Bosses and remote workers need to walk a fine line to balance trust, oversight and micromanagement, experts say.
They spoke out following a B.C. court ruling ordering an accountant to pay her former employer more than $2,600 after surveillance software discovered she was not completing her tasks when she was teleworking. The data indicated that the lady’s computer had not been used for approximately 50 hours.
The employee had filed a lawsuit, arguing that she had been terminated without cause.
Sandra Robinson, an occupational psychologist who teaches at the University of British Columbia, argues that companies continue to offer full or partial telecommuting to their employees in order to keep them happy. That’s one of the reasons they do it.
She warns bosses against the temptation to employ surveillance tools, such as tracking software. This could erode the trust between the company and the employees.
“One of the things I tell executives is that one of the best ways to build trust is to trust. Trust must be reciprocal,” says Ms. Robinson.
Research suggests that employees’ sense of responsibility is lost when they feel the company trusts them less.
Adults generally don’t like to be watched all the time. Tracking software can be stressful for employees, Robinson says.
Monitoring employees from home can even contribute to creating unrealistic standards that would have no place in an office.
“Nobody comes to micromanage what we usually do. At work, people go to talk to the water cooler, they go to the bathroom. They get lost in their thoughts. »
Research shows that employees in many fields can’t do their job for eight hours straight, even in the office, says Robinson.
“Our brains can’t do everything. Are we setting standards that don’t even exist in the workplace because we want people to work like robots? Are we going to pay them only if they “really” deliver the goods? »
Shafik Bhallo, an employment lawyer and associate professor at Simon Fraser University, said the case before the court was serious because submitting a false attendance sheet is the equivalent of fraud.
“The act itself was serious enough to constitute a breach of an employee’s duty of honesty to his employer. Trust has been broken. There was a break. In this case, the relationship was no longer repairable,” he says.
Me Bhallo does not believe that the court’s decision will encourage a large number of companies to sue their employees. What the offending employee was doing was much more than answering a personal phone call during working hours.
“When I work from home, I may have a pet that will catch my eye for a while. I can receive a personal call. I can have my gardener who needs my instructions or the postman can ring the doorbell, he enumerates. All things I wouldn’t do if I was in the office. »
But such activities do not constitute grounds for dismissal, unless these acts and gestures become habitual and the employee does not correct his behavior despite warnings from his superiors, adds the lawyer.
He recalls that Canadian law remains at “a stage of development” when it comes time to settle disputes about telework. The issue of context will be decisive in court.