Kaitlin Luna: Hi, everyone, it's Kaitlin Luna, host of Speaking of Psychology. This episode was recorded during APA's Technology, Mind and Society Conference held in October 2019 in Washington DC. I was on maternity leave during that time, so my colleague Kim Mills was a guest host. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Kim Mills: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology , a bi-weekly podcast from the American Psychological Association that explores the breadth and depth of psychological science. I am your host, Kim Mills. Do you ever get the feeling at work that you're being watched? To a certain degree you're and it's possible that you will soon be tracked even more closely by your employer. Whether that's your video surveillance, GPS location tracking or internet monitoring. If that disturbs you, you're not alone.
Our guest today has been doing research into how much workplace surveillance is acceptable to employees and at what point do people feel that the nosey boss has gone too far. David Tomczak Product Solutions Consultant at Aon, a global professional services firm. He's also working towards his PhD in Industrial - organizational psychology at The George Washington University. He has researched the influence of electronic performance monitoring on employee behaviors. His interest also includes personal environment fit, occupational health psychology and corporate social responsibility. Welcome, David Tomczak.
David Tomczak: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Mills: Why do our bosses want to track what we're doing all day? Americans have a reputation for high productivity which presumably means that we work pretty hard. Is that not right?
Tomczak: I will definitely agree that we do work hard. I think in terms of what we have going on in the current sphere of big data we have a lot of technologies out there. There are capable of gathering large amounts of employee behavioral data in relatively short periods of time and relatively easily. To add on to that, we have artificial intelligence, algorithms and machine learnings that can wrangle these big sets of data and perhaps give us some meaningful implications about employee behavior.
Whether or not that actually is indicative of employee performance is sometimes subjected to criticism. I think what employers want to do right now is to make the best use of all that data they have and use that to inform productivity and performance or even guide safety or health behaviors.
Mills: What are employers interested in learning through these tactics? Are the motivations beneficent for the most part? Do we even know?
Tomczak: That's the big question. What we find is that a lot of organizations don't actually tell employees that they're being monitored, and if they're being monitored, they don't tell them when, how or in what context they're being monitored. I think what a lot of organizations are hoping at, is that they are some sort of small employee behaviors that can give some sort of credence to other aspects of job performance that we've traditionally tried to capture just by performance appraisal.
For example, we have organizations that are looking at facial expressions, voice intonation in meetings. Seeing how frequently people talk up or talk over other individuals and a lot of that can be good. We can tell somebody after a meeting and say, "Hey, judging from our sociometric badge that we had on you, it seems like you're talking over individuals quite a bit. You're not giving your followers enough opportunity to chime in with any sort of creative problem solving that they have."
In that circumstance, we can get very minute aspects of job performances saying, "These are the specific situations in which perhaps you could work on something." Instead of maybe saving all that for the end of the year performance appraisal where some of those small behaviors might go overlooked. A lot of what we're looking at is, is there meaning from very small aspects of behavior and how can that inform job performance?
Mills: That's got me going down to two trials here. One is, first of all, you mentioned biometric badges. Can you explain that? Are they happening already? Are people wearing these things?
Tomczak: They call this sociometric badges.
Mills: Sorry, sociometric.
Tomczak: This is something that was started I believe in 2015 by MIT. They were looking at sociometric badges and looking to see how often we could get such rich forms of data intraindividual. Lots of performance are behavioral data within the individual and what they were supposed to do is an individual wears this badge perhaps around their neck with a lanyard and this badge is just continuously taking in any sort of audio information that they have within a meeting. I don't think that is used widely right now but if you think about where certain technologies are going nowadays, a lot of them have these capabilities.
When we think about all of the things that your smartphone can do, the modern iPhone has facial recognition, it has a very good microphone. It tracks all of your internet behaviors. What we have right now are technologies that are going to be capable of taking in a lot of this information. I don't think it's used very often now but certainly, there is some research indicating that it is trending toward that direction.
Mills: The other path my mind was going down when you started talking about this was-- I've worked in many offices and there are people who talk over other people. We all kind of know that, "Joe over there is a jerk in meetings." This is just giving the employer some coverage to be able to say, "I have data that proves that you're a jerk in meetings."
