Theo dõi nhân viên không giúp họ làm việc hiệu quả hơn

In June, TD Bank told staff that it would begin running software called WorkiQ on their work computers, tracking time spent in browsers, internal chat and meeting apps. The rollout has revived public debate about workplace surveillance. But the issue extends well beyond one bank.

Many jobs have become more digital, hybrid and dispersed. Managers may feel less able to see work directly, and may turn to software that promises a clearer picture of what employees do all day: time spent in applications, browser use, meeting activity and other digital traces of work.

For employers, the appeal is easy to understand. They want to know where work is getting stuck and how time is being spent. But the issue is not only whether surveillance improves performance. It is also what kind of workplace it creates, and whether employees can do good work while feeling trusted and respected.

The idea that being watched changes behaviour is not new, either. English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century idea of the panopticon was a prison in which people could be watched without knowing when they were being observed. The point was not only that people might be watched. It was that the possibility of being watched could change how they behaved.

Visibility versus understanding

Workplace surveillance is often presented as a way to improve productivity and make better decisions about staffing and resources. TD framed WorkiQ in these terms, calling the deployment “standard practice across the industry” and saying the tool would help managers “more accurately manage workflows, team capacity and performance.”

These are reasonable goals for a company. The difficulty is that seeing more of work does not always mean understanding it better.

Digital traces can show that an employee was in a spreadsheet, browser or meeting app. They are much less able to show whether the work was thoughtful, creative, emotionally demanding or even necessary.

An employee who appears inactive may be thinking through a difficult problem, supporting a colleague or dealing with a slow system. Someone who appears constantly active may be busy without doing especially valuable work.

Monitoring can make some parts of work easier to count while making other parts easier to overlook.

Productivity gains are not guaranteed

The strongest appeal of electronic monitoring is the promise that it will improve performance. A recent meta-analysis of 94 studies involving more than 23,000 participants found no overall link between electronic performance monitoring and better performance. This held whether performance was measured as speed or quantity of work, helping behaviour or counterproductive work behaviour.

That does not mean monitoring can never help. In some settings, especially where tasks are repetitive and easy to measure, it may encourage people to work faster or reveal inefficient processes.

Many jobs, however, require judgment, problem–solving and trust. These qualities are harder to capture through activity metrics. When organizations treat digital activity as a proxy for performance, they risk measuring what is easy rather than what matters.

Employees also adapt to what is measured. They may learn to look busy rather than work well. One study at a large mobile phone factory in China found that production lines shielded from direct observation by curtains had fewer defects than comparable lines that remained visible. The suggested explanation was not that workers stopped caring about quality. It was that, with a little privacy, they no longer had to hide informal but more effective ways of getting the work done.

Monitoring may increase activity. It does not necessarily improve the quality of the work, and it can discourage the kind of informal problem–solving that keeps operations running well.

Monitoring can erode trust

The evidence is more consistent when it comes to how employees experience monitoring.

Electronic monitoring is linked with greater stress, lower job satisfaction, weaker fairness perceptions and stronger feelings that privacy has been invaded. These negative effects are not always large, but they matter because monitoring can change the feel of a workplace.

It can make employees feel watched, distrusted and pressured to account for every minute of the day. That can weaken the sense that work is decent, respectful and built on mutual trust.

Context matters. Employees are likely to respond differently when data are aggregated to identify workload bottlenecks than when individualized data are used to scrutinize or rank them. Monitoring also tends to be more damaging when it is invasive or poorly explained.

Employers should ask better questions

Organizations need information to manage well. But before adopting monitoring tools, employers should be clear about the problem they’re trying to solve.

A workload problem may really be a problem of too much work, too few resources or poorly designed systems. A performance problem requires meaningful measures of performance, not just digital activity. And if the problem is trust, surveillance is unlikely to help.

Employers should also be clear about what data will be collected, who will see it, whether it will be used for individual performance management and what safeguards exist against misuse. Someone must decide what the data mean, when they matter and when they should be ignored.

These are questions about law, technology and work design, and Canadian law offers only partial answers. Ontario, for example, requires employers with 25 or more employees in the province to have a written policy explaining whether, how and for what purposes they electronically monitor employees.

But the rules are mainly about transparency. They do not create a general right to refuse monitoring, nor do they limit how employers can use information collected through monitoring.

Workplace surveillance should be treated as a meaningful intervention into the employment relationship. If it helps identify bottlenecks, reduce unnecessary work and improve staffing, it may have a constructive role. If it becomes a tool for micromanaging employees or pressuring them to justify every moment of the workday, the costs are likely to outweigh the benefits.

The challenge for employers is not simply to know more about what workers are doing. It is to understand work well enough to improve it, without making ordinary work feel like constant inspection.

Nick Turner receives research funding from Cenovus Energy Inc. and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) .

Justin Weinhardt receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) .