We’ve all had to adjust to working from home, but for creative workers the new environment is a particular challenge. How can new, exciting ideas be generated and developed without the energy that comes from being in the same room as your colleagues?
If your agency has taken a hit in productivity thanks to the Covid-era virtual workplace, you might be considering ways to monitor staff to see if they’re really putting in the hours. Previously you would have had an idea what your team was up to in a shared physical space, but the options now are decidedly more Big Brother.
Before you rush out to buy software to monitor key strokes and mouse movements, like this boss did, take some time to read this article by my colleagues Lee Nair and Sean Illing. They’ll take you through the pitfalls of employee surveillance (beware multi-million pound fines from the data regulator) and the employee relations issues to bear in mind.
We may have come to accept some degree of work presence in our homes, taking video calls from the kitchen or typing emails from bed, but agencies would be well advised to tread carefully when it comes to more intrusive measures. After all, as Lee and Sean say, we may be working from home, but we don’t live at work.
In this period of increased home-working and adapting to the “new normal”, employers are facing the question of how they can monitor employees to an adequate degree without risk of incurring eye-watering fines. Whereas it was previously possible to gain an understanding of what employees were up to in a shared physical space, employers can no longer rely on “learning by osmosis” without engaging the help of monitoring software.
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