- Commonwealth Bank confirmed it uses tracking app to monitor staff
- Nine out of every 10 Australian employers are doing the same thing
- Is your workplace tracking you? Email tips@dailymail.com
The revelation that the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) is tracking its staff digitally caused plenty of anger but an astonishing 90 per cent of Australian employers are doing the same thing.
The bank, which made $5.15billion profit in the second half of 2022, uses the ‘Navigate’ app to track its staff’s online activity and how often they are sitting in front of their computer.
The pandemic led to a huge number of Australians working from home, along with a corresponding explosion in companies using technology for employee surveillance.
A report by law firm Herbert Smith Freehills said nine out of every 10 Australian firms use monitoring software on their computers and phones – the average worldwide is around 80 per cent.
‘They put this stuff on your computer and you don’t actually realise,’ Professor Peter Holland of Swinburne University in Melbourne told Daily Mail Australia.
‘It’s fairly endemic in the workplace now … that either they’re monitoring the movement of your mouse or they’re taking snapshot pictures of you on the computers to see if you’re actually at the site and doing your work.’
The monitoring of keyboard use, typing, mouse movements and location tracking is benignly marketed as a measure of productivity and efficiency.
But Prof Holland questioned what purpose such surveillance serves.
‘Do (companies) really need to do this? What are you trying to achieve? What are your concerns and have you discussed this with your workforce?’ he said.
The Finance Sector Union (FSU), which has many members among CBA’s 48,000 staff, has similar questions about the bank’s use of an app called Navigate.
On both the Google and Apple app sites, Navigate is described as ‘the workplace application for CBA Group employees’, though not all of its workers use it.
‘The information we collect has been useful in ensuring our people stay in touch in the various ways of work we support at CBA or, for example, to record the appropriate type of leave taken when our employees take leave or are off work,’ a bank spokesman told The Australian.
‘This has been especially helpful throughout and post-Covid as people have returned to the office, allowing us to better manage space in our corporate offices.’
But the FSU’s national secretary Julia Angrisano, has a very different view of the banking giant’s Navigate app.
‘Workers at the Commonwealth Bank are concerned about reports that they are under surveillance and being spied on by the bank through a system said to measure their computer activity,’ she said.
‘It is unacceptable for an employer to set up a system to track an employees’ work activity without their knowledge and agreement.’
Ms Angrisano said the bank had not notified the union ‘that it has instigated widespread employee surveillance’.
‘We call on the CBA to cease all spying on our members,’ she said.
CBA is also reportedly using office attendance and computer use data to question absenteeism such as taking an early mark or a long lunch and has ordered some staff to take leave if they aren’t doing enough.
Ms Angrisano said workers ‘had a right’ to know what data was being collected.
‘It should never be used as a tool to intimidate or to place pressure on employees to take leave,’ she said.
Prof Holland also questioned the need for this level of surveillance.
‘CBA have been around for over 100 years. How did they do it beforehand? Do they need this level of sophistication to actually just monitor leave,’ he said.
The Commonwealth Bank declined to comment for this story.
In his work, Prof Holland has come across some very intrusive examples of how employees are being spied on.
‘The examples I’ve had is a lot of people who anecdotally have gone to the toilet or made a cup of coffee and they’ve come back and there’s an email asking them where they are,’ he said.
‘And (the employee is) wondering how do you know where I am or where I’m not?’
He said some people use what are called jiggers, which are vibrating pads that keep a computer mouse moving so it looks like people are working even if they are not.
But people who go to that much trouble to avoid being caught shirking is the reason such spyware exists in the first place.
Of more concern to most people is workers surfing the internet for non-work related activities on company time.
The advice to them is to use private devices for private matters.
But even if you are using you own devices, such as phones and computers, you can be tracked if you are logged in to any company software.
‘There is this sort of omnipresence that people’s movements are being monitored in a way that I think as Australians we haven’t previously been used to,’ Natalie Gaspar, an Australian partner at Herbert Smith Freehills, told news.com.au.
The level of employee surveillance in Australia is so high, that if you have ever had the feeling that you’re being watched, you probably are.