Workers at some of Canada’s biggest companies say increased workplace surveillance is taking a toll on their mental health as their employers ramp up the use of software that monitors their screen activity.
TD Bank told employees in its financial crimes and risk management team in June, in a call first reported by Reuters, that it will start tracking their screen time — specifically the time they spend on browsers, internal chat and meeting apps — using a tool called WorkiQ.
TD employees in other departments have raised concerns about this and other productivity tracking tools, saying they cause added stress and unease in the workplace.
“We are all very, very worried about what it’s going to do,” a TD employee in Edmonton told CBC News.
Companies across a range of industries are increasingly facing pushback from employees over the deployment of software that monitors screen activity. The practice has raised questions about privacy, trust, workers’ rights and workplace stress.
In June, Meta paused a program that tracked employees’ keystrokes and mouse movements amid concerns about data privacy and staff backlash, including a petition signed by 1,600 employees.
Worker feeling ‘extreme unease’
The TD employee, who CBC News has agreed not to name because she fears she could lose her job for speaking out, said she worries the new monitoring tools will come to her workplace soon.
Her managers currently use ControliQ, she said, which is made by ActiveOps, the same U.K.-based company behind WorkiQ. ControliQ tracks time spent on tasks, but not granular details like keystrokes and mouse movements.
Introduced about two years ago, the tool is increasingly used to “shame and belittle” workers by displaying and comparing their “productivity” metrics at meetings, the employee said.
Bosses also use “Active” and “Away” status on Microsoft Teams to gauge work activity, she said, even though much of the work she does requires reading documents and other tasks not reflected by screen time.
As this type of monitoring ramps up, the employee — who has been with the company for eight years — said she and her colleagues are feeling burnout, frustration and “extreme unease.”
“It’s going to start impacting colleagues, because there’s a lot of stuff that we do in our day that isn’t recordable or isn’t quote-unquote productive, but it’s necessary work,” she said.
“We run the risk of losing bonuses, losing raises, losing performance ratings — that sort of thing. And then we run a risk of getting written up, and eventually, possibly, losing our jobs.”
TD spokesperson Mick Ramos did not answer specific questions about the software or employee concerns in an emailed statement to CBC News.
“Like many organizations, we use workflow tools in some areas of our business to better understand how work gets done and where we can make it simpler and more effective,” he said. “Colleagues are informed about their use and purpose well in advance.”
An ActiveOps spokesperson said in an email that the company aims to improve workplace environments by giving employers “the visibility they need to plan work and resources.” He added that WorkiQ is being rebranded as Application Mining.
Using an internet archive search, CBC News found ActiveOps explicitly called WorkiQ “employee monitoring software” in 2021. It has since changed the language on its website and no longer refers to it as such.
Tracking ‘degrading and humiliating’: Bell employee
Surveillance and monitoring tools have become commonplace at telecom companies in Canada.
A longtime Bell employee in Toronto told CBC News that WorkiQ sounds “eerily similar” to software that’s used at her work.
Bell started using Verint software to track employees’ screen time and mouse movements during the COVID-19 pandemic, when everyone was working from home, she said, using “occupancy” or “effectiveness” metrics to track their active time.
A Bell Canada employee in Toronto says the company’s screentime monitoring software is hard on her mental health. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)
Workers can be punished for not meeting their effectiveness targets, the employee said, first with a verbal warning and then with progressive discipline, up to and including termination.
“The amount of surveillance that’s done, it’s very hard on your mental health,” she said.
“I don’t know if the company actually understands how almost degrading and humiliating it is to know that you have to have a babysitter when you’re in your 50s, and you’ve been doing your job for 30 years, and you’ve been doing it well.”
CBC News is also not naming the Bell employee because she fears she could lose her job for speaking out.
The employee said the effectiveness time requirements in her specific workplace have continued to increase since the pandemic, to 85 per cent from 72 per cent.
The current target is “almost impossible” to achieve, she said, and leaves no room for people to have bad days.
“When you do the math, it works out to about 23 minutes a day that you’ve got that you’re able to use the bathroom, go grab a drink of water — or, say, you’re reading,” she said, adding employees are also allowed one half-hour lunch break and two 15-minute breaks.
WATCH | Benefits and concerns around monitoring tools:
Should employers use productivity monitoring software? | Quick Question
Anti-surveillance advocate Matthew Mitchell and Jay Godse of Awareness Technologies, whose company develops electronic worker-monitoring software, discuss the benefits and concerns surrounding software that tracks employees while they work.
The Bell employee also worries about repetitive strain injuries from constantly moving a mouse to meet the requirements.
CBC News could not verify the 85 per cent target at the employee’s specific workplace, but obtained documents from another Bell workplace showing an 80 per cent effectiveness target.
She said she’s heard from managers that Verint is not only monitoring workers, but pulling their work to train AI systems and offshore workers, which she suspects has factored into recent layoffs.
“It’s a weapon and it shouldn’t be wielded the way it is,” she said.
A Bell spokesperson told CBC News in an email that the company does not use Verint to train AI or offshore workers, but did not respond to specific questions about employee complaints or the way the software is used.
“Bell uses call–monitoring and screen-capture software to help customers get the best experience possible. This is standard industry practice for call centres,” she said.
A spokesperson for New-York based Verint did not respond to CBC News’s requests for comment.
Do the tools even work?
Tara Behrend, a professor at Michigan State University’s School of Human Resources and Labor Relations who studies monitoring and surveillance tools, said her research has consistently found two things: these tools increase stress on workers and don’t actually improve performance.
Tracking tools tend to narrow workers’ focus to the metrics that are being monitored, which can then cause them to ignore other aspects of their job and also create “anti-social incentives,” she said, like discouraging them from taking a screen break to help a co-worker.
“When someone starts micromanaging you and babysitting you, it breaks that contract of trust. And so then you just say, ‘Fine, if you think all I am is this collection of tasks that you wrote down, then that’s what you’ll get from me and nothing else,” Behrend said.
“It just makes work this really superficial imitation of itself. Work is not just a collection of tasks. Nobody wants to feel like that’s what their contribution is.”
Nevertheless, she said, these tools have proliferated with recent transitions to remote work and accelerated as part of a general societal push toward more data gathering and algorithm training.
Increased worker monitoring has led to negative physical and psychological consequences for workers in some industries, Behrend adds, citing a 2024 Oxfam report that found Amazon and Walmart warehouse workers suffered from pain and dehydration, and were afraid to take bathroom or hydration breaks because of intense surveillance.
Roch Leblanc, a national representative for Unifor, a union that represents 19,000 Bell workers across Canada, raised alarms about growing worker surveillance in telecoms when he addressed the House of Commons committee on industry and technology in April.
WATCH | Ontario employers have to disclose tracking software:
Is your boss watching you work? Some Canadians are about to find out
In Ontario, employers must now disclose if they have been using productivity tracking software to keep tabs on their employees. Experts say while this may address transparency concerns, businesses should be tracking output instead.
Unifor has also raised concerns to Bell’s management about Verint software specifically.
Leblanc tells CBC News the software is “invasive,” has created significant stress in the workplace and does not always represent the true picture of a worker’s productivity.
“The work intensification is at such a level now, there’s no ups and downs in the work on a daily basis,” he said. “It’s constantly intense, constantly frustrating.”