BlueSky Thinking Summary

Employee productivity monitoring is a practice that will improve efficiency but strikes a deep nerve with issues of trust, privacy, and fairness.

Kellogg faculty underscore a few of the key considerations that companies implementing these methods must make.

They recommend starting by measuring outcome variables for which there are clear, relevant metrics for each individual role;

in other words, simple tasks with clear metrics are more monitorable than complex innovative work.

Effective monitoring benefits both firms and employees only when tied to safety, learning, and fair compensation.

These pitfalls include the gaming of metrics and the implementation of intrusive surveillance that can erode trust.

We call on leaders to involve workers in monitoring system design in order to ensure proper alignment of incentives and a sense of procedural fairness, particularly when people are working from home.

It is an important balancing process between productivity gains and employee autonomy if they are to implement monitoring sustainably.

As remote work continues to grow in popularity, this balance becomes exponentially important to organizational success and, indeed, to employee satisfaction.