Give Workers a Room of Their Own
By: Angela Lashbrook
Tags: Microprocessing, Work, Slack, Surveillance, Digital Life

Earlier this month, The Verge published a damning story about the luggage startup Away. Former employees alleged that co-founder and CEO Steph Korey created a toxic workplace environment by berating and belittling employees; manipulating them into working on vacation or “asking” them to cancel their vacations altogether; encouraging long hours without overtime; and posting long, vicious rants in the company’s Slack. Away’s problems weren’t limited to headquarters. As the latest Verge update revealed on Tuesday, the company’s mismanagement and neglect extended even to the company’s retail stores, where workers were exposed to noxious paint fumes and toiled often without air-conditioning in the summer or heat in the winter.

Among the many horrors at Away, one thing stuck out to me: Employees were not allowed to email each other, and private channels or direct messages were almost entirely forbidden except in very small, particular circumstances, such as asking a colleague to lunch. All other communications were to take place in public Slack channels that everyone in the company had access to. (Away did not respond to OneZero’s request for comment about its Slack guidelines.)

While the company claimed this was to create a culture of “transparency,” as the Verge article notes, it instead created one of surveillance and discomfort. By requiring that all employee conversations occur where anyone could potentially be watching and listening, Away effectively created a panopticon that made workers feel that anything they said or did was subject to managerial oversight.

That’s a bad idea — at least if you care about your company being successful (and your workers being happy). A feeling of constant surveillance can have significant repercussions for employees, including job dissatisfaction, fear, and even eventual depression and anxiety.

Unfortunately, most American workers are surveilled on the job in one way or another. A poll by the American Management Association found that 80% of major U.S. companies monitored employee email, phone use, and internet use, up from 35% in 1997. It’s considerably easier to monitor employees now, and it appears that management is taking full advantage.

Employees are surveilled for a number of reasons. At Away, it was to create a bogus culture of transparency. At other companies, it might be to increase productivity, to monitor workers for safety reasons, or to ensure that no one says anything potentially offensive or discriminatory. Or it could be for unstated reasons: that management worries its employees are complaining about them, gossiping about them, or — god forbid — union organizing.

To be clear, there’s no indication that Away employees were agitating in Slack. But at other companies, they are.

“I used to talk to my union members [on Slack]. We had a separate Slack for union stuff, actually, but many people used their work computers,” says Serena, an editor in New York who like others interviewed for this piece asked that her real name not be used to protect herself against retaliation at work. Though most of the initial union organizing happened off-Slack, she says, people definitely complained in private channels on the company Slack, and sometimes, conversations would get perilous enough that they’d be moved out of Slack. “No sentence makes me more excited than ‘let’s take this to iMessage or Gchat,’” she says.

Serena’s decision to take her dicier conversations off the company Slack was a good idea, as a National Labor Relations Board ruling Tuesday made it legal for employers to institute rules prohibiting non-work related discussions, including union organizing, on its email servers and other IT systems (such as Slack). Employees’ rights to discuss wages, working conditions, and hours on company technology is still protected, but anyone thinking of organizing their workplace should strongly consider taking these conversations to their private email accounts and chat software.

In other offices, employees take to private channels to discuss qualms and concerns about management or comfort each other in the wake of public scandals at the company. Emilia, who used Slack while working at a New York-based arts organization, said via Twitter DM that she and her co-workers would use private channels and direct messages to blow off steam because of a micro-managerial boss, and commiserate about the scandal their company was weathering. “We were never too rude about her and her behavior — it was more strategizing about how to explain to the boss boss that she was a bully... The Away article was too real,” she says. “I was also working there during multiple MeToo scandals. We had to take the public guff for it in the social channels and we needed to blow off annoyance [in Slack].”

The ability to discuss difficult situations privately with co-workers is crucial to employees who may not know, for example, that a boss’s mean behavior is in fact bullying. It’s important for employees who think they may have been sexually harassed by a co-worker. It’s also important for workers to merely “shoot the shit,” whether it’s about sports, the last episode of Watchmen, or the horrors of one’s commute that day.

These conversations help employees build friendships at work, which are an integral part of a positive work experience for most people. Gallup research from 2010 found that only 30% of employees have a best friend at work, but those who do are seven times more likely to be engaged in their work, less likely to be injured, and generally happier and healthier. Those who don’t have a good friend at work have only a 1-in-12 chance of being engaged in their jobs.

Stephanie Andel, an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University who researches how work stress affects the way employees cope in their jobs, told me via email that bonds between co-workers are critical. They can make employees happier, increase the sense of meaning they find in their work, improve the likelihood that the employee will stay in the job, and help them cope with stressful on-the-job situations. “Support from co-workers can also help reduce negative health outcomes, such as psychological distress, following instances of injustice (such as privacy invasions) at work,” she says. “If management is constantly monitoring employee communications, that could certainly decrease the likelihood that employees will develop fulfilling and supportive bonds with their co-workers.” And if employees feel isolated at work, she says, workers may eventually feel less able to trust their fellow employees, which could affect their job performance as well as the functioning of the entire organization.

A 2010 paper reported that electronic performance monitoring of employees leads to heightened fatigue, anxiety, depression, and other nervous symptoms. Employees felt the negative effects of surveillance in the early days of its deployment. A study from 1988 found that customer service employees at an insurance company who were surveilled began to believe that the quantity of their work was more important than the quality, leading to a decrease in the quality of the customer service. The employees began to avoid difficult requests, since those cut into the number of tasks they could accomplish in one day.

Bradley Brummel, an associate professor of psychology at The University of Tulsa who researches employee engagement and occupational intimidation, says that the surveillance at a company like Away doesn’t only affect workers when they’re in the office. Because lifestyle companies often frame employees as “family” and demand that they give over their full selves to the company and its “mission,” work often bleeds into home life, which can cause further issues when the company is intensely surveilling its workers. “When you limit [workplace conversations], you’re really intentionally repressing what people can actually believe or say to the people that they’re spending all this time with,” he says. “Because you’re saying, ‘I expect you to be available all the time and only thinking work and then only believing and stating things that praise work.’”

As the Verge story makes painfully clear, monitoring all employee conversations and insisting they occur in the open does not create a “culture of transparency.” In the long term, it doesn’t even increase productivity or benefit the company. “It’s very harmful for morale, for employees to feel like they’re continually being watched and monitored,” says Paula Brantner, the founder of PB Work Solutions and former executive director of Workplace Fairness. “It creates a climate of fear and distrust.”

While employers are now, thanks to the NLRB, within their rights to limit “non-work related” discussions on company email and chat software, it could have such a detrimental effect on employee morale and productivity that it’s not even really worth it.

Companies that want healthy, happy employees have a number of obvious pathways to achieve that. Among them: Not compelling your workers to cancel their vacations to take care of work. Not forcing them to embrace the company “mission” when you over-work and belittle them. And certainly not recreating Foucault’s panopticon in your own office. In the end — as we’ve seen with Away — that tower’s only going to fall.

This article has been updated with new information about a National Labor Relations Board ruling.