The most successful implementation relies on a fine balance: using data for performance while ensuring trust and the right to privacy at work.
The Double-Edged Sword of Digital Monitoring
Digital monitoring software can monitor everything from applications and keyboards totime spent on tasks. When done well, these can become a great tool:
- Increase productivity: Decrease the time spent on activities not related to work.
- Increase accuracy: Provide concrete proof of work for client billing; therefore, there is no risk to the employee's payroll.
- Fairness and accountability: Provide measurable data for performance management and workloads.
With this type of implementation, however, things could easily become surveillance of the workplace if there is not adequate guidance provided, thus causing fear, resentment, and an erosion of trust.
The Three Pillars of Ethical Tracking
For a digital monitoring plan to be successful, effective, and ethical, it must be based on three foundational pillars: transparency, context, and purpose.
Pillar 1: Transparency (The "Why" and "How")
The number one trait to build digital trust is openness. Your employees should never be surprised by the fact or the way they are being monitored.
- Establish Clear Communication of Policies: Organizations must have a clear, written set of policies that outline the official type of data that will be collected (e.g., the application names and logs of time), what methodology will be used to acquire the data (e.g., taking screenshots every 10 minutes on a job and monitoring application usage for activity), and who (specific individuals) will have access to said information.
- Clarify Your Purpose: Frame your usage of monitoring such that team members do not need to feel a misplaced distrust but rather to create an ethical tracking tool for a project to accurately monitor payroll, well-being of clients, balance workloads, and stay on track for focused work instead.
- Open Access to the System: Employees should have access to their own collected data to show the system is meant to be utilized as a collaborative tool instead of an anonymous judge.
Pillar 2: Concentrate on Context Rather than Control
Ethical monitoring looks at outcomes and support instead of micromanagement. The idea is to gather data that can work to the business’ advantage, instead of gathering information that intrudes on personal space.
- Emphasize Productivity vs. Privacy: The software should capture time spent on work activities and project tasks and not overly personal and private information. For example, checking the active application window and the high-level activity score should normally be more ethical than collecting keystroke data continuously.
- Measure Outcomes, Not Activity: Any data collected should then be used to engage in targeted coaching conversations about efficiency and prioritization and not merely to criticize low activity periods. An employee may have simply experienced low activity while working very hard to think through a complex problem.
- Right to Off-Hours: Monitoring should cease once an employee has logged off for the day. The employee must feel psychologically safe in knowing he/she is not being tracked once the workday is over.
Pillar 3: Purposeful Data Use
The ethical standard is based on how the data is being used. Employee tracking ethics state that the data must be for a legitimate business purpose.
- Data Security: Data collected should be stored securely and accessible only to specific personnel.
- Avoid Punitive Uses: If data is consistently used to punish and reprimand, it will hurt morale and increase turnover. Use the data to provide support, training, and workflow improvements first.
- Balance and Fairness: Use the data, when available, to praise high performers and ensure fair distribution of work and resources, demonstrating that the system benefits the team as a whole.
Building a Culture of Trust
We require trust and transparency in the workplace, not only for digital monitoring to be a force for good, but also for employees themselves to be able to clearly see the value benefit, clarity, reward, and better project matching and to see the effort the employee put forth in terms of tracking. When employees start to see and identify workplace value, they will willingly accept and endorse a digital monitoring workflow that is ethical.
This is not an "or"; this is about renegotiating the tenets of digital labor in a new digital contract that values, respects, and protects productivity and privacy. Furthermore, if businesses can be transparent while using data productively, it will only help ensure their overall digital monitoring strategy is both highly performant and ethical in nature.
