It is important to know that employee surveillance has become a new norm in recent times. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many workers were tied to their homes and they needed to work in the home environment. This meant that their employee privacy law was in danger.
Many employers completed employee surveillance and this was usually against the will of the workers. Most employers wanted to take control over the employees’ behavior and that is why they applied many methods of surveillance.
For the employees working from home, the situation is very difficult because they need to manage and combine personal and private life. As a result, the rights of the employees were affected and the situation was difficult for each employee.
In modern times, employers are using special kinds of software to track the movements of the mouse or the movements on the keyboard that each employee makes.
Your employer is watching!
There is also a biometric employee ID tracking that reveals the ctual location of the worker.
This trend has become largely popular during the pandemic. By the end of 2021, 60% of companies with at least 1,000 workers used the tracking methods. In comparison to that number, only 30% of the companies of the same size used the tracking methods before the pandemic. This means that the pandemic and working from home produced an increased number of workplace monitoring and employee surveillance.
Many companies have developed tools that log keystrokes or capture randomized screenshots of the content that a worker is looking at, which is why many workers feel like their privacy is endangered.
The reports are created to reveal what the worker actually does at the workplace. They could be escaping work and watching YouTube videos, or doing some other activities that are not related to work. That is why many employers apply workplace surveillance in order to reveal the unwanted activities of the employees.
In many cases, employees were not aware of the surveillance, and since March 2020, when the pandemic was in full force, many of the employees were not sure if their employers had changed the monitoring policies. This resulted in increased concern about the employee privacy law and other regulations.
The monitoring policies included new technologies that affected the monitoring and controlling of the workers. There are rules that should be followed in this area. The employees should be aware of the policies and regulations so that they can be notified about the monitoring process.
The lower-wage workers in the retail, call center, distribution, and restaurant industries were already facing monitoring prior to the pandemic. At the same time, the office workers started to see the pandemic effect and surveillance at their workplaces. This resulted in increased concerns about privacy and legal protection.
Now, workers want to know their rights and they employ legal officials to protect themselves. There are many legal cases that are part of the actions that workers start in order to get their rights back. This is usually followed by the official protection that each worker deserves.
It is left to see how the pandemic will affect future work and how workplace surveillance will develop. Until now, many companies apply surveillance methods, and their employees are left unprotected. If this trend continues, the regulations and employee rights will have to be activated and the legal case will be the new normality.
Both employers and employees should be aware of the monitoring practices, and that is why both sides need to find the balance between privacy and professional matters. Only in this manner can we see the satisfied workers who are not monitored all the time and who perform well at their workplaces.