Rethinking Assumptions about Workplace Surveillance: A survey on the use of employee monitoring applications in Canada


Danielle Thompson, University of Waterloo

Employee monitoring applications (EMAs) are software tools that provide employers with the capacity to monitor employee behaviours through features such as email monitoring, time tracking, location tracking, keystroke logging, and camera and screen captures, among numerous other functionalities. EMAs have become increasingly affordable and accessible on the open market, and their adoption by Canadian companies increased significantly since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the shift toward remote work (Capterra, 2022; Thompson and Molnar, 2023). While marketed as beneficial for managing a dispersed workforce, the use of EMAs to monitor remote workers raises significant concerns about privacy and human rights, given their powerful surveillance capabilities and ability to collect vast troves of sensitive information that blur the division between workplace and personal activities. The use of EMAs for remote work monitoring increases the urgency of examining technology-facilitated surveillance in Canadian workplaces; yet relatively few studies have explored the patterns of EMA usages within Ontario. In light of these concerns, we sought to examine the extent to which EMAs are being adopted by Canadian companies and the ways in which they are used. Specifically, we wondered: (1) How do rises in remote work influence EMA adoption and use? (2) How do company objectives (e.g., cybersecurity, productivity, wellness) influence the adoption of EMAs? And (3) Are companies concerned about the potential harms of digital workplace surveillance and how does this influence EMA use? To answer these questions, we conducted a survey of 402 managers/supervisors (71.6%), executives/owners (22.6%), and partners/co-owners (5.7%) in companies across Ontario (60%), British Columbia (30%), and Quebec (10%). In order to gain insight into the relationship between remote work and EMA use, we included industries that were selected based on their high capacity for remote work (as identified by Statistics Canada) (e.g., education, finance, insurance etc.) and required participants to have knowledge of their companies remote working policies. Our findings suggest remote work options and the use of EMAs to be more prevalent in large companies (500+ employees) in comparison to those with a small workforce (less than 10 employees). However, following the onset of the pandemic, we see a spike in the amount of medium size companies (50-99 employees) using EMAs, suggesting that many companies who did not view monitoring technologies as necessary for workforce management prior to the pandemic, supported its adoption thereafter. While the connection between remote work and EMA use is not surprising, Canadian companies continue to use EMAs even though a recent StatsCan report (2024) notes a significant decrease in the percentage of Canadian workers that are working from home. While remote working rates have not returned to pre-Covid levels, we have seen a decline from 40% in April of 2020 to 30% in January of 2022 (Statistics Canada, 2024); yet, our findings suggest that EMA use remains high, with over half of our sample (51.7%) indicating that their company currently used EMAs at the time of our survey (January 19 - February 2, 2022). As such, we argue remote work management has served as a justification for the adoption of EMAs but suggest that digital workplace surveillance has permeated into non-remote management alongside the shift from entirely remote working during the pandemic to hybrid or in-person working arrangements thereafter. Additionally, we argue that while remote work management drove the adoption of EMAs for many companies, company objectives such as cybersecurity and productivity secure the continued use of these softwares. In fact, the desire for companies to achieve objectives like increasing profit (62.69%) appears to outweigh concerns about the harms these technologies produce (e.g., erosion of trust). Overall, our findings raise important concerns regarding the frequently mistaken compromises that managers accept when choosing to use EMAs. Specifically, managers assume that a slight loss of employee trust is counterbalanced by clear gains in productivity and cybersecurity, when, according to scholarly research and our own original research using computer science methods to assess the security and privacy vulnerabilities in the applications themselves, the opposite may well occur.

Non-presenting author: Adam Molnar, University of Waterloo

This paper will be presented at the following session: