Wired magazine reports that 94% of organizations currently monitor their workers in some way. Monitoring and analytics software may measure how often you’re away from your desk, how quickly you respond to emails, what’s on your computer screen and more.
The purposes of employee tracking may include better allocation of resources, spotting problem employees, identifying high performers, increasing productivity and even safeguarding intellectual property. Security firm Teramind offers software that can send alerts if employees open certain documents and try to print them.
Microsoft tracks data such as the frequency of chats, emails and meetings between its staff and clients. According to a manager at Microsoft, this “can paint a picture of how employees spend an average of 20 hours of their work time each week.” Microsoft also sells their analytics software to other employers.
Monitoring is virtually unregulated, and companies do not always tell employees exactly how they are being observed. And trying to hide from monitoring can backfire. “The more workers try to be invisible the more managers have a hard time figuring out what’s happening, and that justifies more surveillance,” says Michel Anteby, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Boston University. He calls it the “cycle of coercive surveillance.” Of course, some employees want to be spied on. In a recent study of Uber drivers, researchers found that a monitored employee can sometimes feel “more secure than the worker who … doesn’t know if her boss knows that she is working.”
Although there is almost nothing you can do about some employer monitoring, privacy experts do have a few tips.
- Only use your employer-issued phone and laptop for work and keep a personal phone and computer for private use.
- Don’t link your personal devices to corporate Wi-Fi networks where activity can be monitored.
- Be careful about sharing information on your resume. Your information could become public through a data breach. Consider using a Google Voice or internet-based calling phone number rather than your cell phone number, and a commercial mail receiving address such as a UPS store.
- Use a USB data-blocker to prevent the transfer of information from your smartphone to public charging stations, rental cars or company-owned computers.
Don’t publish information about your personal life on public social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter. Many employers will search these sites during the recruitment process.
