Oct. 11, 2022 "Is your boss tracking you while you work? Some Canadians are about to find out": Today I found this article by Nisha Patel on CBC:
If you're spending more time on YouTube than Excel during your workday, there's software that may be flagging you as "unproductive" and sending that activity to your boss. That's the new reality as remote work is on the rise, causing more employers to monitor employees to see if they're slacking off.
Near downtown Toronto's Union Station, a major commuting hub, workers like Fariha Chowdhury say they would like to know if their actions are being monitored.
"It's technically like being spied on. So it's within your rights to know if it's happening," Chowdhury said.
Mustafa Kobari says companies that turn to these software solutions can be heading down a slippery slope: "Where does it stop? It's a little bit worrying."
Some Canadian workers will now learn whether they're being tracked. Starting on Tuesday, Ontario employers with 25 or more employees will be required to have an electronic monitoring policy, and they have 30 days to disclose the information to staff.
It's part of the Working for Workers Act, and it makes the province the only one in Canada with legislation on employee monitoring. Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia require employers to disclose data collection under privacy laws.
A step toward transparency
As the COVID-19 pandemic led to lockdowns and forced employees to work from home in droves, many employers implemented electronic monitoring systems without alerting their staff, said Mackenzie Irwin, an employment lawyer at Samfiru Tumarkin LLP in Toronto.
The Ontario legislation applies to all employees using company-issued devices — whether the employer is tracking the GPS of a delivery truck driver or the emails of an office worker.
Irwin said the new rules are a good first step toward transparency. "Once we know what they are actually doing, then we'll have a better sense of whether those monitoring systems are breaching any other legislation."
But she said there is more work to be done because the legislation doesn't actually give employees any new rights to privacy or do much to discourage employers from overly intrusive monitoring.
Still, Irwin said she expects employees to take a stand if they feel uncomfortable once they find out how much they are being monitored.
"They're going to be pushing back on that," she said.
Employee tracking accelerated due to pandemic
While it's difficult to nail down just how many companies are using employee tracking software, workplace surveillance "accelerated and expanded" in Canada during the pandemic, according to a report from the Cybersecure Policy Exchange at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Tech firms Time Doctor, Hubstaff and Teramind are just a few that are seeing a growing demand for their monitoring software — which records keystrokes, listens back to phone calls and even takes screenshots every 10 minutes.
Eli Sutton, vice-president of global operations at U.S.-based Teramind, said his customers range from law firms and telecom companies to government and the health-care sector. In Canada, the company currently has about 300 active customers, and another 150 have signed up for a trial.
"Even on the first day of the pandemic, we saw an increase of three to four times the usual traffic to the website," he said. "We definitely saw a significant rise in the interest in employee monitoring solutions."
Sutton said his employer clients want to monitor employees for security in order to prevent information from leaving the organization, and for productivity, as a way to understand how employees are spending their time when they're working remotely.
"Say a particular task should take anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour. If they see a user is working on that task for more than two hours, they can actually track back and see what actions he took for that task and then assist them in being more productive with their time," he said.
But Sutton agrees that it's up to employers to set boundaries to use the technology effectively and not just focus on one employee's actions.
"You definitely don't want to use it in the form of micromanagement.... It's more about the end goal, not so much what they're doing every second of the day."
Tracking usefulness is up for debate
Some critics of employee monitoring software say it's actually not an accurate representation of employee performance because it doesn't capture other work that may be helpful to employers, such as talking to colleagues and mentoring co-workers.
If employees worry about being tracked, they may start rejecting those activities to protect their productivity, said Valerio De Stefano, a professor and Canada Research Chair in Innovation, Law and Society at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.
Companies could fare better by assessing workers based on output, he said, rather than on the time they spend on activities that the computer marks as work. Otherwise, employee monitoring software can often end up being counterproductive, De Stefano said.
"People, when they know that these systems are in place, spend much more time trying to game the system rather than actually focusing on work."
Is your boss tracking you while you work? Some Canadians are about to find out | CBC News
Oct. 26, 2022 "Some Canadians say remote employee tracking is justified. Others are dead set against it": Today I found this article by Bob Becken on CBC:
Company removes worker after remote tracking software helped determine they were sleeping on the job
The electronic employee surveillance system installed at Lori McEniry's company helped determine that an employee was sleeping on the job, while working from home. That person ended up being let go.
