The Orwellian Big Brother Problem: The Ethics of Remote Worker Monitoring

"Proceed, if you do, with caution" is the advice given by our guest Reid Blackman when speaking about employee monitoring whilst remote working. 

For many of us, working from home has been a nice change and one of the only positives to come out of the global pandemic. It has meant more working-time freedom, avoiding the long commute and no boss breathing down your neck. But as we all made the move home, managers have ramped up employee monitoring seemingly in fear of dropping levels of productivity. Managers are worried that employees will shirk off from their duties and become complacent, failing to perform as well as they do when in the office.

Heightened employee surveillance brings forth a number of ethical concerns to do with trust, consent, freedom and privacy. It is proven that intense employee surveillance actually reduces productivity rather than boosts it. It creates a culture of untrustworthiness. Employees feel watched all the time and their freedom is diminished, like they're in some Orwellian nightmare. 

In this episode Andrew and Cindy speak about this topic with Reid Blackman, Founder and CEO of Virtue and Professor of Philosophy (and trapeze instructor!). 

The topics of conversation include:

Whether employee monitoring is ever ethical.What productivity actually is and its relationship with time. How to implement employee surveillance as ethically as possible. How to avoid discriminating against groups in the workplace through surveillance. Trust, consent and freedom.

Reid Blackman, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of Virtue. He works with senior leaders of organizations to integrate ethics and ethical risk mitigation into company culture and the development, deployment, and procurement of digital products. Prior to founding Virtue, Reid was a professor of philosophy at Colgate University and a Fellow at the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

To find out more about Reid and to look at his work visit his website https://reidblackman.com/about

Find the article that sparked this conversation written by Reid here

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