Compliance Today (April 2022)

“Function creep” is not a term used to describe a person you don’t like. It refers to using a technology for something beyond its original intended use.

The pandemic has changed many aspects of how we conduct business. Many of those changes have, in turn, caused further changes that we are now dealing with. One example of the former is the conversion of many office workers to remote employees, a change that is becoming at least semi-permanent to some level.

But the change from office to remote work has triggered another change. According to one recent report,^[1] the percentage of companies with at least 1,000 employees that use technology to surveil their employees has doubled from 30% to 60% since the beginning of the pandemic.

Has your organization increased its monitoring of remote employees? A better question may be, do you know whether your organization is doing so? A follow-up question that addresses function creep is whether a technology that was deployed in response to the pandemic could now be used to overly monitor employees at home. Many laptops already have capabilities for monitoring employees working from home, and if they don’t, it’s rather easy to install remotely. In other cases, the software our employees use automatically creates a trail of data that could be used for surveillance. This data simply hasn’t been used in that manner before.

Interestingly, as with many areas of rapid change, the legal framework needs to catch up with reality. There isn’t really a federal legal framework that specifically addresses this issue in the US. So, states are scrambling to address it. We can expect more legal developments in this area, with differences from state to state, adding yet another type of compliance risk that needs to be managed by human resources, IT, and the compliance team.

Balancing the already blurry line between work and personal activity has gotten more complicated. This is an area of risk that the compliance team needs to consider and help form a consistent approach to—before supervisors begin taking advantage of data that they discover is readily available to them.

1 Sam Blum, “Employee surveillance is exploding with remote work—and could be the new norm,” HR Brew, January 19, 2022, https://www.morningbrew.com/hr/stories/2022/01/19/employee-surveillance-is-exploding-with-remote-work-and-could-be-the-new-norm

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