"Professionals and the Ethics of Workplace Surveillance" - Steve Clarke, William Tuckwell & Morgan Luck

Journal of Social Philosophy (forthcoming)

By William Tuckwell

In August 2022, Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram reported in The New York Times on recent developments of workplace surveillance. Central to these developments is the rise of employer-driven productivity monitoring, in which workers are assigned productivity scores based on a range of metrics. In some cases, scores are calculated manually—for example, by awarding points for tasks completed and tallying them at the end of a reporting period. Increasingly, however, monitoring is automated: employers track keystrokes and mouse movements, log the number and duration of calls, analyse email traffic and response times, monitor mobile phone use, and even capture screenshots of employees’ devices. These measures are often tied directly to compensation. While such monitoring has long been used in sectors like warehouse distribution and call centres, Kantor and Sundaram point out that highly skilled professionals—such as lawyers, social workers, and healthcare practitioners—are now subject to it as well, particularly with the expansion of remote work following the COVID-19 pandemic.

In one particularly striking case described by Kantor & Sundaram, a US hospice run by U.S. based healthcare corporation Allina Health introduced productivity monitoring to monitor the work of chaplains:

The Rev. Margo Richardson of Minneapolis became a hospice chaplain to help patients wrestle with deep, searching questions. “This is the big test for everyone: How am I going to face my own death?” she said. But two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called “productivity points.” A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point (Kantor & Sundaram, 2022).

By requiring individual chaplains to acquire a particular number of productivity points, chaplains were incentivized to conduct their daily work activities in ways that paid out productivity points rather than in ways that helped them fulfil professional obligations:

Sometimes the chaplains sacrificed points, risking reprimand or trying to make them up later. But their jobs depended on meeting productivity point requirements. So they shifted whom they saw when, the time they spent and the depth of their relationships with the dying, some said. Group settings like nursing homes were rich sources of points. Single patients in homes dotting the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area were not.

“This is going to sound terrible,” [Chaplain] Mx. Thonvold said, “but every now and again I would do what I thought of as ‘spiritual care drive-bys’” to rack up points. If a patient was sleeping, “I could just talk to the nurse and say, ‘Are there any concerns?’ It counted as a visit because I laid eyes.” (Kantor & Sundaram, 2022)

Something seems morally amiss here, and in several similar cases described by Kantor & Sundaram. In our paper, we propose an explanation. We suggest that such cases involve a violation of the following moral principle:

Unhindered Professionalism: Employers ought not to significantly hinder the ability of their professional employees to fulfil professional obligations.

In the pursuit of productivity points, chaplains spent less time with patients making it hard for them to provide the emotional and spiritual guidance that patients might require. As the Rev. Margo Richardson reports, when someone asks a question like ‘What’s it like to die?’, there are no short answers. Such productivity monitoring also meant that some patients went unseen as chaplains favoured visiting group settings, which are rich sources of points, rather than visiting patients in more rural settings, which were poor sources of points. The result was that both Rev. Richardson and Mx. Thonvold '...came to the same conclusion: The metrics prevented them from fulfilling their calling. They quit' (Kantor & Sundaram, 2022). So, incentives provided by productivity monitoring can be damaging because they encourage the violation of professional obligations, such as the Chaplains’ obligation to ’[S]peak and act in ways that honour the dignity and value of every individual’ (APC, n.d.) that is stated in their codes of ethics.

Beyond productivity monitoring incentivizing the violation of professional obligations, we describe two further ways that workplace surveillance can compromise professional obligations. Surveillance can compromise confidentiality obligations, such as when online counselling services are recorded. Surveillance can also as compromise the intellectual privacy that some professionals need to experiment with ideas before settling on what is best for a client, such as when lawyers are trying to figure out the best line of defence for a client. It is not all bad. Surveillance can sometimes help professionals fulfil their professional obligations – police worn body cameras are a case in point.

Beyond doing a good job of explaining what is amiss in the Allina Health case, there are good theoretical reasons to accept Unhindered Professionalism. One reason concerns consequences. Professionals fulfilling their professional obligations has good consequences. When psychotherapists respect confidentiality, they create the conditions for a trusting and effective therapeutic relationship—something that would be impossible without assurances of privacy. More generally, when professionals reliably uphold their obligations, this fosters public trust in the profession as a whole, which in turn encourages people to seek out and rely upon professional services.

Another reason concerns moral agency – the capacity to make, and act on, judgements of what is right and wrong. Professionals are motivated to provide a good service and to fulfil their obligations. Employers recruit professionals knowing that they are bound by professional obligations. When employers subsequently make it difficult for professionals to carry out their work within these constraints, they are objectionably interfering with their moral agency.

Unhindered professionalism has implications for what forms of workplace surveillance are morally permissible. Performance monitoring must be sensitive to the point and purpose of the job being monitored. In chaplaincy, the central purpose is to provide spiritual care and guidance to those nearing the end of life. The quality of this work cannot be captured by the length of time a chaplain spends with a patient or a grieving family. The metrics employed in performance monitoring should be reliable proxies for what an employer is trying to measure. In professions where effective practice requires time away from one’s computer, keystroke counts and idle-time trackers are misleading. Finally, surveillance is should not be used where its mere presence undermines professional obligations. For example, recording a private exchange between a psychotherapist and their client. These implications cast serious doubt over the permissibility of many of the recent developments in professional workplace surveillance.