Welcome to the era of the hyper-surveilled office

BOSSES HAVE always kept tabs on their workers. After all, part of any manager’s job is to ensure that underlings are earning their keep, not shirking and definitely not pilfering. Workplaces have long been monitored, by inspectors, CCTV cameras and more recently all manner of sensors, to check how many widgets individual workers are assembling or whether anyone is dipping too liberally into the petty-cash box. In the past few years, however, and especially as the pandemic has forced work from the controlled enclosure of the corporate office to the wilderness of the kitchen table, both the scope and scale of corporate surveillance have ballooned.

A study by the European Commission found that global demand for employee-spying software more than doubled between April 2019 and April 2020. Within weeks of lockdowns starting in March 2020, search queries for monitoring tools rose more than 18-fold. Surveillance-software makers reported huge increases in sales. At Time Doctor, which records videos of users’ screens or periodically snaps photos to ensure they are at their computer, sales suddenly trebled in April 2020 compared with the previous year. Those at DeskTime, which tracks time spent on tasks, quadrupled over the period. A survey of more than 1,000 firms in America in 2021 found that 60% of them used monitoring software of some type. A further 17% were considering it.