Employee surveillance (HR’s role in remote working, spying & privacy)

HR teams talk about the importance of data and people analytics to drive better business decisions, but in our rush to track people metrics, have we allowed surveillance to enter the workplace? 'Talking HR Trends with Natal & Tom' gingerly navigates the minefields that are data privacy, spying software, and questions of information ownership. On the bright side, Natal Dank and Tom Haak (of the HR Trend Institute) conclude that there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

0:00 People Analytics or Surveillance?
1:13 Spy Software Hiding in Plain Sight: It’s Happening
3:02 Technology isn’t the problem
6:42 Power to the people
7:12 Practical tip: It’s the future, so let’s discuss it

Tom has written about Big Brother and all kinds of software that’s watching you at work and surprisingly, readily available. It’s bizarrely out in the open with systems bearing ominous names like Staff Spy or Staff Police. Don’t be naive, there are employers who want to carefully track what people are doing

HR technology can help people, so we must make a clear distinction between different purposes. Trackers, monitoring software, etc. can be used to help us or they can be used to control and spy on our people. Natal points out that a lot of these tools seem quite harmless when you first encounter them. However, what often happens is we set these systems up, start using them, and then it's not until the data that's being collected gets used in a certain way that we realise there’s an ethical dilemma around it.

There’s good legislation and employers should adhere to it but we must also be very clear and transparent about how and why we are using technology.

How about putting the data more in the hands of the employees, than in the hands of the employers. It’s quite possible to put it in the hands of users and employees and give them the opportunity to use it and to compare it to others but not necessarily collected and stored in a central database and certainly not misused.

Also, Natal questions how much data needs to be attributable to an individual. It's okay to track trends and maybe when you've released a new product into the organisation or a new way of working and you want to see how many people are engaging with it but that's an overview. If you start tracking parameters like, whether an employee is sending enough emails each day to indicate that they're productive that's a different level of monitoring.

What we’re really advocating is a conversation and trusting employees themselves to make good decisions around how data is used. This is treating people like adults a bit more when it comes to how you use digital tools in the workplace.

This connects to learning in the flow of work. How you can observe what people are doing and then help them to do what they are doing better if there’s room for improvement.

We need to embrace digital tools, that's just the direction we are going in the world and that's what helps us do our job better. However, with that we need to have a conversation about if there's any data that's tracked and collected, how is that data going to be used.

Maybe data doesn’t need to be in a central repository. If you move to another employer, wouldn’t you like to be able to take your data with you or ask for that data to be deleted as you can with GDPR, for example?

In the past, when it was engagement surveys being analyzed, we were always really conscious of protecting people's answers, ensuring that they're anonymous, and driving trust and safety.

This is what we've got to start doing with our digital tools and particularly any digital tracking. If we see senior leaders or senior teams starting to want to use the data collected in a certain way, we need to have a conversation. Is this the right way? Is this part of our brand and our values? How do we ensure that our people trust what we are doing? If it does undermine trust in any way we need to have a conversation around that and make sure employees are involved.

PXO Culture https://pxoculture.com
HR Trend Institute https://hrtrendinstitute.com
LinkedIn Tom:   / tomhaak  
LinkedIn Natal:   / nataldank