VMware has just presented the results of an international and local study that shows that the increase in performance and employee confidence as a result of the new hybrid work modalities could be reversed with the implementation of remote surveillance measures.
The study, conducted by Vanson Bourne for VMware and entitled: The Virtual Office: New Rules for a New Era of Work, reveals that 72% of the companies surveyed have implemented or plan to implement employee monitoring measures in order to analyze staff productivity from the adoption of hybrid work models.
Among the measures adopted by these companies are the supervision of email (41%), Internet browsing (34%) and collaboration tools (41%), video surveillance (22%), tracking of Attention using webcams (24%) and keyboard keystroke recording software (27%). However, 34% of companies that have begun monitoring their staff remotely see an “increase” or “significant increase” in staff turnover.
The results of the study indicate that a breakeven point must be reached in the search for new ways of evaluating the performance of employees who go beyond presenteeism. From an employee perspective, 82% acknowledge that after the transition to distributed work, employers focus more on performance and less on conventional indicators such as time spent in the office.
Furthermore, 83% of employees say that teleworking technologies allow them to work more efficiently than before. For their part, 77% of companies have had to develop new ways of measuring productivity. Some have adopted performance-focused solutions, such as regular meetings with managers to assess workloads (49%), analysis of results and expectations (53%), or the use of innovative programs for project management (51% ).
Now that employees are no longer in the office, companies are turning to new modalities for monitoring and evaluating productivity. While 64% of surveyed companies acknowledge that their organizations have had to come up with new ways to measure productivity as part of the transition to hybrid work, transparency remains critical. 28% of employees say they do not know if their company has implemented device monitoring systems to evaluate their productivity.
“We see that companies around the world are embracing hybrid work models, which do not require employees to always work from the office. When replacing presenteeism with supervisory tools, companies should be cautious.
“Monitoring and performance are two very different things,” he says. Maria Jose Talavera, CEO of VMware Iberia. “The tools for the digital workspace allow people to work from anywhere. As we have observed, employees feel more valued and perceive that their employers trust them more. Lack of transparency and stealthy quantitative metrics often undermine employee loyalty and drive valuable people to seek other horizons outside of the company in a highly competitive market where opportunities for talented employees abound, “he adds.
