I’ve written before about some of the right (and wrong) ways to measure remote workers, as the boom in remote working during the pandemic coincided with a boom in remote monitoring sales. My previous foray into the topic highlighted that the surveillance of remote workers can not only harm trust and employee engagement, but also lead to poorer mental health among remote workers. This is often because it’s introduced surreptitiously, and doesn’t provide workers with a sense of autonomy.
A recent study from MIT provides a fresh look at the topic, and provides a salient reminder that surveillance is a terrible substitute for good management. This is an important message at a time when many organizations are introducing return-to-office mandates, due in large part to the failure to adapt managerial practices to ways of working that employees want.
Improving performance
The researchers wanted to explore whether using software to monitor remote workers helped or hindered their performance. Unsurprisingly, the results suggest that simply introducing surveillance software doesn’t help productivity. Instead, the best results occur when employees have a strong relationship with their manager and managerial decisions are made transparently.
“A lot of organizations adopted new digital tools to manage remote work—for example, digital monitoring tools and new communication platforms, but in the absence of complementary management practices, these tools do not necessarily support remote work success,” the researchers explain.
“Our results suggest the money spent on these digital tools may not have been money well spent, and that might be one of the reasons so many firms are saying that ‘in the longer run, remote work hasn’t really worked out.'”
Looking in the wrong place
This perhaps explains why return-to-office mandates often do more harm than good, as I explained in a recent article. When managers fail to adapt to the changing needs of employees, it breaks down the relationship that is so important to people thriving. As such, a better approach is to invest in managerial capability so that managers have the skills to manage a remote or hybrid team effectively.
The MIT researchers examined several hundred workers recruited via the Upwork platform, each of whom was monitored to try and ensure their performance and productivity was up to scratch. The researchers were able to accurately identify those with high and those with low productivity, before randomly placing them into three groups: Justified, Unjustified, and a Control Group.
For instance, in the first group high performers were told they no longer needed to be monitored due to high productivity, whereas poor performers were required to remain monitored with an explanation that it was due to low productivity.
In the second group, high performers were allowed to opt out of monitoring without tying this option to their productivity. By contrast, low performers were required to remain monitored without linking the decision to their performance.
The final group saw high performers continue to be monitored without any option to opt out, while the low performers were permitted to work without monitoring.
Clarity matters
The results show that when high performers had surveillance decisions made without justification, it resulted in a 17% fall in their performance. This wasn’t just confined to high performers, however, with low performers also seeing a decline in their performance when unjustified decisions were made around surveillance. It’s also important to note that high performers were less likely to accept work from the employer when changes weren’t justified.
By contrast, when changes in surveillance, whether in terms of keeping it or removing it, were made based on clearly articulated reasons, performance levels remained stable.
“These results reveal that simply applying surveillance is not enough to improve productivity,” the researchers explain. “They also suggest that managers need to provide a clear justification for requiring or not requiring their staff to use surveillance if they want it to enhance productivity.”
The results remind us that justification is important to workers. If there is a sense that people understand managerial actions, and even have a hand in them, then acceptance is much more likely to occur. This applies whether we’re talking about digital surveillance or return-to-office mandates. This is perhaps what many managers are struggling to understand as they continue with a command and control style of management that no longer works (if it ever has).
