Is tracking your employees the right thing to do?

Woolworths has been in the headlines lately for placing “unrealistic expectations” on its workers and ensuring they meet these expectations by tracking their activity.

All businesses push for increased productivity, but where’s the ethical line for reaching these goals? In a report published by The Guardian last week, Woolworths was criticised for allegedly setting lofty expectations for workers that were often unattainable.

The supermarket giant – which struggles to stay out of the headlines – implemented a new framework that requires warehouse workers to reach 100 per cent efficiency in their job tasks and subjected those who don’t reach these goals to a coaching program.

To ensure that workers are meeting these expectations, surveillance and tracking through scientific management have been utilised. According to Dr Melissa Wheeler at RMIT University, scientific management approaches can treat workers as “cogs in a machine”.

Wheeler explained that tracking techniques can offer employers short-term results, sacrificing long-term trust between employees and management. Monitored employees tend to feel anxious as they are under constant scrutiny if they don’t reach these unrealistic goals. Their creativity and morale may take a dive, as they are seemingly being managed in a way that reduces the opportunity for critical thinking and problem solving.

In an article featured on The Conversation, Wheeler said: “You’d think that by now, we might have moved on to something more human-centric. But the rise of constant monitoring for employees – both onsite and remote – suggests otherwise.”

Woolworths isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last organisation to implement such tracking. A recent HR Leader article reported that PwC UK has begun tracking the working locations of its employees.

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.

Another example was at the beginning of the year when 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.”

Employment and safety partner at Dentons, Ruth Nocka, warned employers 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.”

Kace O'Neill

Kace O'Neill is a Graduate Journalist for HR Leader. Kace studied Media Communications and Maori studies at the University of Otago, he has a passion for sports and storytelling.