PwC UK implements location tracking of workers

The UK arm of one of the big four accounting firms has told its employees that it will be monitoring how often employees work from home, in an attempt to crack down on remote work.

PwC in the United Kingdom has given their employees a swift directive to spend “a minimum of three days a week” in either the office or at client sites, cracking down on remote work and reintroducing a more office-orientated hybrid working arrangement.

As reported by The Guardian, PwC UK will begin tracking the working locations of its employees to ensure that they are not disregarding this new directive. Each worker will be sent information about how they are tracking in terms of their “locational data.” Reviews of the data pertaining to each individual employee will take place every month.

This new stance on remote work and hybrid working conditions will take effect in January, with PwC UK wanting to prioritise more in-person work.

HR Leader reached out to PwC Australia to inquire whether it will implement a similar directive to its employees in the near future.

Karen Lonergan, chief people officer at PwC Australia, said: “PwC Australia has a flexible workplace policy which does not include an onsite mandate. Our leaders and people work together to ensure we meet the needs of our clients while building a culture of collaboration and offering our people the many benefits of flexibility.”

This push towards return-to-office (RTO) mandates has created rousing discussions across the Australian workplace, as just recently, Premier Chris Minns recalled all public servants back to the office with hopes of restoring and building a “culture in the public service”.

On the other side, however, the Fair Work Commission has announced that it would begin proceedings on its initiative to consider and determine variations of modern awards in a total of six areas, one of which being the development of a WFH term in the Clerks Award. A decision that has been widely scolded by employers across the country.

The ethics of implementing an RTO by way of using locational data opens up a can of worms in regard to the right of privacy for workers. To help explain some of the legal ramifications that could arise here in Australia if locational data tracking was used as a tool to enforce RTOs, HR Leader reached out to an employment and safety partner at Dentons, Ruth Nocka.

“Employers in Australia carry out various forms of workplace surveillance from the use of cameras on site to monitoring the activities of employees through computer use. Contrary to widely held views, the surveillance of employees is relatively unregulated across Australia, and privacy regulation has limited impact on surveillance,” Nocka said.

“There is no federal legislation dealing directly with workplace surveillance. Only New South Wales and the ACT have legislation applicable solely to workplaces, which imposes rules on surveillance by employers of their employees, whether through camera, computer, or tracking devices.

“In broad terms, that legislation only allows surveillance if the employer has informed employees about the surveillance, providing details such as the type of surveillance and where and when it will occur.”

The worry with locational data tracking, and any surveillance of employees for that matter, is that it can quickly become a slippery slope. Data tracking of employees at all can create a host of issues and ethical questions, as we’ve seen in a few cases across Australia.

At the beginning of the year, Services Australia found itself in some hot water for tracking the amount of time an employee spent in the bathroom during working hours. The perplexing workplace debacle occurred from staff having to enter auxiliary codes into their computer when they went to the toilet, with a five-minute screen break being the maximum time allowed for this activity.

If employees exceeded that time frame, their names were displayed on a whiteboard in the office, shaming them for their “disobedience.”

At the time, Senator David Pocock believed this form of tracking was unacceptable: “Any minute over that five minutes which you’ve ‘stolen’ from the agency is in some cases being put up on a whiteboard. You’ve got people doing their training on their lunch break to try and make up for a few minutes.”

Nocka warns employers who are looking to introduce any form of surveillance or tracking to take caution with their approach.

“Employers looking to introduce any kind of surveillance or means of collecting information about employees should have regard to employees’ rights under industrial instruments, workplace health and safety laws and contracts of employment,” Nocka said.

“The introduction of any kind of widespread surveillance should be carefully planned and accompanied by sufficient information to allay the concerns of employees and unions to avoid unnecessary disruption.”