Working from home – with Big Brother watching
Screen-bound employees working remotely can avoid the time and expense of commuting, and companies can hire staff without the expense of paying for office space, but employees are also isolated, often disconnected, and occasionally tempted to wag during work hours.
History suggests pandemics empower workers. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death shrunk the labour pool in Europe, giving the working class an awareness of its bargaining power.
Today, however, technology may reverse the power balance. Digital tools used by employees working remotely are a source of endless information on their own activities. And it's information employers can track – often without an employee's awareness.
The post-COVID office arrangement has left some companies snooping on their staff's productivity out-of-office. A 2021 global poll of 375 senior leaders found that in Australia, 91 per cent of respondents said they used monitoring software to keep tabs on employees working remotely. The poll commissioned by the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills found only 5 per cent of business leaders instead required employees to self-report.
The reason employees can work from home – the laptop, the internet, mobile phones, Teams meetings – is also why they are so easily watched. Keyboard strokes, time in front of the computer, mouse movements, eye movements, and now, with the help of AI, even the tone of messages sent can be monitored.
Kira Bomberg, marketing director for Mimecast Australia, said that before the pandemic lockdowns, her cybersecurity company looked for unusual email activity out of hours. This could be a potential sign of unauthorised access of information.
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Three years since lockdowns ended, people have switched to hybrid work and their hours are adjusting, so looking for 'time-based' inconsistencies alone no longer captures cybersecurity risk, Bomberg says.
Still, the company scans 98 million emails a day in Australia and New Zealand, and a full 1.1 billion a day globally.
'COVID saw the use of collaborative tools across businesses, the rise of Teams, Zoom, Slack,' she said. Those tools involve sharing documents and links, often with people outside the business. 'So the industry had to catch up with security on collaborative tools.'
The company homes in on behavioural activities, looking for intruders who have harvested credentials, which is a very common activity. But the company also looks for 'disgruntled employee insiders'.
The systems track movements of employee data and then, using a risk-scoring model looking for 'insider risk indicators', flag the employee's action for attention with the employer. Mimecast's Incydr product 'continuously' collects metadata as events are detected, the company's video says.
'Using artificial intelligence, we look for anomalies in speech patterns' of employees, Bomberg says. 'We ask: would a certain employee use this kind of language? Would he send questions to the finance team? Are these his normal greetings?'
The monitoring means that every employee is subject to 24-seven surveillance – in their office and also, increasingly in the post-COVID era, in their home office, if they have one.
Relying on AI to sift content can create 'false positives', Bomberg says – situations, events, exchanges are flagged as being suspicious when they are just outside normal patterns.
Mimecast APAC field chief technology officer Ryan Economos says false positives aren't 'the most frequent result' and don't happen often.
The company's 'focus is on identifying all forms of insider risk from employees, with the knowledge that most incidents are more often unintentional rather than stemming from disgruntled individuals', he says.
While Mimecast is a human 'risk management platform' designed to provide cybersecurity, performance software does exist. In a separate, widely publicised case, Suzie Cheikho was fired from IAG insurance in February 2023 after 'the company's keystroke monitoring software detected low levels of activity while she was working remotely'.
Draconian response
A world of remote work has placed employers in a fog, which some have met with a Draconian response. In March, about 2000 staff at wealth management giant AMP were told to sign contracts that the finance union alleged would enable the company to carry out continuous video surveillance of them. After coming under fire for the clause, AMP eventually backtracked.
In two cases that predate the pandemic, Sydney-based veteran IT executive Peter Croft says he discovered that a full-time tech employee was working a second job.
'They were doing the same job as the job they were doing for my company, in breach of their employment contract.'
One employee's output was patchy, and the other simply spoke 'openly' about having a second job – to the point where the employee discussed needing to schedule meetings around it. The situation became unacceptable, he said. 'Funnily enough, they were quite willing to be very open about it.'
Croft, however, says he doesn't see employees secretly holding two jobs as a 'huge trend'.
Yet the reality of hybrid work further enables such HR capers. One WA-based IT consultant related a story on Reddit that occurred at a small start-up: 'We literally had a client escalate a case to us ... where an employee joined a company all-hands meeting from her company Teams account, on her company-provided laptop, with her camera background set to the corporate branding of what turned out to be her new employer, who was a major competitor, and she was yet to even provide notice.'
The legality and acceptance of employer surveillance of employees working from home is a matter of debate.
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There is generally more public acceptance of monitoring of people in transportation, construction roles or jobs that could physically endanger people, says University of Technology Sydney labour lawyer and academic Dr Joellen Riley Munton.
For that reason, the law generally accepts the employer monitoring of employees, but with limits.
In NSW, workplace surveillance legislation basically 'says the employer just needs to notify people that it is, in fact, watching them and how it's watching them, and then it can do so', Munton says.
Employers have always monitored employees
People forget that employers have always monitored employees, she says, looking back at the industrial era, when workers toiled in factories under the gaze of bosses. 'They've always harnessed our energies, and they've controlled our time. To some extent, we've become freer of that level of monitoring by being able to earn an income without necessarily fronting up at the factory and being strapped to machines.
'But by the same token the understandable desire of employers to want to make sure you're actually earning your salary means that they're introducing surveillance means. And some of those surveillance means are more intrusive than they would have once been.'
The question is: just how intrusive, especially when phones, apps and gadgets produce endless streams of information to audit.
Employee data can be mined and analysed on an anonymised basis, which is the business model for US-based Worklytics. The company says it does not provide employee-level monitoring services to clients, but instead tracks 'hundreds of real-time metrics' from Slack, Office 365 and Google workplace 'across meetings, emails, online interactions, document management and more'.
This data, compiled and presented by the company, allows clients to understand manager effectiveness, wellbeing and burnout and sales effectiveness. Worklytics has no clients in Australia.
Disconnect in expectations
As working from home moves from a contingency plan to a way of life, companies are adjusting to the new reality.
There appears to be a disconnect in expectations, even within companies. One social media poster said he received a 'work-from-the-office-or-else' email from management while working in an empty office. The manager who sent the email 'was himself working from home'.
Distance allows more misunderstandings, too. In another case, an employee misinterpreted their manager's announcement of working from home as authorisation for them to also work remotely.
By many indications, hybrid work (some in office, some from home) is here to stay.
A recent report from the Australian HR Institute shows 'return to office' requirements are declining. The same polling found the top disadvantage of hybrid working was 'a feeling of disconnection between colleagues'.
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In the hybrid arrangement, employees can fall through the cracks of management visibility, leaving them feeling disconnected. The already-unclear boundaries of employee surveillance are poised to become even blurrier as work and personal time blend.
Writing in The Conversation, RMIT lecturer Melissa Wheeler describes a paradox between surveillance and performance. 'When surveillance is enforced, employers have greater control over the work that can be accomplished by employees. But it can also signal a lack of trust,' she said. 'By definition, seizing greater control is incompatible with communicating trust.'
With so many employees working at distance, fostering and maintaining a level of trust is essential, she says.
But trust, as well as commitment, may be in short supply as remote working becomes standard. Croft, the veteran executive, says that 'one of the byproducts of larger scale work from home is to prove the use-case that if things can be performed outside the office, they can be performed from anywhere'.
There is no longer any 'real practical difference' between working from the suburbs of Sydney or working from the Philippines, Croft said. 'Potentially you're going to be competing with people who are based in some other part of the world for a role,' he said. 'I think everybody's aware of that.'
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