How would a remote worker’s life be after COVID-19? Consider yourself one of the hordes of white-collar employees who now have remote work options. You get up, assist with household duties, and then settle in at your desk prepared to go to work. An app linked to the server of your firm prompts you to turn on your webcam and log in as soon as you open your laptop. Software that runs remotely snaps a photo of your desktop and you.
Every ten minutes, it will capture a screenshot of your workstation. Your social network posts, online calls, web activity, and even private chat will all be monitored by another app. The goal of this surveillance equipment is to give you the proper incentives to keep up a high enough level of output: hours worked, lines of code written, and movies created.
Tools for Workplace Monitoring
Even though the scenario we described might seem like something out of a dystopian novel, these technologies are already in place. For many years, IT service providers have been creating technologies for workplace surveillance via the internet. A few examples of tools with employee monitoring capabilities such as ActivTrak, InterGuard, Veriato 360, Teramind, WorkSmart, and Controlio can be used for everything from simple online activity monitoring of employees to processing employee data through data analytics and business intelligence reporting.
Hidden benefits of Monitoring
According to conventional economic theory, extensive online workplace monitoring makes perfect sense. Historically, principal-agent theory has been used by economists to analyze employer-employee relationships. In this theory, employees operate as agents and deliver benefits to their management or boss in exchange for a wage.
According to the theory, agents—workers such as software engineers, instructors, or machine operators—are driven solely by self-interest and are only concerned with material payoffs, such as their salaries and benefits. The theory’s predictions are simple: a wide variety of behaviors (like an employee’s effort), which are advantages the labor contract incomplete.
Therefore, unless another employee specializes in acting as a monitor to check the worker’s performance, opportunistic employees will always have an incentive to shirk. Such monitoring responsibilities were handled by mid-level supervisors prior to online work being the norm, which inevitably led to problems with “who monitors the monitor.”
The monitoring problem is easily overcome in the modern age of cyber-surveillance. Therefore, technology provides a close replacement for mid-level monitor-managers, potentially saving a significant amount of money. Purchasing software is less expensive than hiring employees to serve as monitors.
Support for Complicated Human Behavior
However, this conclusion is predicated on an antiquated theory of human behavior. A substantial amount of empirical data gathered over the course of the previous 25 years indicates that human motivations are more nuanced than those suggested by the conventional self-interest model. People care about whether and to what extent they are supervised at work in addition to cash rewards, indicating that they value autonomy and detest outside control.
Additionally, people are driven by reciprocity and their perceptions of the motives of others. Our design of workplace monitoring systems, whether they are online or not, should change significantly if these intricate motivations are taken into consideration.
Autonomy’s Impact on Motivation
Social psychologists have long recognized that people lose intrinsic motivation and perform worse at work when they lack autonomy, which is something that control techniques contribute to. Researchers in behavioral economics have looked into whether reciprocity functions similarly at work.
Role of Interaction in Workplace
To be reciprocal, people must reward good deeds and penalize bad deeds, even at their own expense. According to lab tests, workers who are reciprocally motivated could see control from their bosses as a sign of mistrust and reduce, rather than increase, their level of effort. According to neuroscientific research, functional connectivity in brain regions often linked to attention reorientation and cognitive control may account for variations in control-averse behavior. The latter are the areas that frequently light up when people have to resolve disagreements about choices.
We carried out a study that leads to the separation of the roles that reciprocity and autonomy play in causing control aversion. We created an incentive-based experiment where an agent, or employee, selects a labor effort level that benefits the principal, or employer, but is expensive for him. A control mechanism that prevents shirking and forces the employee to put in a minimal amount of effort can be used before effort is chosen. We contrast two scenarios: one in which the employer has direct control over the worker, and another in which the worker can be controlled by a third party (who gets paid a certain amount regardless of the worker’s effort). The effort is the same whether control is exercised by the employer or a third party.
The way that workers responded to decisions made by employers and other third parties to relinquish control was altered. Instead of punishing controlling employers for their distrusting control exertion, employees reward trustworthy employers who abstain from control with trustworthy exertion of effort. Therefore, instead of exercising more control over their workers and maintaining their productivity, employers should encourage good reciprocity in their workforce by choosing to abstain from it whenever possible.
Future of Monitoring in Remote Work
In the post-pandemic environment, some analysts predict a rise in home-based employment. Survey data indicates that not only did the number of remote work cases spike during the outbreak, but that distant work is now anticipated to become the new standard.
Therefore, it shouldn’t be shocking if we witness increasingly heated discussions over safeguarding employees’ private information and personal data, erasing the distinction between work and personal life, and balancing employees’ freedom to unplug from work with expectations that they be reachable at all times. It will become even more evident in the post-COVID-19 world that these new regulatory concerns are just the latest iteration of an old issue—a fresh chapter in the protracted debate over the application of labor discipline in capitalism.
FAQ;S
Are these surveillance technologies really in use?
These technologies are already in place and have been for years. They are actively used by IT service providers to monitor employee activity in the workplace.
What is the scope of cyberloafing?
Research indicates that between 30% and 65% of all internet use at work is attributed to cyberloafing, or people utilizing work time for personal internet use.
Will COVID-19 policies still apply to remote work?
I think there will still be a lot of remote work after the pandemic. It is therefore anticipated that conversations about striking a balance between employee privacy and monitoring will pick up steam.
