If You Want to Track Your Employees, Make Them a Part Of It
Employee surveillance doesn’t increase productivity as much as one would assume. It has a lot of weird second-round effects, because employees adapt to the system and change their behavior.
A few years ago, the CEO of the company I was working at decided to start monitoring us, the employees. A subcontractor installed cameras at the coffee machine, and the IT department upgraded the firewall, at the same time blocking a lot of websites someone decided weren’t relevant to our work. I’m pretty sure that office managers started to peek into our hard drives, because of some weird remarks that slipped out during meetings.
Unsurprisingly, the new policy had long-lasting effects.
After a couple of weeks, the guy taking care of the coffee machine asked us why we had stopped drinking coffee. In fact, we had all pooled together and bought a Nespresso coffee maker, that we set up next to the copy machine, away from the cameras.
Internet usage dropped like a stone. The new firewall had started to block a lot of websites that were in fact useful to our work, and slowed down the connection speed. After one too many calls to the IT department asking them to whitelist a domain that was unreasonably blocked, I gave up and bought an iPad with a 3G connection, and a couple of colleagues followed suit. In effect, we ended up bypassing the Internet controls completely.
With an iPad on hand, we also started to do A LOT of non-work related stuff on the side, much more than before. We even created our own clan on Clash of Clans, and we would routinely play the game while at our desks. Off the grid.
Anyone who has ever worked on a group project knows that you can’t tell a person what to do. We’re just not wired that way. The right approach is to influence that person, to pull the right strings so that he/she is compelled to accomplish what you need. When a company puts its employees in a goulag-type environment, with cameras and firewalls, they’ll feel compelled to escape, to cheat the system. The whole company will end up being worse off, with little hope of going back to the old ways.
A friend of mine who used to work at AT&T told me how one day, the IT installed a huge 40" screen in the middle of the open space where he was sitting. The screen would simply display a slideshow of the last images all the guys sitting in the room had downloaded, as a result of their browsing the Web. Internet usage for non-work related reasons plummeted instantly. Without actual tracking.
The lesson from this experiment is, if you want to set up a surveillance system to know what your employees are doing, make them a part of it. Share the results, show them, for example, how much time the office spends on Facebook as a whole. Studies show that people tend to grossly underestimate the amount of time they spend “slacking off” at work. We all see ourselves as more hard-working and more committed than the next guy. Show your employees the naked truth, and watch them self-police themselves.
In this spirit, we developed OfficeBrowsingHistory.com, a service that tracks the time spent on the Internet by every person in the office, together. The browsing map is the result of everyone’s collective behavior, an image of the team’s real culture. We don’t track every user’s individual actions, because it’s just not relevant. What matters is how every person in the group reflects on his own behavior, once he has this new point of reference.
More than a piece of tracking software, it’s a knowledge sharing tool, where everyone can see, in real time, the ressources being accessed by one’s teammates and colleagues. In a show of good faith, I’ve put up my own browsing history for everyone to see, on the Demo Map. I know, I spend too much time on Facebook and 9gag.
Sarunas Barauskas
