At the outset of pandemic office closures, 98 Buck Social, a social media marketing company based in Florida, installed an application on all employee computers that randomly captures screenshots of desktop activity every 10 minutes. Amazon and Facebook have shared that they’re tracking badge swipes to ensure that employees ordered to return to the office regularly report to work. JPMorgan Chase developed its own software to record how long employees spend on Zoom calls, emails, and spreadsheets, among other activities.
These real-world examples are part of a growing movement to track employee productivity through increasingly sophisticated technology, such as desktop surveillance, biometric smart badges, location tracking, or desk heat sensors. While this trend preceded the pandemic, it’s only accelerated with employees’ continued interest in hybrid or remote work arrangements. One recent report suggested that nearly 80% of employers were engaging in some electronic monitoring of employees.
The ultimate decision to use these technologies typically comes from upper management. However, the reality is that implementation and utilization of such systems typically falls on supervisors.
With this in mind, we set out to better understand two critical questions: First, to what extent do employees blame their supervisors for the monitoring? Second, can the supervisor do anything to alleviate the repercussions of monitoring?
We suspected that if supervisors could not control whether to use the monitoring systems, they may be able to control how they use the information from these systems. Specifically, we expected that whether supervisors used the system for control (i.e., performance evaluation) or feedback (i.e., performance development) purposes would determine whether their relationship with their subordinates would suffer from using monitoring systems.
We conducted two studies to assess our predictions. First, we conducted an online experiment with 186 U.S.-based participants, recruited from the crowdsourcing platform Prolific Academic. Half were told that a study administrator would access their webcam to record their activities and monitor their computers to prevent cheating on a work test. To increase the believability of the experiment, we temporarily activated the participants’ webcams to simulate recording; in reality, participants’ experimental activities were not recorded.
About half of the participants received positive and constructive feedback from the study administrator following the initial test. Those who had been monitored were told that this feedback was specifically based on the study administrator’s observations.
We also conducted a field study with 298 full-time employees and their supervisors across a variety of U.S.-based companies. Employees were asked over several months to complete a series of questionnaires that measured the extent to which they were being monitored and how they perceived their relationship with their supervisor. We also asked supervisors of these employees to rate their subordinates’ work performance and counterproductive behavior (deviance).
In both studies, we found that electronic monitoring can erode the supervisor-subordinate relationships.
Our results show that when supervisors used monitoring for control purposes, employees were more prone to engage in deviant behavior (e.g., time thievery, inattentiveness, cyberloafing, tardiness, etc.) and their performance decreased.
These findings didn’t emerge when supervisors used the data for developmental purposes. When supervisors used information obtained from monitoring as developmental feedback, employees continued to trust and maintain positive relationships with their supervisors. They also performed better in their jobs and engaged in fewer counterproductive behaviors.
While employee-tracking software can be intrusive, it also presents opportunities for gaining profound insights into employee behavior, such as which applications employees use most frequently or whether employees are at risk of overworking based on their work patterns and productivity.
Based on our research, we offer three suggestions to help organizational leaders achieve the benefits of these systems while preventing the backlash against supervisors.
1. Be transparent about using monitoring for developmental feedback.
First, organizational leaders — particularly decision-makers — should set up monitoring systems to be developmental, and they should be fully transparent about that purpose. Giving employees advance notice helps them to mentally prepare for surveillance and to develop expectations that put pressure on employers to use monitoring in a developmental way.
A survey from Gartner Insights showed that employee acceptance of monitoring surges to 70% when companies simply explain the scope and purpose of monitoring. This means implementing these systems with significant advance warning, respecting privacy boundaries, and tracking data that easily translates into developmental tips.
For example, Microsoft’s Viva Insights collects employee data across various Microsoft platforms (e.g., Teams, Outlook, etc.) to provide supervisors insights into workflow and communication patterns across entire teams, as well as actionable recommendations for addressing inefficiencies. These types of systems — which emphasize barriers to success and strategies for improvement — encourage supervisors to use employee monitoring in a developmental way. They also have greater potential to be used to promote employee well-being, as they also focus on unit- and system-level issues that harm individuals.
2. Train supervisors on how to deliver feedback derived from monitoring in a developmental, non-punitive way.
Supervisors should be trained to hold discussions about information collected through monitoring separately from overall performance evaluations. This helps separate the developmental message from any rewards or punishments typically associated with formal evaluations.
Discussions based on monitoring data should focus on specific behavioral incidents or trends. This allows for feedback delivery using effective frameworks like the Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) model. For example, supervisors should describe the task the employee was working on, the activity observed through the monitoring system, and the results this activity contributed to at the time and throughout the day. This feedback could include observations of both positive and negative behaviors, emphasizing how to improve in each area.
3. Highlight the benefits of performance monitoring — and deliver on your promises.
Because monitoring leads employees to believe their manager is “taking away” desired benefits, such as autonomy, for monitoring to not “blow up” in supervisors’ faces, the organization must offer something in return.
For example, development-oriented performance monitoring may provide companies with data about how employee teams can maintain productivity while working remotely at times, which could be used to offer employees greater remote flexibility.
Additionally, since employee monitoring can empower employees with greater knowledge of how their work contributes to higher-level unit success, supervisors may be able to grant greater authority over their performance goal-setting. Each employee will have different views on what they value, but it’s incumbent upon organizations to consider ways they can compensate for employees’ lost autonomy.
While our research offers valuable insights into how supervisors can best utilize employee monitoring technology, it does not suggest that developmental electronic monitoring is universally effective. As previous research strongly indicates, certain forms of monitoring can be highly invasive and may result in a loss of personal agency. Employers run the risk of their monitoring efforts backfiring, undermining the very benefits they aim to achieve, such as increased productivity and reduced deviant behavior, if the monitoring is excessively intrusive and controlling. Our points relate simply to steps organizations and their supervisors can take to avoid costly losses associated with monitoring.
In addition to preparing supervisors to use monitoring technology in a developmental manner, employers should consider the broader context in which monitoring is introduced. Existing research suggests that employees are much more likely to accept monitoring and not respond adversely if they already believe their employer is generally fair.
Companies frequently cast supervisors as passive participants in the monitoring process, merely tasked with observing and regulating employee behavior. This type of messaging can pose risks, both to the overall effectiveness of the monitoring process and the relationships these supervisors have with their subordinates. To address these risks, organizations that rely on employee monitoring should make thoughtful choices in how they conduct monitoring and ensure that supervisors are adequately prepared to utilize the collected information for developmental purposes, rather than punitive ones, when engaging with their subordinates.