Big Brother bosses | Employee surveillance under the microscope after recent controversies

The benefits of hybrid and remote working have been widely extolled by now – whether it’s doing away with geographical restrictions to hire from a wider talent pool, improving your workforce’s wellbeing through a better work-life balance or fewer outgoings on commuting and those overpriced sandwiches at lunchtime.

But of course, some drawbacks have refused to go away – one of which being the dilemma of how to make sure your remote workers are actually, well… working.

The most obvious and simple solution is to trust them. As long as their daily tasks are ticked off by the time they clock off, does it really matter whether they’re glued to their desk every second of the day?

For some, it is, and this has led to a rise in worker surveillance. There are significant ethical issues when it comes to monitoring an employee’s productivity via tracking software, yet around one in five companies has admitted either installing technology to snoop on staff or planning to, according to research. The software can log how long workers take to read and reply to messages, check attendance at meetings — or even secretly film them from their screen.