Nir Eyal has an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about the horrible, Orwellian practice of businesses using spyware to monitor what their employees are doing. Even putting aside the Stasi element, it should be clear to anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex that this a bad idea. Employee moral will plummet, the best ones will be plotting their escape, and the rest will actively subvert it to the extent they can.
Even worse, the spyware often tracks trivial things—like how many emails an employee sends—and doesn’t really tell management anything useful. And, of course, Goodhart’s law comes into play ensuring that employees will game the system so that whatever is being measured is what you will get. For example, if you measure how many emails an employee sends, you can be sure that employees will spend their time sending emails in favor of more productive work.
Rather than distrusting employees and spying on them, Eval says companies would be much better off seeking ways to not distract them. That means, among other things
- Don’t expect them to drop everything to answer an email.
- Don’t have unnecessary meetings, especially ones without an agenda.
- Sync your schedules so that everyone has distraction free time to get the important work done.
Regardless, there’s a moral aspect: it’s not okay to spy on people. Even if you’re paying them.