Do you use Microsoft Teams, Slack or Jabber to banter with your colleagues? Or perhaps a co-worker has pointedly sent you this link.
Since you’ve clicked on this, you’re probably wondering why someone has such strong views on enterprise software. I don’t particularly. What I care about is workers getting themselves fired because workplaces made it too convenient to use their technology.
It’s become normal to treat work technology as if it is our own. First it was a work email address. Then, they gave us work mobiles. Then, in a trend supercharged by pandemic-prompted remote working, instant messaging services replaced face-to-face conversations between colleagues.
These changes are, of course, to the benefit of employers. Workers can — and increasingly are expected to — be contacted at any time. In a world where businesses run 24/7, it’s cheaper to have workers on call than to hire people to work in shifts around the clock. And it’s even cheaper to make it possible for staff to be tempted to just respond to a few emails or a desperate Teams message that pops up at 8.30pm on a weekday night than it is to pay them to be on call. (Hello right to disconnect laws!)
But it’s easy to convince ourselves it’s to our benefit, too. Instead of using the ad-filled Gmail or having to check multiple emails, why not just use your company email to organise your social soccer league that’s on after work? Your boss wouldn’t mind.
When your iPhone 11 starts to get a bit long in the tooth and you don’t want to stump up big bucks for a new one, it’s easy to just use your company phone to watch TikTok and play Subway Surfers when you’re on the loo at work. Thanks to WhatsApp, Messenger and iMessage, you can even get your personal messages on there without too much hassle.
Ding! You’re in a boring meeting when you get a message. Your CMO (whatever that means) is talking about adjusted EBITDA (whatever that means) and is droning on. Your colleague has sent you a message dryly observing that it’s running a bit long. You try to mask your smile from the always-on camera that’s beaming your face into the Zoom meeting grid and write something back about their slide deck. Instead of having to wait until you run into each other at the water cooler — if you ever do, considering flexing working schedules — you can instantaneously bitch about your bosses. It feels good to bond over the shared trauma of a modern workplace.
Okay now imagine you did all of this with your boss standing over your shoulder. That’s what you’re doing when you talk shit, shop online or use Tinder on your work phone. When it comes to tech — whether it’s a device or a service — if someone else owns it, someone else can see what you’re doing. Every single word you type can be pulled up by your superior (with the help of the IT department) at any moment. And the transcript of chitchat between you and your work husband sounds a lot different when you’re hearing it read back to you by a company HR representative.
Legally, there is not what Maurice Blackburn lawyers Alison Barrett and Jillian Barrett called an “unrestricted right to conduct surveillance” on work devices. But many workplaces have very broad policies permitting them to surveil what you do on your laptop, phone or company servers. All it takes is a nebulously worded policy about “social media usage” or “work resources” to justify a claim that you broke company rules and need to show cause or get laid off. It may not even be the real reason someone wants you gone, but it is undeniable evidence of potential wrongdoing. Even if you want to claim wrongful dismissal and you win, that result is years down the track — how are you paying the rent until then?
That’s assuming it reaches the level of official sanction. But there are ways to make your life hell without going that far. Missed promotions, isolation and bullying are all consequences of a nosey boss who looks through what you’ve been emailing without you knowing. Good luck proving it even if you know it’s happening. You might be thinking to yourself that this will never happen with your boss who is so cool and lets you leave early on Fridays. But when you’re suddenly angling for a pay rise or overperforming at work and making them look bad, things can change.
Then there are the new ways that companies are monitoring messages with technology like AI to calculate employee morale or see how people are responding to new company policies. Feeling a bit down on work? You might be flagged as a flight risk and taken off exciting projects in case you quit.
At this point, I daresay you might be recalling your own technically non-work-related use of work tech and becoming a bit nervous. Don’t worry, these aren’t likely outcomes. Most of us will be fine. These risks aren’t evenly distributed, either. Whistleblowers, those in employment disputes, marginalised groups and people who generally rock the boat will be the ones most likely to get the short end of the stick.
The question you need to ask yourself is: why? Why can’t you use your personal email? Why are you using your work phone to scroll Instagram? Why don’t you just kick off a WhatsApp group with your colleagues? Is the benefit of convenience worth the slight chance that this stuff could be used against you? Let’s be real, there’s the tiniest bit of friction on all of these additional steps. In fact, it may even be liberating to fully let loose about your job (or leak corporate wrongdoing to journalists such as myself).
You should be doing this to protect yourself. In fact, you’re even protecting your boss from misreading out-of-context chats and having to punish one of their star employees. These worst-case scenarios will probably never happen to you. I hope they never do! But if you ever find yourself in this situation, there’s a lot riding on the fact that you thought it was easier to send a message on Slack to someone than it was to send a text.
Most of us are on 200 cameras a day. AI can lipread. The cloud has no true security. What to do?
