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At present, it is more and more common for companies to conduct digital supervision of employees, and even use monitoring to prevent "sabotage".
In fact, many studies have shown that digital monitoring systems will harm the initiative of employees.
It is recommended that companies protect the privacy of their employees and use "technology for good" to achieve the sustainable development of the company and its employees.
A few days ago, a company used statistics to investigate non-work flow information, and reported and punished employees for watching videos and listening to music in the office area, causing heated discussions.
These behaviors of employees are ridiculed as "fishing", which means being lazy and not doing business properly.
Upon hearing this, some netizens were "trembling": Will I also be "monitored" by the company?
Checking in, managing online behaviors, tracking employee communication records, video surveillance of office spaces... Today, companies use various digital means to manage employee behaviors.
Is there any boundary for such "monitoring"?
Can it improve work efficiency?
Does it violate employee privacy?
A reporter from the Workers’ Daily launched an investigation.
Many companies manage their employees’ online behavior
Upon seeing the aforementioned announcement, You Jing remembered her experience of being warned for "fishing" at work.
Working in a private enterprise in Jinan, Shandong, she used to download game software on an office computer, and was warned by the company's technical department on the phone.
"At that time, the department leader was holding a video conference. The technical department warned me that I was occupying network bandwidth and affecting the video conference. If it was serious, it would also be notified to the personnel department." She said that the employee handbook did list "no work is not related to work." "The matter", but I did not expect to be "caught a current".
"This belongs to the common traffic distribution management in online behavior management." He Zhe once engaged in product research and development in a leading company that provides online behavior management services for enterprises.
He revealed that Internet behavior management products generally include hardware and software, with basic functions such as identity authentication, application permission control, data analysis, and security protection, helping companies monitor employee Internet behavior, with the goal of improving work efficiency and protecting information security.
He Zhe said that companies purchasing online behavior management products are in various industries. “There are also many companies that build their own online behavior management systems, but the audit intensity is different.”
The reporter searched and found that the introduction of many online behavior management products not only clearly lists thousands of common application software that can be identified, controlled, and audited, but can even identify segmented actions such as file transfer and chat in chat software.
The digital management of an enterprise is not only about employees’ online behaviors, but more commonly, mastering employee attendance, performance, and workload.
Professor Xie Xiaoyun, deputy dean and professor of the School of Management of Zhejiang University, told reporters that due to the impact of the epidemic, remote office and online office are becoming more and more normal.
When face-to-face communication is not possible, the management of employees by enterprises is basically realized by means of digital technology, and the use of digital supervision is becoming more and more common.
"Corporate activities have become online, recordable, and storable, which makes fine-grained supervision more convenient." Xie Xiaoyun said.
Use monitoring to prevent "sabotage", but it undermines work initiative
"Enterprises need to use online behavior data to understand the work situation of employees and improve efficiency." The reporter noted that in the user interface of some online behavior management products displayed by He Zhe, design based on traffic data, working hours and application access Situation, to count the employee’s "sabotage" function.
However, there are many controversies regarding the use of digital technology to monitor sabotage.
Earlier, it was reported that a company in Hangzhou issued a batch of high-tech cushions to employees to monitor their heartbeat, breathing and other physical conditions. However, the company's personnel department therefore grasped the information that employees were not at work stations, and used this to prevent employees from being lazy.
Many people believe that this action is suspected of infringing on the privacy of others and is a kind of disrespect for workers.
“Digital technology keeps employees in a state of being monitored by digital technology at all times. From the limited supervision of people to people and systems to people in the past, to the continuous and uninterrupted supervision of people by digital technology, this obviously makes managers and employees The balance of power in between is more inclined to managers." Xie Xiaoyun said.
At the beginning of last year, the post-90s Zhao Rui opened his own game development studio in Shanghai.
He who doesn't go to the company often installed a camera to monitor what the employees are doing and whether there is any delay in work.
However, soon after, he abandoned the monitoring equipment.
He found that after the installation of monitoring, the phenomenon of employees chatting and playing games did not decrease, but as long as there are common work goals, reasonable process design and team division of labor, work can be advanced quickly.
According to Xie Xiaoyun, many studies have proved that digital monitoring systems can harm employees’ work initiative, reduce employees’ job satisfaction, and trigger negative emotional experiences.
He suggested that when designing assessment indicators for digital management, companies should pay more attention to ethics and ethics, pay attention to protecting the privacy of employees, and avoid the negative effects of digital management.
Should protect privacy and enhance employees' right to know
Does the company have the right to "monitor" employees?
Yang Baoquan, a senior partner and lawyer at the Bank of China Law Firm, said that at present, the law does not specifically provide for this. "The'monitoring' of an enterprise is actually a manifestation of management power."
Among them, the biggest controversy, and what workers are most worried about, is the infringement of personal privacy and even the leakage of personal information.
So, where is the boundary of the company's "monitoring" of employees?
The second paragraph of Article 13 of the "Personal Information Protection Law" stipulates that the personal information processor can only process personal information if it is necessary for the implementation of human resource management in accordance with the labor rules and regulations established in accordance with the law and the collective contract signed in accordance with the law.
Yang Baoquan believes that this means that companies should inform employees in advance to collect employee information for monitoring, and they should be approved by employees through legal procedures.
In August of this year, the Shanghai Jinshan District People's Court concluded a labor dispute. The company believed that the resigned employees had "flying orders", and the evidence was the call recordings restored on their work mobile phones.
The court held that the company did not prove that the company had told its employees to record and restore data using the mobile phone, or that it had obtained the employees' explicit consent to restore the call information, so the evidence was not legal.
Some experts pointed out that the implementation of monitoring by employers in office premises must not only be legal and necessary for human resource management, but also conform to public order and good customs, and have a certain degree of rationality.
A case can illustrate this point to a certain extent.
In September last year, a company in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province installed an automatic tracking camera at the top of the public passage behind Zheng and other five employees.
Zheng believes that his privacy has been violated, and after communicating with management to no avail, he and his colleagues use trash bags to cover the camera.
The company fired him.
Zheng believed that the company was dismissed illegally and sued the Ningbo High-tech District Court.
The first-instance court ruled that the company illegally terminated the labor contract.
The judge in the case stated that for management needs, there is no clear legal prohibition on the installation of cameras in the office by employers.
However, employers should comply with laws and regulations to set up monitoring content viewing and extraction permissions, procedures, and other regulations, and must not over-enlarge management permissions, and must not install cameras in private places such as toilets and locker rooms.
Regarding the personal information leakage that may be caused by monitoring activities, Yang Baoquan suggested that employers must control the scope of personal information managers and establish confidential rules and regulations during the process of collecting and processing employee information.
“Digital supervision is a double-edged sword that helps to improve the efficiency of corporate management, but it also has its drawbacks. Business managers who use digital technology should take the responsibility of protecting the privacy of the managed, improve the transparency of digital management, and enhance the management process of employees. The right to know or participation in China.” Xie Xiaoyun believes that humanity and human dignity should be respected, the precision of digital supervision and the temperature of management should be combined, and the sustainable development of enterprises and employees should be realized with “technology for good”.
(Some interviewees have pseudonyms)