Employers are increasingly listening in on their workers, and a surprising number of employees don’t have a problem with it.
When asked whether they would voluntarily give their company access to work-related instant messages and email text data to help identify and address employee experience issues, 43% of respondents said “probably yes” or “definitely yes,” according to a survey of 1,000 office workers conducted by experience management company Qualtrics.
The number of people who were okay with their company listening in on their work activity was significantly higher than what HR leaders predicted, said Qualtrics’ chief workplace psychologist Benjamin Granger. Yet employees still draw the line at companies peering into their activities outside of work, such as their social media, even if it’s anonymous, he added.
“If you’re on a work device, and you’re at work, they’re more comfortable with that,” Granger told Fortune. “You can see that clear line of falling off, like that comfort level falling off once you start to get to things outside of work.”
Granger said this kind of “passive listening,” which uses anonymous data that can’t be traced to one employee, is often a better tool for executives to identify worker problems than surveys. Instead of leaders posing specific questions on surveys that may not address all employee concerns, passive listening enabled by AI could help them discover issues that they might not have been aware of, such as burnout and disengagement.
“Surveys are great, and leadership needs the opportunity to ask questions, but sometimes employees have ideas, have problems—they see something going wrong with the customer that leadership doesn’t see, and they need an open line of communication,” Granger said.
The surprising tolerance for using AI to help parse work-related data stands in sharp contrast to public perception about the role of artificial intelligence in everyday life. A Pew Research survey from 2023 found that just over half of Americans were more concerned than excited about the use of AI in daily life.
Yet the idea of an employer listening in on work-related activity was still off-putting to just under a third of the employees surveyed—with the rest answering “maybe”—and Atlanta-based executive coach and entrepreneur Jay McDonald said a wrong move could harm a company’s reputation and prevent it from attracting the best talent. Anything that harms trust between employers and employees could be a disaster, he added.
“Trust is the glue between an employee and a business and between a business and a customer, and if anything you’re doing on this monitoring, or spying, or AI, or technology, any of those avenues, erodes trust, then it erodes confidence, and ultimately it will kill your business,” he said.
To avoid such a reputational hit, Qualtrics’ Granger suggests companies start implementing “passive listening” programs gradually with full transparency and permission from employees so they don’t condemn the idea from the start.
“If employees see value in it, they’re going to generally become more comfortable with it over time,” he said.