Workplace surveillance tools are tempting to managers, but the information they provide may be misleading.SolStock/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
Nick Turner is a professor and Croft Chair in Management at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary.
Justin M. Weinhardt is an associate professor at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary.
The latest debate over workplace surveillance has focused, understandably, on the technology.
Screen-tracking software. Activity dashboards. Heat sensors under desks and chairs. Systems that tell employers when workers are online, whether a desk is occupied, which apps are open and how long someone appears to be working.
Those tools deserve scrutiny. They can be intrusive, poorly understood and hard for employees to refuse. But the technology is only part of the story.
Workplace surveillance is also a management story.
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The tools may be new. The impulse is not. Managers have long tried to make work more visible and easier to control. What has changed is how precisely, and how quietly, that can now be done.
A supervisor no longer needs to walk around the office or glance through a doorway to see who is at a desk. Software can do that all day.
That does not make it better management.
Many jobs have become digital, hybrid and dispersed. Managers may feel less able to see work directly. They may worry about workload, productivity or whether people are being treated fairly. Monitoring tools offer a tempting promise: less uncertainty.
But visibility is different from understanding.
An activity dashboard can show that an employee was logged in, sitting at a desk or using a particular app. It cannot easily show whether the work was thoughtful, creative, emotionally demanding or even necessary. It cannot tell the difference between deep concentration and inactivity. It may mistake frantic busyness for useful work.
That is why surveillance can mislead. It often measures what is easiest to count, not what matters most.
Steven Kerr’s classic paper, “On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B,” warned that organizations often reward the wrong things because they overvalue what can be measured. Workplace surveillance risks doing something similar. It rewards visible activity while employers are hoping for good judgment, collaboration and quality work.
Organizations do need to understand how work is being done. Some monitoring may help identify bottlenecks or inefficient systems. However, trouble starts when surveillance becomes a substitute for trust, judgment and good work design.
Research on electronic performance monitoring does not show large or consistent performance gains. The more consistent findings concern how employees experience monitoring: higher stress, lower job satisfaction, privacy concerns, reduced autonomy and weaker trust.
That is a poor trade-off. A tool that gives managers more information while making employees feel less trusted may be solving the wrong problem.
There is also a psychological side to this that organizations rarely acknowledge. Surveillance is often framed as a neutral tool to improve productivity or allocate resources. Sometimes it is. But people make policies, and people bring their own fears, assumptions and motives to decisions about work.
Recent research on return-to-office mandates offers a useful parallel. Marissa Shandell, Courtney Elliott and Adam Grant found that leaders who scored higher on narcissism were more likely to resist remote work, partly because remote work threatened their sense of power and status.
That does not mean every manager who dislikes remote work, or uses monitoring software, is narcissistic. That would be unfair, and a misuse of measurement. It does suggest something more modest: policies presented as productivity measures can also satisfy managerial needs for control, authority and reassurance.
This managerial drive for control, authority, and reassurance comes at the expense of employees, and employees notice the difference. When people feel trusted, they are more likely to use judgment, raise concerns and take ownership of the quality of their work. When they feel watched, they may learn to perform by being busy. They keep the green status light on, skip breaks, stay near the desk and behave in ways the system can see. That is not productivity. It is theatre.
The best leaders do not need to watch every minute of work to know whether work is going well. They set clear expectations, remove obstacles, seek feedback, staff work properly and judge people by the quality and value of what they produce. This is the type of leadership people thrive under. If the goal is better work, the answer is not to watch employees more closely. It is to lead in a way that helps people do their best work when no one is watching.