The Debate: Is employee tracking justified in the modern workplace?
JP Morgan last week announced it had started using tech to track its junior employees; amid the rise of work from home, is it fair enough? We hear the case for and against in this week’s Debate
YES: Accountability ensures that labour is priced according to actual effort
Employers want to track staff working hours? Gasp! Big Brother! Orwell! Put the pitchforks down, monitoring is a simple response to a simple problem: how do you ensure staff aren’t overworked, overreporting, or both?
In any high-stakes market, transparency is essential. Investment banking is famous for long hours and late nights. Staff underreport their hours to stay visible on deals. The result is not just personal risk; it is lost productivity. Monitoring software can provide clarity on who is genuinely overloaded and where bottlenecks exist so that corrections can be made.
We often forget that productivity is measurable and that measurement drives improvement. Markets function best when information is accurate, and labour markets are no exception. If hours worked are misreported, resource allocation is distorted. Firms over- or under-staff projects and staff catch burnout.
Incentives matter. When pay and promotion depend on effort, employees respond to measurable signals. If hours are self-reported, the signal is noisy; underreporting (or over for those billing hours) becomes rational. Accurate measurement restores proper incentives. Workflow can be easily adjusted, and firms can avoid costly misallocations of talent. In competitive markets, productivity gains benefit employees through higher pay and job security, clients through better service and shareholders through sustainable profits.
Critics cite Orwellian fears, as if this is an omnipresent surveillance, when in fact it is analogous to time-tracking in manufacturing or call centres. Accountability ensures that labour is priced and deployed according to actual effort, not perception.
From a macro perspective, firms that embrace data-driven management contribute to overall economic efficiency. Misreported labour creates distortions that ripple through markets; accurate measurement reduces waste. In the modern knowledge economy, where human capital is the primary input, monitoring is an economic imperative.
Joanna Marchong is head of communications and external affairs at the Adam Smith Institute
NO: Power imbalances in the workplace leave employees vulnerable to invasive monitoring
Signing a contract of employment does not give bosses carte blanche to monitor every key an underling hits or every link they click. Yet workplace surveillance is exploding, first triggered by the work from home boom at the start of the pandemic in 2020 and now by companies wanting to make sure their staff are returning to the office as they demand.
Power imbalances in the workplace leave employees vulnerable to invasive monitoring and abuses of their data rights. When presented with either accepting additional surveillance at work or losing their job, many employees face a Hobson’s choice as unemployment is not an option.
On a fundamental level, constant monitoring is a signal to employees that their bosses do not trust them. Instead of judging their staff by results, computers and algorithmic tools produce minute reports analysing everything from office attendance to words typed per hour. Suspicion replaces the mutual respect that should power the relationship between staff and their bosses.
At worst employee surveillance can feed into management by machine rather than by a human, with staff assessed by data points rather than as a complete human being. This will only lead to employees feeling more isolated, while undermining autonomy and dignity at work.
Keeping an eye on staff can have a role at work but there is a gulf between monitoring to secure access to controlled drugs in a hospital at one end and the use of mandatory biometric scans to check into work at a council gym at the other.
Convenience cannot be used as a justification for increased surveillance, it has to be strictly necessary and proportionate.
Jake Hurfurt is head of research and investigations at Big Brother Watch
THE VERDICT
JP Morgan last week announced it would now be using tech to monitor hours worked by junior bankers, rather than relying on their self-submitted timesheets. But this is simply the latest development in the naturally divisive expansion of ‘bossware’ – technology designed to survey employees.
Objections to such measures are more than natural; nobody likes to feel like they’re being watched. But Mr Hurfurt is right to outline a more insidious outcome: the erosion of trust. But trust runs both ways and, as the rise of trends like ‘polygamous working’ or ‘quiet quitting’ show, employers, at least on a macro level, do have reason not to always give their workers the benefit of the doubt – especially in the modern workplace, where fewer employees are in the direct sights of their bosses.
Trust functions better when it is earned, and, in this context, it is not unreasonable to use certain measures to track worker activity, especially for junior staff or new starters though, as always, there’s a fine line to tread. Let’s maybe leave the keystroke logging to actual spies.