In an era of remote work, more companies are tracking employees through desktop monitoring and other tools. While systems like this are put in place to prevent rule-breaking, recent findings suggest that they can actually encourage it.
Research outlined in a recent Harvard Business Review piece found that monitored employees were substantially more likely to break rules. This change was driven by a shift in employees’ sense of agency and personal responsibility — monitoring made employees subconsciously feel less responsible for their own conduct.
Conversely, when employees feel they're being treated fairly, they are less likely to lose their sense of moral responsibility in response to surveillance. This shows that, where monitoring is necessary, employers must take steps to preserve a sense of agency among employees.
In Starling's 2022 Compendium, Starling Advisors Karen Cook (Stanford), Amy Edmondson (Harvard), and Thomas Malone (MIT) discuss the importance of trust in the use of AI in the workplace, and the negative impact that current surveillance and monitoring often has on employee morale and organizational culture.
They argue that AI can be used in ways that reduce reliance on traditional surveillance and monitoring, helping to avoid potential negative outcomes. "Like bank risk and compliance officers, bank examiners and supervisors are well experienced with technologies used in surveillance and monitoring," they write. They are thus well placed to judge the competence and reliability of such tools. Employees, however, "are more circumspect.” To win employee acceptance, alternative applications of AI should be developed— and specifically designed to engender trust.
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