About 20 years ago, I published my dissertation research on workplace surveillance. Not surprisingly, I found that people being monitored electronically react very negatively when their privacy at work has been invaded, and respond in very negative ways. But back in 2001, no one could really visualize the kind of employee surveillance made possible by technology, and no one really cared.
Time brought the advent of more ubiquitous surveillance technology, and I thought that maybe people might start to worry. In 2005, I wrote about the cycle of deviance that is created with electronic surveillance, leading surveilled employees to seek out ways to evade monitoring, and engage in more or different types of deviance than the monitoring was designed to eliminate. Still, no one really cared.
No one showed much alarm when, in 2008, my colleagues and I wrote about how leaders who monitor their employees electronically are operating under an “illusion of control”by making the easy and lazy choice to lead by surveillance and fear rather than leading with character and developing trust with their employees.
It’s possible that one reason no one really cared is because tracking call times and keystrokes, monitoring GPS locations and bathroom breaks is the kind of surveillance that really only affects low-level administrative or blue-collar employees. After all, we need our customer service calls answered quickly and our packages delivered ASAP. None of the surveillance apparatus that makes this possible — at considerable cost to employee well-being — was being used to monitor knowledge workers or “skilled” employees.
That’s all changed. There’s a new and much more democratic form of employee surveillance emerging now, one cloaked under the guise of “people analytics.” The 2010s have seen the explosion and expansion of employee surveillance to the rest of us, and to a degree I never thought possible back in 2001. Surveillance is not just for the call-centre agent any more. Social listening algorithms track our responses to provocative trial balloons on the company intranet, smart badges track meeting contributions and send reports to managers suggesting that we should speak up more, implanted chips hasten computer log-ins and open doors with ease but also track our every movement.
This is the new…
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