WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE AS A TRADEOFF FOR SAFETY

Even as the economic situation has yet to settle out, companies have and must continue to prepare for reemergence. Employers have had to consider work from home policies — indefinitely or through the end of the school year, to ease some of the uncertainty for employees with children — and policies to allow their employees to return to the workplace. These critical decisions have given rise to conversation about surveillance AI and the world of work, both virtual and physical.

The pandemic has forced the hand of many employers previously reluctant about their workforce working from home regularly, with an impact to productivity as the concern most often stated. To mitigate this concern, some employers have asked their employees to install software that tracks their mouse movements or keystrokes. 

Ensuring the health and safety of employees entering an office could mean collecting self-reported or requesting access to health data, contact tracing via work phone app, or even the ability to triangulate information between email, video conferencing tools, SMS, and internal messaging platforms to understand sentiment and detect health and well-being.   

“Employees must be able to trust their leaders to deploy new technologies, including AI, for good. Earning that trust requires a great deal of transparency — about why and how AI is being used, the key factors driving the system’s recommendations, the technology’s limitations, and the human judgment calls that feed the system and interpret the data. Employees need to feel that their leaders are truly interested in boosting their performance, improving their health, and keeping them safe, and that surveillance AI will make the company a better place to work. Even well-intended efforts to leverage AI to protect people will backfire if companies don’t have a culture of trust and employees are suspicious of those at the top.”

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/can-surveillance-ai-make-the-workplace-safe/

The broader implication, beyond the current workforce, is the future workforce. As employers recruit new employees, transparency around new safety-focused surveillance practices may become a new interview topic to navigate.