The Decibel - How your boss might be monitoring you

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Electronic monitoring of employees has been going on for years, but it’s seen a serious boost during the pandemic. It can consist of tracking anything from location, online activity status, keyboard and mouse movements, URLs – some even take photos of employees from their computer cameras and take screenshots to ensure they are working. Ontario has legislation that now makes it mandatory for companies with more than 25 people to tell employees how they’re monitoring them and why.Nita Chhinzer, professor in the department of management at the University of Guelph, explains the extent of this kind of monitoring in Canada, and how this Ontario law might change things.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. When so many companies moved to working from home during the pandemic, there was a jump in something that's been going on for years — electronic monitoring. Ontario has now joined a list of provinces that have laws around this. Bigger companies have until early November to tell their employees how they're being monitored. And across Canada, companies are keeping an eye on employees in a variety of different ways. So the first step is how. How are you monitoring them? Are you going to use GPS? Are you going to use cameras?

Are you using email? Are you using URL trackers, mouse trackers? Nita Chinzer is a professor in the Department of Management at the University of Guelph. She studies employment law and human resources management. She's here to tell us what kind of monitoring is happening in Canada and the effects that this new Ontario law might have. This is The Decibel. Nita, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a good topic. Let's chat.

Before we jump into the big issue here, can you just start by helping me understand, when we use the term electronic monitoring, what exactly is that? That's a really important differentiation for us to start with. So a lot of people think electronic monitoring is limited to emails, and they think that it's when they're at their computer and they're making decisions to send and receive information. That's electronic monitoring. But it's actually much broader than that. It's been going on for a long time. So, for example, Amazon Pickers at a warehouse.

There's handheld devices that have GPS on them that are actually tracking how far they're walking and how quickly they're recording stuff. And as they're scanning products, putting them into boxes, it's tracking how quickly they're scanning and the accuracy level of their scanning. So that's a form of electronic monitoring. There may be electronic monitoring with cameras that are in the office that could have been put in for preventative reasons or for protection reasons, but we are in fact monitoring the employee. Prior to COVID-2, we would all have these little lanyards and those were our access cards to the office. So we were still being tracked when we would sign in and sign out for the day and when we would log in and log out. When we think about people who work

in retail or grocery stores, it will be, you know, the speed at which the scanning is happening or any of the monitoring of the registers that people are working on actually monitors what they're doing. And then of course, we have people who are concerned about monitoring of their phones and what websites they visit. And that's another form of electronic monitoring. So people are also thinking that it's just limited to company devices, but it could also be on some of your personal devices if you give permission. So electronic monitoring is anything the company is doing that involves technology that may be used to review or track where employees are, what employees are doing, when they're coming and going. How extensive would you say

is electronic monitoring in Canada today? So the surveys that have come out more recently say that 30% of employees know for a fact that they are being monitored. So one out of every three. But that 80% are saying we actually don't know what the policy is. So they know that their email is being tracked, but they don't know what it's being tracked for, how frequently it's being tracked, what's allowed and what's not allowed. Or they know that their GPS on a company car is being tracked, but they don't know why it's being tracked, what is happening to the information and what the rules are. Very few companies are doing a good job explaining what's being tracked and where it's being used. And that fundamentally creates an environment

where people get nervous and it builds mistrust. So that kind of information disclosure is known to build trust. But when we have information hiding or we withhold information, then people get more nervous. So without knowing what the policy is, without knowing what the rules are, without knowing why my company is tracking my GPS, I'm thinking to myself, they're spying on me. They're trying to get the, you know, they're trying to get a reason to get me fired, right? You end up thinking the absolute worst case scenario. And based on the research you do, like what proportion of companies would you say are doing at least some form of electronic monitoring? I think all companies are doing some form of electronic monitoring. All companies?

Yeah, if we think about even factories. So think about how broadly electronic monitoring is designed. We have these companies that have wide monitoring of cameras, or they have check-in and check-out systems. So if we go back three or four decades, people would come into work and they'd hit a punch clock. And that would be the start of their shift. And then they'd hit a punch clock and that would be the end of the shift. That was electronic monitoring. Right. And so it sounds like it is very extensive these days. What kind of monitoring are we seeing going on in Canada, Anita, if we actually look at the specific kind of thing that's actually going on? Yeah, so there's a lot.