Wear a mask. Botox your lips, and your partner’s. Spyware the boss, and their partner. And the Board. AI-bot them all. Be secure! If you can do all that how come you’re working for them? Start a security company, sell this stuff, be a billionaire. Hold the keys.
But ask yourself this: would I be happy?
This is true now, but only while suitable baselines for “normal” chatter are established.
Once that’s done, everything will be monitored and straying far from the mean will have you in a “risky proposition” bucket.
Yes, get used to carrying two phones. The work IT is for work only, no exceptions. And record every conflict in the workplace. Every conflict, no matter how small. And simply turn off the work phone once home. How hard is it? The right to disconnect nonsense and inability to grasp the concept of work IT is not yours, are more signs humans have lost the ability to adult and need mummy and daddy government to adult for them. We adults shouldn’t be having our tax money squandered in this rubbish.
If the potential consequence is being unemployed, very.
They’re not there to adult for you, they’re there to protect you from retaliation from a more powerful entity. Which is about as core a function of Government as you could imagine.
It’s either a toxic boss and/or a toxic organisation. A bully boss can be got rid of. If it’s a toxic organisation, leave.
The malfunction is that there is no way to safely call out to name and shame toxic bosses and orgs anonymously. That management have to be bludgeoned into good management by the guvment is the real worry. It’s called micromanagement. By a third party. What a shit show of a society that this nonsense is happening.
And here we are, on a planet, where the richest are saying, hey, what can we do with all this unnecessary wealth.
Well, duh.
It’s either a toxic boss and/or a toxic organisan be got rid of. If it’s a toxic organisation, leave.
The malfunction is that there is no way to safely call out to name and shame toxic bosses and orgs anonymously. That management have to be bludgeoned into good management by the guvment is the real worry. It’s called micromanagement. By a third party. Says a lot about our society and not in a good way. My tax money being used to micromanage bad organisational management.
And here we are, on a planet, where the richest are saying, hey, what can we do with all this unnecessary wealth.
Well, duh.
Yup. And then live off… air ?
What ? “Bludgeoning” business into not exploiting workers has been a major function of Government for generations. Minimum wage ? Workplace safety ? The working week ?
Naming and shaming only works when those who are named, are actually shamed.
Another way of doing it is for the government to say to organisations that work out of normal hours, for every day that you don’t have a policy that stipulates no out of hours calls, and we have to have policy for you, then you pay us a management consultancy fee of $30,000 per day.
That way the tax payer makes on bad management.
As someone who spent a decade being on call for at least one week each month on average (and some years for one in two weeks – although on the other hand I was paid to be on call) I used to only buy work shirts with two front pockets. It really is easy to manage two phones. One for work, one personal, because there was no way I was making it easy to give work access to my personal phone. And, since I worked in IT, kept my ears and eyes open and fostered a healthy sense of paranoia, I often had to point out to other staff that using work equipment for non-work chats and browsing was a singularly dumb and potentially dangerous career-limiting thing to do. In worst-case scenarios, I was the guy who trawled through the web proxy logs to match the browsing activity to the staff member who had been caught with certain images on his PC. As such, I can verify that as soon as you switch on your work computer/phone you lose any privacy. My workplace had a pre-login disclaimer pointing out that all activity was subject to monitoring.
As to the “right to disconnect” legislation, personally I consider it to be performative rather than effective. You can whinge about being contacted at all hours or expected to drop everything on a Sunday because your manager has had an inconveniently-timed brain-fart, but proceeding on to doing something about it? Without business-endangering levels of penalties, taking your employer to the FWC is basically just another way of resigning.
“I consider it to be performative rather than effective.”
I fear you’re probably right, but if it makes employees realise they do have the right to ignore that call, text or email that comes in on their time off, that’s a help, not a hindrance. Likewise if it makes employers think twice before calling, texting or emailing someone who is on their day off. Even better if the employer decides not to call, text or email until the employee is back at work.
The feeling of being on call 24/7 is really messing with employees. Too many are only switching off when they’re on annual leave, sometimes not even then and I personally know of too many colleagues who have still received work calls and texts when they were on annual leave- even calls begging them to work a shift. One colleague got one of those calls at her sister’s wedding, where she was a bridesmaid- and she’d put “sisters wedding” in the leave application!
There also seems to be an assumption in the comments, though not in the article, that you always have a work mobile, so you can just switch it off when you’re not at work.
I work in residential disability support and it’s MY mobile all the work stuff comes to. It’s the same story right across the disability support sector. Only middle management and up get a work mobile. The rest of us are on call 24/7 on our own bloody phones, contacted by management who “don’t have access to the rosters” on our time off, time and time again, and it’s always, ALWAYS super urgent and unavoidable from where management are sitting. It usually isn’t from where you’re sitting, believe me. Nothing that couldn’t have waited the few hours or the next day when you’re back on shift. Employers have just gotten used to treating employees as a 24/7, on call commodity. The mindset needs to change and hopefully the new legislation will help do that.