What are employees actually doing during remote work? Some companies have already resorted to snooping software. However, it is not only legally questionable.

For two articles on employee monitoring during the Corona period on the portal karriere.de and in the Handelsblatt, Handelsblatt journalist Melanie Raidl interviewed, among others, Detective Patrick Kurtz from Kurtz Detective Agency Düsseldorf. The following is the article from the Handelsblatt:

Handelsblatt: "Big Brother in the Home Office"

Workplace Monitoring

It sounds like a bad crime novel. Detectives have been observing a suspect’s apartment for days. He opens the front door, goes outside to his car and drives off. His destination: a DIY store. His purchase: ready-made turf. The client is a business owner who, thanks to meticulous investigative work, now has certainty that his employee is shirking their duties.

 

When employees are working from home due to the Corona pandemic, many employers wonder what they are actually doing. According to media reports, detective agencies receive numerous assignments from companies that distrust their staff. For a Frankfurt-based company, there are reportedly up to 25 client inquiries per day, according to Die Zeit and the Hamburger Abendblatt.

 

But it is no longer only private investigators who spend considerable effort and incur high costs to monitor employees. Contrary to reports, the Federation of International Detectives (BID) could not identify any increased demand for investigations into "home office fraud" in a nationwide member survey. Instead, a new form of monitoring seems to be gaining popularity.

 

Digital monitoring programmes, euphemistically called "monitoring tools", have experienced soaring sales since the outbreak of the Corona pandemic. The start-ups developing these tracking programmes mostly come from the USA and have names such as ActivTrak, Timedoctor or Hubstaff.

 

In the USA, numerous companies, including American Express and the Bank of America, use such monitoring programmes. Works councils, which might raise objections, are rare in the land of unlimited opportunities, and employee rights are limited.

 

In Germany, it is different. "There is clear case law here," says employment lawyer Peter Wedde from the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, who focused on remote monitoring in his doctorate. "Total monitoring, where the employer can track every single step of work, is not permissible in Germany."

 

However, this does not appear to stop companies in Germany from using such programmes. Upon request, the US monitoring start-up Hubstaff confirmed that it also receives inquiries from Germany and other European countries. Which clients are involved is not disclosed. Only this: since March, demand has been three times higher than the previous year. And this is despite not only significant legal hurdles but also doubts regarding effectiveness.

Control instead of Trust

Employers have monitored their employees since the beginnings of industrialisation. For example, the English textile entrepreneur Ambrose Crowley had a bell rung every day at 9 pm at the end of the 17th century, signalling the start of the curfew in the workers’ settlement he had built for his staff. Drinking alcohol was prohibited, and other activities that could reduce employee productivity were punished. Until the mid-19th century, employees in some factories in England were even forbidden from wearing their own watches. The entrepreneurs controlled the time.

 

Since then, employment relationships have changed, but then as now, employers aim to ensure or increase employee productivity. In factories or office buildings, this can be implemented more easily. In the home office, however, they can no longer monitor every single work step. The employer must trust their employees – or resort to software from Hubstaff.

 

The US start-up promises to significantly increase employee productivity in some cases. Companies would need to spend ten dollars per month per employee. Once activated, the employer has access to a wide range of monitoring methods. This ranges from simple recording of keystrokes and mouse movements to monitoring internet surfing behaviour and even GPS tracking of employees.

 

Timedoctor offers further monitoring functions. Screenshots of an employee’s screen are taken at regular intervals. Every ten minutes, the webcam also takes a photo to ensure that the employee is at their workstation.

 

But Hubstaff and Timedoctor are only the first step compared with Enaible. The Boston-based start-up additionally uses an algorithm to automatically analyse the collected data without a human having to assess the quality of work. The advertising agency Omnicom Media Group already uses Enaible, and according to the company, discussions are underway with US airline Delta Airlines and US pharmacy chain CVS Health. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, demand has quadrupled.

 

Founder Tommy Weir explained to Technology Review how his software works: "Imagine managing employees and being able to watch over their shoulder all day, giving advice on how to do their job better. That is what we try to enable with our tool."

 

Employees receive praise and criticism from the machine in the form of productivity scores. Artificial intelligence becomes the whip. The supervisor only sees the end result. For some, this may sound like a nightmare.

No Increase in Productivity

It is also highly questionable how meaningful such monitoring is. Studies suggest that productivity does not increase as a result. British anthropologists Michael Fischer and Sally Applin found in their study titled Watching Me, Watching Youthat workplace monitoring causes people to change their behaviour more often to align with machine behaviour. Their conclusion: monitoring does not necessarily increase productivity but makes people more machine-like.

 

Employment psychologist Simone Kauffeld from TU Braunschweig is also critical of employee monitoring, whether analogue or digital. Together with colleagues, she investigates via a survey the effects of the Corona pandemic on virtual collaboration.

 

"I consider it a no-go from a work psychology perspective," she says. Employers do not need reports on every single step or workday. "The only thing a supervisor needs to know is whether an employee can complete a task within a given time."

 

Permanent digital monitoring could damage the trust relationship between employer and employee, especially since not all employees are equally productive in the home office, explains Kauffeld. "There will be those who say they are much more productive at home. Other employees will be glad when they can return to the office."

 

Even Patrick Kurtz, who offers monitoring services for companies and private clients through his detective agency, has doubts. Especially during home office periods, checks make little sense because working hours at home can be more flexible than in the office.

 

"Just because someone goes out to run a private errand does not mean they are not fulfilling their work contract," says Kurtz. Furthermore, the living area is part of the most private sphere of life, which is absolutely off-limits for private investigators like those at Kurtz Detective Agency Düsseldorf.

 

"And as for digital monitoring options, there are clear legal limitations in Germany. If we want to install spyware on a computer, we first need the user’s consent. Therefore, the legal scope for application is very small," adds Kurtz.

Monitored Trust-Based Working Time

In the modern workplace, digital monitoring tools reach their limits anyway. Professions with repetitive daily tasks, for example in call centres or customer service, can still be statistically evaluated. "But there are professions whose productivity cannot simply be measured with such tools," says employment lawyer Wedde.

 

In creative professions or jobs without fixed routines, digital monitors fail. They cannot record work if an employee, for instance, collects ideas for a new strategy or project in a notebook rather than entering them into a computer.

 

"Ultimately, these tools are just statistical programmes running on high computing power. They say little about the quality of an employee’s work," says Wedde. They merely suggest an objective evaluation of work productivity.

 

For the employment lawyer, the behaviour of employers who tend towards digital monitoring is contradictory anyway. There was outrage among many employers when the EU decision on working time recording was issued last year. They argued that time recording was incompatible with trust-based working hours.

 

"However, it becomes paradoxical when employers now use monitoring tools to control employees in the home office. Trust-based working hours and monitoring do not go together," says Wedde. Companies take considerable risks when they secretly observe their employees.

 

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets strict limits on data collection. According to Wedde, employees can claim compensation under the GDPR if monitored at work without legal basis or written consent. If a company is found to have illegally monitored employees, it could face fines of up to four per cent of group turnover.

 

Wedde’s conclusion: "A good supervisor should be able to assess employee productivity without technical tools."

Note

The original article by Melanie Raidl and Roman Tyborski appeared in the Handelsblatt. Emphasis (bold) and links on this page may differ from the original.

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