Is your duty of care program starting to look more like surveillance?

Pretty anyone who has either built or deployed a technology platform to provide some level of safety, security and duty of care on behalf of a workforce will have awareness of this topic. Because a safety solution can, to some level, locate workers and monitor movements … that data can be used elsewhere within the business in regards to productivity. There are workforce management solutions now that periodically take an image of your desktop, or take an image from the webcam, check IP address connection and disconnection times etc. to monitor that a person is online (somewhere) and performing their allotted work. Is it wise to combine these features into duty of care solutions for worker and traveller safety?

Now, avoiding too many ethical/moral discussions here, for some areas of the world this raises conversations around consent, transparency and intent. If you have deployed a solution, with an aim to protect the safety and security of a workforce, the intent is there on how that data will be used … to understand when incidents occur, who and what the impact is and coordinate some level of response to it. If the same data is being used for productivity, specifically in countries within the EU you would need to be transparent with the individuals on what data is being used and processed for this purpose. As an organisation, how are you intending to have those conversations, or is that for the small print in everyone's contracts?

The flip side of the coin of monitoring productivity is going to be the trust or mistrust from your workforce. Most duty of care solutions are utilising data that covers some or a high level of sensitivity, may come from integrates platforms such as HR, and at some point will require compliance and the consent from individuals in how that data is being used (emergency contacts, medical data, contact details etc.). I have discussed in previous posts about the importance of engagement with users and how their buy-in is so important to the success of your safety, security and travel policy being followed. It is an area worker councils will have a major say in.

There are also other solutions that dive much deeper into potential insider threats from the workforce, or people with an axe to grind against the organisation. These solutions are utilising a wide range of data sources to analyse and spot potential people and situations. Whether this is monitoring internal platforms, public and social networks, behavioural data, image analysis, the dark web and so on, all of which may be processed through AI. The data from these can all be pulled back and analysed against profiles to see if there are any trends, anomalies or triggers. Some of these have cross overs with platforms to monitor individuals (often including lone workers and executive protection) to predictive or monitor an environment and behaviours.  These solutions are not really built on a consent framework.

In safety and security technology, threats can go from being very subjective to highly objective based on location, people, facilities, events and so on. Data quality is often at the heart of how affective these solutions are to locate people, provide truth around situational awareness, engage with impacted individuals and provide a collaborative environment for response teams to support and manage incidents and crises. Naturally, the greater data quality and accuracy you have, will impact your ability to understand, decide and respond quickly for each incident.

It is a very narrow path we need to walk between the technology solutions we use to provide safety and security for a workforce, and a more covert surveillance solution. Reach out to me or use the comments section below to add your opinion and take on the subject … has the adding of productivity features hampered your ability to gain trust and consent from your workforce? … Do you keep a clear separation between these areas to avoid these issues? … How does your compliance requirements dictate your approach and policy here? … Have you felt the pressure from your business to combine these capabilities? … I would love to discuss this in more detail. Reach out via LinkedIn.