Bossware is coming for almost every worker
Many companies in the US and Europe now appear – controversially – to want to try, spurred on by the enormous shifts in working habits during the pandemic, in which countless office jobs moved home and seem set to either stay there or become hybrid. This is colliding with another trend among employers towards the quantification of work – whether physical or digital – in the hope of driving efficiency.
The number and array of tools now on offer to continuously monitor employees’ digital activity and provide feedback to managers is remarkable. Tracking technology can also log keystrokes, take screenshots, record mouse movements, activate webcams and microphones, or periodically snap pictures without employees knowing. And a growing subset incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) and complex algorithms to make sense of the data being collected.
