• It's no secret some companies use surveillance software to monitor employees.

• But the return-to-office wars have also brought attention to how they monitor staff attendance.

• Here's how firms use "bossware" to keep tabs on employees, including tracking keystrokes and breaks.

If you've ever thought your employer was watching, you may not have been wrong.

Some companies use workplace-surveillance tools to keep tabs on their workforce, whether that's to see employees' productivity or monitor their comings and goings as the return-to-office debate rages on.

Here are some of the ways companies spy on their workers.

Badge swipes

Many employees swipe their badges to get in or out of their offices, and that data has become a gold mine for companies enforcing return-to-office mandates.

Accounting giant PwC recently told staff in the UK they must spend at least three days a week in the office or with clients starting in January. The company reportedly said in a memo that it'll track employees' working locations to monitor compliance.

As Amazon escalates its RTO push, it's started tracking and sharing individual office attendance records. Employees can see their own "Badge Report" on an internal HR dashboard showing the days they badged in for each of the past eight weeks.

The move is a reversal of an old policy of only tracking anonymized, aggregated office attendance data, which Amazon said was shared with managers, mostly for safety and space-planning purposes.

"This tool gives employees and managers visibility into the days they badged into a corporate building," Rob Munoz, an Amazon spokesperson, previously told BI in an email. "The information will help guide conversations as needed between employees and managers about coming into the office with their colleagues."

Goldman Sachs has also used employee ID swipes to track who goes to the office and ultimately help crack down on employees who weren't working in the office enough. JPMorgan has done the same, using swipe data to generate special reports and dashboards that managers then use to enforce in-office quotas, including via calls and emails from senior leaders to staffers who aren't complying.

JPMorgan's dashboard "provides the percentage of days employees were in the office out of the possible eligible days," a description on the company's intranet, shared with BI, said.

"Look at this and compare against what you're requiring for your team. For example, if your team is meant to be in 3 days a week, this number should equal 60%," one leaked intranet post said, noting the records were accessible to managing and executive directors.

Keystrokes, internet usage, and even webcam access

Employee time-tracking software can give companies a window into what staffers are doing on their laptops, and it's gotten more popular in the age of remote work.

Carlo Borja, a content marketing manager for the workday analytics company Time Doctor, previously told BI the company's software provided real-time dashboards and progress reports on employees' productivity levels, including things such as their time in and out, breaks, and internet and app usage. One Time Doctor tool even lets businesses take screenshots and video recordings of employees' screens.

"We help companies get peace of mind with productivity analytics," he told BI.

Some employee-tracking software also offers the ability to log employees' keystrokes or even activate their microphones or webcams without them knowing.

JPMorgan uses a proprietary system named the "Workforce Activity Data Utility," or WADU, to gather more wide-ranging data.

The system can see information as varied as how long employees spend on Zoom calls, emails, and spreadsheets and when they reserve seats in the office, as Business Insider reported in 2022.

So-called "bossware" has grown more popular in the age of remote work.

In a ResumeBuilder.com survey of 1,000 US business leaders in March 2023, 96% of respondents at organizations with a primarily remote or hybrid workforce said their firms used some type of employee-monitoring software. Pre-pandemic, only 10% of those companies were doing so, the survey indicated.

Sensors tracking employees' whereabouts in the office

Some employers may even keep tabs on where employees spend the most time in the office. The Australian firm XY Sense sells sensors that can be mounted onto ceilings to scan an office floor and identify heavily trafficked or underused areas, in theory to better allocate space.

XY Sense CEO Alex Birch previously told BI the devices didn't identify individuals but rendered them as dots on a screen.

"It's not about Big Brother or monitoring anyone. It's actually about understanding exactly how space is used," he said.

Water cooler breaks

High-tech water coolers may even offer up some data to employers.

Bevi, a maker of flavored water machines, logs how often workers use its machines. Sean Grundy, cofounder and CEO of Bevi, previously told BI the company was able to see from this data that more workers were getting to the office before 9 a.m. or staying past 5 p.m. than before the pandemic.

The company recently published a report examining return-to-office trends for the first half of the year. The report indicated that more US workers were coming in on Mondays and Fridays than last year, and Tuesdays are the most popular day to commute to work.

Read the original article on Business Insider