Every Move You Make

What to Do about Surveillance in Remote Work

Hello there, Mode-Switchers! I’m trying an experiment, a mid-week re-send of the written portion of an issue, but in an audio format. Let me know how this goes for you, whether the return of an issue you’ve already read is unwanted, or whether this podcast gives you a chance to experience, as you drive or walk, something you didn’t have time for the first time it alighted in your inbox. - craig

A couple of weeks back, some friends invited me out to their cottage on Lake Michigan for the afternoon. The day was gorgeous but gusty, the waves at three-to-five feet swells. It was a red-flag, riptide of a beach day.

One of the beachgoers decided to take his kayak out anyway. And not long after he’d hit the deeper water, a strong current caught his boat. Fortunately, this fellow can handle a kayak with the best of them. Later, when he told us the story, you could tell he’d rather enjoyed what might have unnerved the rest of us. But he and his craft did get drawn out deeper than he wanted to be.

I tell that story just to show off what is for me a new usage of the word craft. There’s a double meaning in the word—a triple meaning, in fact. The communication scholar John Durham Peters notes in his book The Marvelous Clouds that the word can mean skill, as in “He’s a master at the craft of welding.” It can also mean vessel. So, out on the deep blue of Lake Michigan, my plucky friend exercised craft rowing his craft. In Peters’s usage, the double meaning of craft recalls the need for both artfulness and flotation devices in the deeps of digital life.

I’m thinking this week about a very particular kind of craft needed for a very particular kind of digital interaction: the surveillance of remote workers’ productivity.

Photo by Lianhao Qu

As a recent issue of The Dispatch noted, “employees who plunged into remote work during pandemic lockdowns—many for the first time in their careers—increasingly cite other reasons for wanting to stick with it: no commute, better focus, flexibility to manage a chronic illness or watch a child, freedom to live somewhere cheaper or close to family.” But this freedom comes at a cost, as the talk about surveillant companies would suggest. Monitoring people’s productivity with digital tech makes a certain sense: supervisors quite simply don’t know what their teams are doing. And as the Mode/Switch has noted, Gen Z and millennial employees don’t appreciate phone calls. These realities compel employers to negotiate with employees: we’ll trade you freedom at home for surveillance from corporate. New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor noted that people are calling this “the bargain” that remote workers and their supervisors are making.

That’s not good craft. In fact, the spreading surveillance of employees represents a third meaning for the word craft: sneakiness and deception. In The Daily this past week, Kantor, the above mentioned NYT reporter, told of an employee whose paychecks kept showing up with less money than she was owed. The worker gradually figured out that her company’s surveillance software was docking her pay when she was “caught” on webcam or by screenshot looking unproductive. She had apparently not been informed about the surveillance and, even she had known about it, she couldn’t predict when a picture of her face or screen might be taken. If she stepped away from her desk to go to the bathroom, the webcam might capture a pic while she was gone, with the result that her pay would be docked.

That takes corporate craft to a whole new level.

So, this week, I’ve been thinking about what sort of craft we need for these digital interactions. I’ve been asking what art and what skill might come to our aid as we gaze into the fathomless gazes of our screens.

Let me float a kayak, er, an idea by you.

I think that what we need for the choppy conditions of digital interaction is speech craft, or the artful practice of oral communication. How might such an old-fashioned practice as good talk help in a world of screens and mics and webcams?

Let me start with a non-surveillance example. One of my interviewees, Rachel Alvarado, in the height of the pandemic, had two kids underfoot and numerous clients onscreen. But she practiced speech craft in the midst of it all. I watched her do this myself when she came into podcast with me at 1871: she brought her kids and her husband and chatted good-humoredly with me and kept touch with them as well. In the course of our interview, I learned that, when she works with clients who are distressed about website problems, she spots their anxiety onscreen. Instead of ignoring it, as is sometimes done in the formalities of business communication, she addresses it head on. She asks them to share what’s going on. And if life seems like a lot at the moment, she asks simple human questions like, “How can I make things easier for you today?”

There you go. That’s speech craft. Rachel is allowing the norms of everyday speech—the sort of communication a parent uses with a child—to guide her digital interactions with clients.

Now, back to surveillance tech and remote work. How might speech craft work in such a setting? Again, I’m not proposing that we get rid of digital interaction, but rather that we look for a more humane way to guide supervisors and their teams towards better practice.

It’s easy to forget that surveillance media aren’t just tools. They also bring with them ways of using tools and ways of relating to others. When supervisors use their employees’ webcams to collect incriminate data, that usage brings with it a certain way of relating to computerized tools and to computer-users. Let’s call it an extractive relationship: the webcam becomes not a way of relating, but a way of grabbing.

But what if instead, we allowed the norms of spoken exchange to guide our practices of accountability in remote conditions? Instead of surreptitiously capturing screen shots or facial pics, what if supervisors did regular video check-ins with their teams and simply asked how the projects were moving along? That’s a way of checking-in that’s closer to the spoken dynamics of “stand-ups” at the beginning of the corporate day. It’s interactive rather than extractive. It would equip a more honest and a more humane workplace community.

Speech craft would be a lot better than the bargain managers and their teams are now striking, which strikes me as a kayak likely to capsize.

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