Working from home surveillance vs an employee's privacy - balance needed, lecturer says

Companies have the right to monitor employees to ensure productivity but they must also protect the employee's privacy, an Auckland University Business School lecturer says.

Last week US banking giant Wells Fargo sacked more than a dozen people for allegedly faking keyboard activity, pretending they were working at home when they were not.

The bank has not said how it picked up on the problem.

But a survey last year of 1000 US-based companies showed 96 percent of them were using some kind of monitoring to check up on employees working from home.

All of this raises questions around ethics and productivity.

Auckland University Business School lecturer Dr Emmy van Esch said there were now a lot of tools on the market to monitor employees particularly those working from home to ensure they were actually working.

"To monitor productivity to access software which can measure proxies like the number of emails being sent, websites people visit, documents opened, key strokes but there's also some more extreme software available like some employers they take snapshots of employee's screens at certain intervals or they take pictures through the webcam of employees working from home."

Companies have the right to monitor employees to protect the company's data or ensure their productivity but they should do so within reasonable limits, she said.

"But organisations should also respect employee's privacy rights so they need to find a balance."

Van Esch said she believed that employee monitoring would always be an issue.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) some employees who were working from home may even use AI to do their work rather than doing it themselves, she said.

"So I think companies need some monitoring tools to make sure that people are actually doing the work themselves."

Employers need to let their employees know and be transparent about any monitoring that is taking place, she said.

Ensuring that employees were working as they should was a matter of trust, she said.

"I think if the company treats you with respect and with trust, in return you can expect trust and respect from your employees as well."

Unfortunately some companies did not treat their employees well and had unrealistic expectations of their employees, she said.

This may have contributed to people faking doing work at Wells Fargo, she said.

"They know that if they don't meet the objectives you may lose your job, so many people then will start to behave in an unethical way like faking work in this case, just to keep your job. This is especially the case in companies that don't treat their own employees with respect and trust."