Employees Working From Home Should Be Closely Watched, Say 55% Of Company Bosses: Study

The devastating coronavirus pandemic caused millions of working professionals to enter a new era of remote work, which resulted in a significant shift in the working culture of a huge proportion of the global workforce. Continuous employee supervision, which was characteristic of office culture, has become rare in the work-from-home environment. Employers are now demanding monitoring more and more frequently.

According to a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CiPD), an industry body for HR workers and management professionals, around 55% of bosses believe that employees who work from home should be monitored to check their productivity.

The CiPD interacted with more than 2,000 bosses who said they believe data should be collected on remote workers, including the amount of time spent on laptops each day and email-sending behaviors, to identify those at risk of burnout.

"However, only three in ten (28%) leaders say their organisations are using software to monitor the productivity of home workers. Where workplace monitoring is in place, the CIPD and HiBob urge employers to consider its purpose, and to be clear to staff about what is being monitored and why," the institute said in the release.

The transition to hybrid and remote working, according to Hayfa Mohdzaini, senior research adviser at the CiPD, has "fuelled the debate on employee monitoring practises and what is acceptable."

Ronni Zehavi, CEO and Co-Founder at HR software company HiBob, said "It's understandable for businesses to want to gain insight into what their staff spends time on or how long anything takes them to do, but collecting more information than is needed to fulfil any audit purpose could undermine trust and impact the relationship between staff and employers, irrevocably damaging employee engagement-the cornerstone of any HR strategy,".