- People who get to work from home are more comfortable with employers watching their communications.
- For those who head into the office every day, there’s more unease with high-level monitoring.
- The findings come from a survey of workers in nearly three dozen countries.
Would you trade some privacy for the chance to WFH?
Those who are allowed to sign in from home at least some of the time are more willing to let their employers sift through emails, chat messages, and virtual meeting transcripts so bosses can make workplace improvements, a survey of workers in nearly three dozen countries found.
The findings, from software company Qualtrics, show a gap between employees who get to work from home and those who have to trek to the office every day.
The results could signal that workers who get some time away from the office are happier and therefore have less to gripe about than those with a daily commute. RTO fights have been growing more intense in recent months. Big names like Amazon and Meta are telling managers that they might have to fire workers who don’t comply with orders to show up at their desks.
Among those Qualtrics surveyed, 62% of people who work from home three times a week were OK with companies broadly monitoring email and chat messages. But of those who always worked in the office, only 49% were good with employers examining these types of digital footprints. For fully remote workers, the number came in at 57%.
Having employers examine social media wasn’t a winning idea for most people. Only about four in 10 workers were comfortable with letting employers mine social media posts — signed or anonymous — for insights.
Benjamin Granger, chief workplace psychologist at Qualtrics, told Insider that employers previously had to rely mostly on things like employee surveys to understand what workers were feeling and concerned about. Now, he said, technology makes it possible to look through things like emails, chats, and comments in a webcast to understand what people are talking about and how they feel about it.
“People are generally fairly comfortable with a company scraping work-related communications,” he said. “But as you get to the more personal stuff, that’s where people get more uncomfortable, naturally.”
Granger noted that this so-called passive listening isn’t the same thing as using productivity-monitoring software.
But when companies look at communications to better understand what life is like for workers, there’s often support for that. Seven in 10 workers in the survey were OK with their employers relying on email data to draw insights and make their jobs better.
Granger said questions around what’s OK for employers to monitor will continue to arise because it’s become easier for those in charge to scoop up data on employee sentiment, even if it’s anonymous. That could come from sites like Glassdoor or apps like Blind or even social media posts that don’t identify individuals.
“We do believe that this is going to take root in a lot of companies — where there’s going to be much more passive listening done,” he said.
Not surprisingly, younger workers were somewhat more comfortable than their older colleagues with companies monitoring social media posts. Among Gen Z and millennial workers, 45% were OK with employers reviewing non-anonymous social media posts. But only 37% of Gen X workers and 29% of Boomers signed off on that approach.
Qualtrics used an online survey to gather responses from nearly 37,000 workers in 32 countries in July. Employers ranged in size from 100 to 50,000 workers.