McEniry is the principal owner of Faxinating Solutions Inc. in Quebec, which employs roughly 40 people, and services the supply chain by processing invoices and purchase orders.
She says the tracking began once employees were forced to work from home in March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We monitor reports and we look for periods of time when they [employees] are not busy," said McEniry. "We also check those times against whether or not there were enough transactions in the queue to process, or whether they were in a meeting."
According to a 2021 report from Toronto Metropolitan University's Cybersecure Policy Exchange, employee surveillance has become more prevalent during the pandemic.
Detractors say tracking remote workers is worrisome, citing personal security and privacy issues, regarding tactics such as keyboard monitoring, webcam surveillance, and facial recognition programs.
McEniry's company uses software that automatically generates reports at the end of each day, illustrating how many transactions each employee processes, and when.
"We have certain service level agreements with our clients that have to be processed within a certain time, so the employees have to be productive."
Everything the employees do is measured and processed, McEniry says, including when they take scheduled breaks — but that they're also upfront about their expectations, such as how long breaks should be.
"We establish, I'd say, a minimum period of time [of inaction] that would be flagged. And it's not five minutes. It's a little bit longer than that. But it's more like anything over a standard coffee break."
As of this month, Ontario companies with more than 25 staff are obligated to disclose if and how they monitor workers, making it Canada's only province with legislation on employee monitoring. Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec require employers to disclose data collection under privacy laws.
Toronto employment lawyer Rich Appiah says the new legislation doesn't clearly articulate what employers can or can't do. That puts the responsibility on employers to try to identify what they want to do in the workplace, and then communicate it to employees.
It doesn't specify how or whether employees can file a complaint about the monitoring either, he added.
"Nothing in the legislation says that employers can't monitor and there's no restrictions on the monitoring at all," Appiah said. "There's no kind of standard as to what's appropriate and what's not appropriate."
As for provinces like British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta, Appiah says private and public sector workers do have the right to bring complaints to privacy commissioners. But he also said there's not much they can do if their companies direct them to install software on work devices.
"As our workplaces change, as businesses become more creative and the services that they offer, we need to give them some flexibility in their ability to monitor their employees," he said.
Jean-Nicolas Reyt thinks employee tracking is "shortsighted" and runs the risk of creating unhealthy and unsuccessful relationships in the workplace.
"The problem is that these metrics are usually very poor proxies for performance," said Reyt, an associate professor of management at McGill University. "Whether or not people are spending a lot of time at the office or behind a keyboard is actually pretty irrelevant."
Reyt says an employee's relationship with their boss and employer can be a "full psychological contract" that goes beyond the legal agreement between them.
"It includes things like, 'Do you have my back?' or, 'Do I feel like I'm in a place where I'm respected?' or 'Am I treated right?' If these factors are not there, they're seriously challenged when employers are spying on employees."
Toronto's Ali Qadeer says he's opposed to remote employee surveillance, particularly as more people are working from home than ever before.
"Nowadays, in this remote period, computers reflect so much more of people's lives than their work life," said Qadeer, an associate professor of graphic design at OCAD University.
He thinks digital tracking goes so far as posing a threat to workers' rights.
"If you're part of a movement; if there are issues in the workplace; if you're trying to organize a union, those ideas can sort of spread through, and in conversations with people on smoke breaks and [at the] water cooler. But when you're suddenly in a remote setting, suddenly everything is logged."
Vass Bednar, public policy entrepreneur and adjunct professor at McMaster University, says that when companies track their employees, they risk treating them more like robots than people.
She says workers should be told how and who is gathering their data, and if there are consequences, including termination, to what's found in the data being collected.
"I think it just replicates managerial mistrust. In what used to be the traditional workplace of hot desks, open concept, en vogue offices, you can glance over and see what a colleague is working on," she said.
"Does that mean you should? Does that mean a record should be created or data should be stored?"
With files from Jason Vermes and Nisha Patel.
Some Canadians say remote employee tracking is justified. Others are dead set against it | CBC Radio
No comments:
Post a Comment