Companies have the right to monitor employees to ensure productivity but they must also protect the employee’s privacy, an Auckland University Business School lecturer says.
Last week US banking giant Wells Fargo sacked more than a dozen people for allegedly faking keyboard activity, pretending they were working at home when they were not.
The bank has not said how it picked up on the problem.
But a survey last year of 1000 US-based companies showed 96 percent of them were using some kind of monitoring to check up on employees working from home.
All of this raises questions around ethics and productivity.
If they aren’t doing any work, how is the manager (who is presumably making much more than the employee in question) completely unaware of this without IT monitoring services intervention?
You know the answer. They have no idea. And middle manglement can’t have that, so they’ve gotten approval for IT install a way to micromanage and justify their position.
The employees are likely working just fine, and achieving or even exceeding metrics, but they’re not devoting every second of the day to the job so they must be “slacking off”.