You're being monitored for your time, of course, because that's the easiest, most common metric. So it's called time policing when you're being monitored for how much time you're spending at work, how much time you're spending on each activity, etc. We're also being geo-fenced. So geo-fencing is where they use GPS to come up with an artificial fence to say, okay, if you're within this fenced parameter, you are at work. Whoa. Geo-fencing. Wow. So that geo-fencing has been going on for a long time. So we monitor time, we monitor geography, and then of course we monitor productivity. So productivity for a factory worker, or even for someone who works at McDonald's,

if anyone here has ever worked for fast food or sales, you know that they're tracking how many seconds it takes you to complete that order. That's electronic monitoring. But what we're doing with this productivity is now we're trying to imagine how productive a marketing exec is based on how much time they spend at their desk or how productive or efficient a professor is at writing a book based on how much time they're spending at their desk or their keystrokes or what websites are going to like there's not really electronic measures of productivity for most of the knowledge workers.

We're not data entry clerks. It's not that you could manage how many minutes we're away from our desk and say, oh, those are unproductive times. Yet, in lieu of something else, companies didn't know what to do. So they started doing keystroke monitoring and also monitoring to see if your mouse was moving every 10 minutes or so to show if you were active. And I've also read about certain times like webcams taking pictures of people at their desk or screenshots. That's also sounds like it's a form of monitoring that this

takes as well then. Completely. So there's all kinds of different forms that this this would take. And it sounds like from what you're saying, it's been going on for years. But I want to ask you specifically about during the pandemic, because a lot of people have moved from working in office jobs to working from home during the pandemic. So how did the pandemic change things? So it changed things in the sense of out of sight, out of mind. And managers started to think about who's really present at work, even with flexible hours. During the pandemic, people were trying their best, but not everyone was available all the time. And companies began to think that means that people are not here. They're not contributing. They're not being productive. Although productivity ratios

show us that people were more productive than before. That's interesting. So, but are we seeing more monitoring now in the pandemic? Yes. So there was some fear mongering and really predatory marketing and advertising from the companies that were developing software at the time. And they really were the ones that were pushing and advertising, you know, kind of that message to parents when it's dark outside, you're in the messaging saying, do you know where your kids are? It was the same kind of messaging. Do you know where your employees are? Messaging was being used in marketing. And that's where some companies started to really think about,

oh my God, what's happening. And then of course, in the media, there was a few cases. So there were, there was cases about an individual who was actually moonlighting. They were working two jobs simultaneously because they were both remote jobs. There are stories about people who were using the company property in inappropriate ways. How accurate though are these technologies? And actually, I guess, actually showing the work that people are doing, right? Because I'm thinking maybe my mouse isn't moving, but I'm reading an article or something on the side, like I'm still working, but my computer, the way that it's being monitored might not show that. Exactly. So these devices are going to be accurate to the point at

which the job requires them to be accurate. So for example, if we're taking a look at scanning at grocery stores, that's going to be highly accurate because we actually know that's a core function of the job. Now this place that it gets really wonky is where they try to use standard systems and non-standard jobs. So like you said, for you, if you're reading an article, you're being productive, but you're not demonstrating that because that doesn't involve technology. You know where it gets really funky is the salespeople. Research has shown that the higher the key strokes for salespeople on their computer, the lower their productivity. Because salespeople need to go out there and meet people and build relationships.

So you don't want them to have a lot of keystrokes on their computer. We'll be right back. We've talked about this in broad terms, but like, why are those things something that an employer wants or needs to do? I think it comes down to balancing the employer's demanding flexibility with the, so the employees want flexibility, but the employers want productive workers. So they're saying we can give you some flexibility. Sure. Work when you want to work. You could work remotely. You could work from anywhere. You could work from a Starbucks. You could work from a friend's house. You can work from the cottage. Sure,

I'll give you that flexibility with time and location. But in exchange for that, I'm expecting you to still contribute to the work in a meaningful way. And we're not here trying to harm and catch the majority of people who are doing really well. We want to ensure that our trust is not misplaced. And let me give you an example. Let's suppose that we have five workers and I've trusted all of them to work remotely and they all were working at the same level and they internally know that Jeremy is infrequently coming into work, missing all the meetings, not holding up their share of the work. Well, if I let Jeremy continue on, get equal rewards, get same job security, get the same flexibility as all of the other workers, I'm actually creating a toxic work environment for

the other workers who have to not only pick up the slack for Jeremy, the one employee who's missing, but also have high feelings of inequity and would say, how is this fair? Like the company's not doing its job. They're letting this person who's like, who's a net negative contributor continue on with the organization. They're paying them the same as what I'm getting paid. They have the same job title, same job security. How is the company not holding them accountable? So it also affects colleague-to-colleague relationships. Couldn't this backfire, though? Because if you as an employee feel that your employer doesn't trust you, I mean, that would cause a toxic work environment as well.

