What use is workplace surveillance?– Surveying the disasters you don’t manage?

Closed-circuit television (CCTV), also known as video surveillance, is the use of closed-circuit television cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place on a limited set of monitors. Image by Hustvedt, CC3.0.

The history of workplace surveillance is more of a black hole than any sort of informative exercise. When workplace surveillance first became an obsession, people were worrying about the minutiae. Why were they timing toilet breaks, or trying to prevent them, and so on, were the issues.

Management was easily sold on this wonderful labor-saving approach to not doing their own jobs. It was like an endless performance review and even less useful. You could find fault with anything you should have fixed six months ago.

In its modern form, workplace surveillance is now like the weather. It’s just there, in whatever form. Nobody seemed to notice that workplace surveillance had become more important than what it was supposed to do. It was supposed to be a performance tool. You could save time and therefore money.

That never happened. You spent the money to enforce rules and have endless disputes with staff, managers, and probably lawyers. Workplace surveillance could never be a replacement for proper expert supervision. It was the lazy way, the easy out for managing “underperforming” staff.

That sounds good, but it’s the exact opposite of the reality. Workplace surveillance is generally resented. it adds major stress at a time when job security is a major issue. It assumes guilt and doesn’t reward good performance.

Underperformance is really the result of lousy management. Work isn’t done because management isn’t making sure it’s done, or making sure the staff member is working properly.

The net effect is:

Not really managing any actual workplace problems.

Using time and resources to fail to manage an obvious problem.

Ineffectual use of people, time, and resources.

Pretty unimpressive, you’d think. Nope. Workplace surveillance is a precursor to AI management in many ways. You can bitch about “remote workers” all you like, but nobody ever complains about absentee managers who are always in meetings or otherwise offsite and never actually manage anyone or anything.

Think about it:

The purpose of workplace surveillance is the surveillance of people. Not systems. Not fraud. Not dysfunctions of all shapes and sizes at all levels of any organization.

The theory is that surveillance improves productivity and reduces fraud.

Sure about that? Nobody’s even too sure what “productivity” means anymore, if they ever were, which is equally debatable.

Fraud is ubiquitous in the USA. It’s a national sport. You think all those cases you read about every day didn’t have surveillance?

More to the point, the cases of fraud and poor performance were equally obviously and unavoidably found after the event. They had time to become major issues even under surveillance.

The surveillance was no deterrent. Keystroke monitors, whatever ancient tech you want to name, even the reliable surveillance didn’t stop it.

Which leads to exactly one real issue.

What use is workplace surveillance?

If it can’t prevent fraud, can’t really target anything but the disasters after the events, how useful can it be? Do you have an asset or a liability?

It certainly can’t be useful with ineffective management. If you’ve become a sort of managerial janitor, your work isn’t productive, either. You’re just cleaning up the mess.

The message from the decades-long global mess is simple enough. Define the objectives of workplace surveillance or expect failure.

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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.