Dive Brief:
- A recent article at Huffington Post explores workplace "snooping" and why it may be a bad idea for building employee engagement and other aspects of managing talent.
- Recently, the Daily Telegraph in London suffered an HR black eye after employees found the company had installed devices that could tell if workers were at their desks or not (the backlash caused the company to remove the devices by day's end, reported BuzzFeed).
- While workplace surveillance is not new (video cameras have been used for anti-theft reasons in retail and hospitality for awhile, for example), the concept of monitoring as a way to boost productivity is probably not a sound HR policy, according to Huffington Post.
Dive Insight:
If anything, the idea of surveillance as a productivity booster is more likely to just stress-out employees, and HuffPo cites a few examples of research that reinforced that idea.
In fact, rather than helping end productivity skids, the added stress from monitoring could actually lower output and drive up costs. Workplace stress can drive increased absenteeism and disability claims.
In its defense, the Daily Telegraph claimed it was using the surveillance technology to determine if the company's desks were being used efficiently, rather than as a way to snoop on whether journalists are sitting in their chairs ostensibly working.
That the company removed the devices soon after workers found out about them says that no matter what the motivation, that specific employer "Big Brother" strategy was not a prudent idea.