Yeah, so I don't think that the concept of trust comes down from if you're being monitored or not. I think trust comes down to a perspective of how fairly you're treated. So the research shows us that there's a very strong correlation between trust and fairness perceptions. So there are people who fundamentally will fraud systems or will shirk their work. And my trust in my employer will actually increase if the person who is producing less, who's the fraud, who's the shirker, actually gets reprimanded. Because then my trust in my employer is that they are making a good decision. They're not reprimanding all of us. They're monitoring all of us, sure. But not all of us are getting a negative outcome from this. Only the people

who truly deserve it are getting a negative outcome. What about the privacy of employees, though? How do you balance this kind of technology with an employee's right to privacy? So email monitoring and right to disconnect are a yin-yang relationship. Right to disconnect gives us as the employees the power to say, this is my off time. You cannot monitor me. You can't expect me to respond to emails. You can't expect me to respond to emails. You can't set me up for meetings and you can't reprimand me for taking my time off. And that's what the right to disconnect legislation said. Now, if we take a look at electronic monitoring, that's kind of the yang of that, because now we're saying, okay, that's fine.

If you have the right to be off when you want to be off and we won't monitor you, then we also have a fair expectation that when you're at work, you're actually where you are when you say you're there. What kind of consequences could there be for this? Could employees actually get fired as a result of this technology and this tracking? Yeah, completely. And they have been getting fired. There was a really interesting case out of Hamilton, Ontario in 2013, where they used GPS tracking and they found that the people who were responsible for filling potholes in the city, there were city employees, 31 of them were working for about half an hour a day filling the potholes. And then they were using the company truck and company property, including company time, to actually either go to a local bar, run personal errands, go home or otherwise be off site. And as a result of that, 29 people got fired.

Well, let's talk about the specific legislation then, Nita. This is coming in in Ontario, where companies with more than 25 employees now have to disclose their electronic monitoring policy to their employees. Can you just help me understand what exactly does this legislation do and what does it not do? Sure. So the legislation says you have to respond and let your employees know how. So the first step is how. How are you monitoring them? Are you going to use GPS? Are you going to use cameras?

Are you using email? Are you using URL trackers, mouse trackers? Let the employees know how you're monitoring them. The second is to let employees know when they're being monitored. And largely, we're only allowed to be monitored during work times. There is very little need for us to be monitored outside of work times. So you have to let them know how you're monitoring them, when you're monitoring them, and what is being monitored. Is email being monitored? Is your time being monitored? Is your physical geography being monitored? So that's the parameters essentially around what is expected to be communicated. But what's not clear is that employees or employers are actually allowed to have different

policies for different groups of employees. The other thing in the legislation that it's not well understood is that your work devices plus your personal devices can be monitored if you opt to use your personal devices for work-based reasons. That's an important thing for people to know too. And so with this new legislation in Ontario, then Nita, I guess how could this new legislation actually change things? The new legislation really brings to light holding the employer accountable for what they are measuring and why they are measuring it. So what's interesting is there are a group of people who are up in arms saying, oh my goodness, this is our privacy being

violated. But in reality, this is actually transparency being added. So I think we have three different pots of possible employers here. One pot is the one who've been doing it right to begin with. So they had established policies and they shared it with people. And now they're just looking to do slight tweaks to make sure that they cover off the what is being measured, how it's being measured and when it's being measured. But then we'll have a second pot. And the second pot is those employers who, you know, were running around like chickens with their heads cut off during COVID, trying to just use any ad hoc system that they could find. And now those groups are being forced to think systematically about what policies they have and if they're legit. Because as soon as I have to defend my decisions externally, I look at them a little bit more closely. Then we'll have a group, and we always do, of super shady employers. And those super

shady employers may have already been crossing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable monitoring. They may have been overstepping what their rights were. And now they'll have to communicate what their policies are to the employee. And the employee now, with this new policy, has a method of complaining about it. Just like when I don't get my minimum wage, if I don't get paid every two weeks, if I don't get my overtime pay, I could go to the employment standards office and put in a complaint with a labor standards officer. That same process now exists if the email policy is being violated. So if I feel that it's stretching the boundaries or if I feel like

I need help, the company's not articulating the policy, I can actually go ahead and say, okay, I'm going to call up the Employment Standards Act, talk to an officer who's a paid government official, and see if they could help me resolve this issue. So I think it's quite empowering. Nita, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thanks for your time. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.