In the age of teleworking, applications such as Zoom, Slack or software offered by Microsoft Office 365 are used by millions of users around the world. However, these apps offer a lot of data to your boss, who can use it to monitor your productivity.
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of people have been forced to switch to telework. According to the analysis firm Gallup, in June 2022, still 34 million employees in the United States worked part-time in telecommuting. In addition, 36.5 million employees were working remotely at least 5 days a week, according to a study by the United States Census Bureau in August 2022.
As we know, this democratization of telework has resulted in numerous excesses on the part of employers. We remember, for example, Amazon which spy on all the mouse movements of its employees and the words typed on the keyboard. According to a report published by Top10VPN in early 2022, global demand for workplace monitoring software increased by 65% since 2019.
And you may not know it, but your boss doesn’t even need special monitoring software to monitor your productivity at home. Indeed, popular applications such as Zoom, Slack or software offered by Microsoft Office 365 give it enough data to do it easily.
Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Office: paradise for bosses
These online apps allow managers to know the number of video meetings you have attendedthe number of conversations you have with your colleagues, and the number of documents you have saved in the cloud.
On Microsoft 365 for example, an account administrator can obtain the number of emails sent by his employees, the number of files sent on a shared drive and the number of messages sent, not to mention the number of meetings in which they participated on Microsoft Teams.
On Google Workspace, it is possible to access all the data mentioned above. You can add the GPS location of the user there when joining a video meeting. Even better, an administrator can also view email content on Gmail, and backed up items on Google Calendar. On paid Slack accounts, admin can see how many days users have been activeand how many messages were sent over a given period.
Data that is not intended for monitoring
Unsurprisingly, the publishers of these online tools claim that access to this data is not dedicated to monitoring and employee performance appraisal. “Measuring output based on surface activity like messages sent gives us an extraordinarily limited view of a person’s contribution to their organization.” says Brian Elliot, vice president of Slack.
However, in the eyes of Daniel Khan Gilmor, lead author of the American Civil Liberties Union’s “Speech, Privacy and Technology” project, nothing prevents your managers from using this data to get a snapshot of your productivity. “The more your work is done through these online services, the more information service providers have,” he explains.
Source: Seattle Times