Ever feel like you’re being watched at work? You probably are

Do you ever feel as if you’re being watched? As though someone is keeping an eye on what you get up to throughout the day while you work? Unfortunately, you’re probably right.

There’s an emerging trend of software being used by employers to monitor exactly what their staff are doing at all times. It’s called “bossware”, and there’s been a sharp rise in usage across almost every industry in recent years.

A report released in March by the Human Technology Institute at the University of Technology Sydney found that “surveillance creep” was increasing at the same time as our legal understanding and awareness of it was not.

It showed that 91 per cent of surveyed employers used some form of monitoring of their employees’ performance, yet fewer than 10 per cent of people thought that it was happening in their own workplaces. That’s a large disconnect between perception and reality.

Many of the technology tools used by employers are now cheap and widely available, allowing bosses to monitor workers’ computers, phones, emails and sometimes even their homes and bodies.

Bossware is now commonly used when trying to keep tabs on remote and hybrid workers when they’re not physically in an office, but it can take many forms. At the entry-level end are software programs that track your inbox activity and calendar to determine how quickly you respond to emails or how much time you spend in meetings. It becomes even more invasive when some employers use detectors to monitor your actual environment or physical movement on factory floors or in retail stores.

There have been some shocking examples of businesses that have gone too far. Take Victorian compliance training firm Safetrac which installed software last year to track its staff. Once turned on, it allowed them to view workers’ computer screens in real time and activated their microphones by default, meaning it could capture everything that happened in a remote worker’s house for up to 10 hours a day.

Ask your employer today exactly how they are tracking and monitoring your work and their answer might genuinely surprise you.

Or there’s Woolworths, which made warehouse workers wear AI-enabled headsets telling them which items to pick. After they exerted themselves throughout the day they were given a performance score based on their daily “pick rate”, with the potential for disciplinary action if they fell below set levels.

Many businesses are getting away with these invisible erosions of workers’ rights due to Australia’s current consent-based privacy laws, which means employers are legally covered because the provisions are buried deep inside an employment contract, or hidden in an IT policy under some vague-sounding wording. Sometimes a single tick is all it takes for you to unwittingly sign away all your rights to privacy in the workplace.

Thankfully that’s now up for discussion, with a proposed new federal law that aims to add a new test that asks if the surveillance is “fair and reasonable” as well. This structural privacy amendment that’s open for public submissions until next week will affect any business that collects, uses and discloses public information. If it becomes law it will give some protection against employers from secretly using technology to track you unless it passes other requirements such as being reasonable, transparent and you have a genuine choice to say no. It’s not a perfect fix, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Technology is evolving faster than we can keep up with it. In the workplace, we have to stay incredibly vigilant or the creeping line of surveillance will one day smother us. When it comes to bossware, the first step is to have some awareness of how it affects you.

Ask your employer today exactly how they are tracking and monitoring your work and their answer might genuinely surprise you.