Tomczak: Yes. I think a lot of people have a resistance to criticism especially anything that's negative and when you can actually show them the data and say, "Hey, 60% of time that you're talking, you're talking over somebody or you have just repeated their idea instead of steamroll that individual." People might be more willing to accept that when there's actually evidence to support the fact that perhaps they're behaving incorrectly but again these are technologies that are not used extensively at this point, but they are badging in.
Mills: The kinds of places that are using it now, we're just talking about tech companies. Is this a Silicon Valley thing?
Tomczak: Yes. It would be a very small usage and very tech-friendly companies. Yes.
Mills: Your research looked at the limits in the minds of the employees. What did you find? How much spying, if you will, is too much?
Tomczak: What we wanted to look at with our research was essentially where do expectations of monitoring come from? We have a lot of research saying that, "Monitoring is an invasion of privacy, it's considered not fair to employees," but we're curious about how that differs based on the individual or the job that they're in or the context of the organization.
We looked at our research from the psychological contract literature which basically states that individuals have this unstated expectation of their employer. They basically expect their employer to treat them with respect and they expect that their employer trusts them enough to do the job. What we wanted to see is, if you're being monitored in every possible way, let's say the amount of EPM increases. You're-
Mills: EPM is?
Tomczak: EPM is electronic performance monitoring. Perhaps you have your computer activity monitored, your emails being read, there's audio-video surveillance. As that amount of EPM increases, we wanted to basically say, "Okay, it's going to be a violation of the psychological contract." This might lead individuals to behave in a way that is actually contradictory to what EPM tries to do.
What EPM tries to do is to direct people toward certain behaviors. When we monitor something, we're basically giving a signal to the employee saying that this matters. What we find though is that as the level of monitoring increases, the likelihood that a person experiences that as a psychological contract violation increases and actually leads them to withhold effort from the organization. We are getting the exact opposite of what EPM is trying to do.
We have people who might look at this violation and say, "Okay. Well, I'm going to take longer at my breaks. I might show up late." They do this in very covert ways rather than overt because of course they're being monitored. Their actions are being monitored and they don't have the ability to steal from the organization or anything like that so perhaps they steal time from the organization.
Mills: What are the differences among job types or industries? You're looking at that as well.
Tomczak: Yes. We looked at that from two different angles. We looked at first, from the job attitude's angle which would be job autonomy. This is the perception that an individual has over the discussion that they have over maybe scheduling their work, how they go about a certain task and so forth. What we found was that when EPM and the person's perception of job autonomy match that's when we have the least amount of psychological contract violation.
Basically, what's that saying is that individuals who have high perception of job autonomy, the belief that they can do their work as they wish. When that is coupled with low EPM; these individuals are not being monitored heavily, they are the least likely to report any sort of psychological contract violation. That strongly increases when you increase the number of monitoring and limit that person's ability to do their job. Interestingly enough, when people have low perceptions of autonomy, EPM does not appear to have any effect. Those people are just as likely to perceive violation as a high autonomy individual in a high EPM situation.
Mills: What rights do employees have in the workplace right now in terms of what can and can't be monitored? Are there legal limits or is this all just a brave new world?
Tomczak: It's an interesting time right now because of the general data protection regulations from the EU. If we look at it just from the US, employees do not have a lot of rights. The privacy laws have not been updated since 1984, with the exception of I think California has recently had some sort of privacy updates to their laws. Again, 1984 that doesn't really give us a lot of leeway in terms of what's going on with how people are being monitored. Now, the thing is, is that a lot of organizations are becoming global or international, and so they actually have to adapt GDPR rules.
What we'll be seeing soon is that organizations will be taking this a lot more seriously, or at least address monitoring upfront but right now, employees in the United States, considering if it's just an American company, do not have many rights. There's actually no law that says that they need to be informed when they are being monitored, which is a huge problem, especially from the literature side.
Mills: Is that happening in the companies that are doing it right now? Are they revealing to employees, let's say, when you go to human resources, you've accepted the job and they give you all the paperwork that you have to fill out, is there a form that says, oh, and by the way, we're going to be monitoring you, we're not only watching whether you're shopping on Amazon all day, but we also want to know what your skin conductance is, and we're tracking your eye movements or whatever they might be looking at.
Tomczak: Yes, I believe there's a statistic out there that says about 20% of organizations actually fully inform their employees about when, where and how they're being monitored. This does not really happen very often. I can say, from my experience, working for various organizations, I've never had that conversation. I think right now, we can just assume everything is being monitored, we have records of everything, every single mouse click, any action that you do on your computer is recorded and can be accessed at any time. I think some people will, regardless just operate under I am being monitored, I just expect it.
