When everyone is watching: employee monitoring and tracking

At the Dentons Davis Brown annual labor and employment law seminar in April, employers discussed many topics that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic or were preexisting but were exacerbated by it. One such issue is employee monitoring. Employers normally monitor employees extensively—timekeeping, project billing, performance evaluations, etc.—but the explosion of remote work during the pandemic created a lucrative market for more extensive monitoring processes.

Monitoring basics

Monitoring can take a number of forms—from increased project oversight to geotagging, attention productivity measures (tracks speed, screen activity, and if you navigate away from certain things on your screen) to screen mirroring (the remote screen is mirrored onto another screen or another system) as well as a wide array of other processes and technologies. Some employers also reported greater use of other long-standing processes such as video monitoring and reviewing customer calls.

Internal public relations and risk mitigation go hand in hand. You cannot research the monitoring of employees without running into many articles on how employees feel about monitoring. If you want a summary of a few thousand articles—employees don’t like it very much.

Big picture