Bosses beware: if you think your company will benefit from surveilling employees who work from home, think again.

As work from home (WFH) becomes the norm for many employees, efforts to monitor their activities are also becoming normalised. Reports suggest growing numbers of companies are using different approaches, including technology, to track how much time remote workers are spending on the job.

A new study by AUT’s Professor Jarrod Haar (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Mahuta) shows that just after New Zealand’s first COVID-19 lockdown, Kiwi employees felt their organisations were more likely to be surveilling them, with 52% reporting they believed this was happening to some extent. Nearly two-thirds of the employees (62%) reported that the most common surveillance came in the form of their supervisor checking on them ‘to control my task completion’; employees also believed they were being surveilled through online monitoring - but at a lower rate (46%).

The study found that those who felt ‘spied on’ were more likely to put in some extra effort at work - but they were also more likely to consider job hunting, and they suffered higher anxiety, depression, and stress.

Professor Haar says that fundamentally, NZ managers appear to be struggling with the WFH boom, seeking new ways to keep traditional tabs on their workforces. He says this so-called clash of cultures – the pre-COVID “checking up on” employees versus the post-COVID “checking in with” them – can be problematic for individuals and organisations.

“The study shows attempts to monitor employees’ WFH activities have more drawbacks than advantages, harkening back to the old days of companies trying to command and control. Simply put, if organisations want to get the best of out their people, they need to trust them.”

Professor Haar acknowledges the challenges of moving from a high visibility, office-based approach to a low visibility, remote approach to work. But he says employees’ perceptions about how much their organisation cares about their wellbeing and trusts them are vital to their own sense of happiness at work.

“There is clear evidence that employees expect their company to trust them and not apply any ‘Big Brother’ mentally to their work from home,” says Professor Haar. “Fundamentally, businesses that engage in such surveillance are eroding their workers’ trust and mental health – at a time when both are needed more than ever.”

The study was undertaken during New Zealand’s nationwide lockdown, as the country moved from Alert Level 2 to Alert Level 1 (May-June). Participants comprised a representative sample of around 1300 New Zealand employees who were relatively evenly split across gender and spanned an age range of 19-70 years (with an average age of 39 years). Just over 1000 employees were surveyed in the first month of lockdown; around 250 were surveyed one month later.

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