Our research actually supports that a lot of individuals say that, I just expect to be monitored nowadays, I don't have to be told that I know that things are being recorded and can be accessed later.
Mills: Are there differences among age cohorts? I'm thinking just millennials, I mean, people who are digital natives, who grew up in this world, that they seem to be less protective of their personal privacy than, say, baby boomers, are you finding that in terms of being watched on the job?
Tomczak: We haven't actually explored age effects. There has been some research out there that has showed in a comical way, how much young people are willing to give up some of their personal information for very small things. For one example, they found that college students were very willing to give up personal information for a free slice of pizza. I think there will be some differences. I think there's a generation of people growing up that have constantly had access to a phone that records their conversations. I think they're getting very used to it, but I don't have any research to support that, maybe something we'll look into it in the future.
Mills: Are people looking at the right things at this point? I'm thinking, I believe where I work, they've implemented something that looks at your calendar and maybe your keystrokes. I'm not sure what they're looking at, and they tell you whether you had a day where you were relaxed compared to other days. Does that matter to you, I mean, maybe I was super productive, because I was thinking really hard, and I wasn't touching my computer much that day, but how can you tell?
Tomczak: That is a question of whether or not what is being monitored actually means anything. I think this is the big problem right now is that because we have access to the data, we must try to find some sort of meaning from it, but like you just illustrated, performance or how people go about their job-related behaviors is just a very complex thing. Just because I can see that you're free doesn't mean that you're not doing anything, it doesn't mean that you might be less stressed, you could have personal aspects of work that are coming into play as well.
I think organizations are getting closer to monitoring the right things for the right reasons, as long as it's job-related, and it's not looking at your personal activity on your personal smartphone or anything like that. I think these can be meaningful sources of data, but we just have to be very careful and very deliberate with how they're used.
Mills: Are they looking at our smartphones now? I mean, my boss certainly has my cell phone number, I think the whole world has my cell phone number, so who else is watching me, and what are they looking for?
Tomczak: We typically talk about this in terms of company issue devices. There was a case a couple of years ago, where an employee was required to download an app that would help her with keeping track of clients, but it took location information at the same time. What this amounted to was the fact that her employer could see how fast she was driving on the highway at any given point and so those are the things where it's unintentional with monitoring, but that can leave the employee feeling extremely violated or invaded of their privacy. When it's not used for its intention, that's when we find employee reactions to monitoring to be the most negative.
Mills: What are the next things that you're looking at?
Tomczak: We want to continue looking at where expectations of monitoring occur, and what are the conditions under which monitoring might be accepted. We can think of monitoring somebody's sweat levels or biometric levels, that's something that's very invasive. I think you have very few people who'd be willing to give that information to their employer, but what are the circumstances where that's not the case? If I'm monitoring your sweat levels, and able to give you a text at three o'clock saying, you sweat a ridiculous amount on your construction job, you need to drink some water before you pass out.
Now the purpose right there is very job-related, it's very employee-focused, its safety, its health. That might be a condition where something when we just think of it, it might be invasive, but might be acceptable in one situation versus the next. That's something that we really want to look at. We've expanded our checklist of how all the ways that people can be monitored to incorporate some of these newer things like biometrics or facial recognition, and are looking at through qualitative data to understand if somebody thinks that this is sometimes acceptable, what are those circumstances?
Mills: Great. Well, that's all really interesting. I appreciate your coming here today and talking to us about the research that you're performing and look forward to learning more about whether my boss is watching me or not. I'm certainly going to be a lot more vigilant. Before we go, I just want to give everyone a reminder that we want to hear from you so email your comments and ideas to Speaking of Psychology at apa.org and please consider giving us a rating in iTunes, that's really helpful for us.
Speaking of Psychology as part of the APA Podcast Network, which includes other informative podcasts such as APA Journals Dialogue about new psychological research, and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all our podcasts on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website, SpeakingofPsychology.org and listen to more episodes. I'm Kim Mills with the American Psychological Association.
David Tomczak, MA, is a product solutions consultant at Aon and a fifth-year doctoral candidate in industrial/organizational psychology at The George Washington University. His research involves electronic performance monitoring, privacy and surveillance in the workplace, technology use in school curriculum and online privacy behaviors.
