quickly to an emergency. It's not going to be called spyware, right? But it still can be used for

that purpose. So what are the questions you're looking at now? Do you have some research going at the moment or the things that you're planning that you're going to be asking about? Yeah, so I think we're really interested lately in two things. One is the different effects that people experience when they have a secure, safe job versus not. More and more people in the United States have jobs that we would call precarious. Maybe they're not full-time. Maybe they don't offer benefits. They're not unionized. Your schedule is not predictable from week to week. The more your job sounds like that, the less power you really have to stand up for yourself to employer mistreatment. And so we're really interested still in how that can be made even worse in the context of technological

surveillance. And the other area that I think is really important is the issue of distraction that we talked about a little bit already, that what's happening to people when their attention is being taken away from what they should be doing towards sort of self-monitoring and making sure that you're acting correctly on camera. What happens is that you're just always on stage, right? You're always thinking a little bit about how you're being perceived and making sure that you're putting forward the right image or the right behavior. And that's very taxing. We know that people can't keep that up all day every day without burning out. And we're seeing lots and lots of burnout as a result of being always on stage. Depending on the kind of job we're talking about,

that can be really, really dangerous. Police officers, I mentioned already, think of air traffic controllers. You need to take breaks when you do these kinds of jobs. Are there jobs where surveillance isn't happening and you think won't happen? For example, you're an academician. Is a big brother watching you? I think yes probably so there are and there are good reasons to do so there are good reasons to make sure I am not emailing students and yelling at them or as a public employee our email communication is requestable by FOIA and so in that way like there are there is quite some tracking that is in some cases like quite quite intensive but there's no cameras on me right now except for this camera

that we're using for the podcast. I think there will always be some level of that because there's an increasing need to do tracking and data keeping for liability and for those kinds of issues that might come up. So I'm not really confident saying that there's an occupation that is not monitored unless you are self-employed and you live out in the countryside and you know,

you're accountable to nobody, then maybe you're not tracked. Oh, well, Dr. Barron, it wasn't the happiest note to end up, but I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been really interesting. Sorry to be a bummer. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology. Or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can also email us at Speaking of Psychology at AP.

www.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.