Surveillance or Management? The 'Attendance Check' Dilemma Created by Office Return [Jjinbit]

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] In 1914, Ford Motor Company in the United States created the 'Sociological Department' to manage employees at its Detroit plant. This department established rules that Ford employees, who were paid a high wage of $5 a day at the time, had to follow and supervised them. The department would suddenly visit employees' homes to check cleanliness, verify whether employees' children were attending school properly, and even examined bank records to see if employees regularly opened savings accounts.

(Photo by The Henry Ford website)

Hearing this now, it sounds like the company managed every move of its employees. At the time, with the start of mass production and a rapid increase in the number of employees, it seems this new system was introduced out of necessity to manage them all. As times change, workers' consciousness and work styles evolve, and ultimately, the methods of managing and supervising employees also change.

Through the COVID-19 era, as flexible work styles have been introduced one after another, companies are increasingly concerned about employee management and supervision systems. Although office returns have been ongoing worldwide this year, the demand for flexible work has grown, making remote and work-from-home arrangements common. This raises questions about whether to monitor employees' commuting and focus on work in real time or to evaluate employees based on performance and trust without a separate clock-in/out system.

How is commuting monitored?

JP Morgan, which began office returns this year, is strictly monitoring employees' attendance. According to the US business magazine Business Insider, JP Morgan has instructed employees to come to the office at least three days a week. They check whether employees have come to the office through electronic ID tracking and create reports to deliver to managers or display them on dashboards so HR staff can contact employees who do not comply with attendance rules.

Goldman Sachs also monitors attendance using electronic IDs. They track the number of employees coming to the office by team in spreadsheets, and employees who do not come to the office three to four times a week or more receive calls from their team leaders. Both JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs emphasized the need for office attendance even during the COVID-19 period, so they appear to be pushing for employee returns through strict attendance management.

Some companies collect attendance records for all employees but do not scrutinize individual attendance patterns. According to The New York Times (NYT), DocuSign, a US electronic document signing company with over 7,000 employees, does not check whether employees come and go but only monitors reservation information for desks and conference rooms inside the company. Teams only see when and how the office is used, without looking into which employees use those spaces at specific times. Joan Burke, DocuSign's HR manager, said, "Our employees have proven they can succeed wherever they are."

"Performance and trust must be the foundation" ? Changing perceptions

In fact, concerns about attendance management systems arose immediately after the start of COVID-19. With a significant increase in remote workers, there was a need to manage employees to maintain high productivity even when working from home. Considering that managers had traditionally overseen productivity by visually confirming employees working in the office, this was a natural thought.

According to the Washington Post (WP), citing market research firm Gartner, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the proportion of large employers who introduced systems to monitor employees and track productivity doubled to 60%. This proportion is expected to rise to 70% over the next three years.

In this process, changes in employee perceptions and privacy issues have emerged. Voices have called for a new organizational management mindset that prioritizes performance over attendance to generate profits, emphasizing trust rather than surveillance. There have even been criticisms of privacy and human rights violations when companies use GPS to track employees' locations or install facial recognition systems to check if employees are sitting in front of their laptops via cameras.

Some experts told NYT that companies relying on surveillance systems likely have problems with workplace culture. Nicholas Bloom, a remote work expert and professor at Stanford University, said, "It's like hiring a soccer player and telling them, 'It doesn't matter how many goals you score; what matters is how much time you spend training.' If a company is tracking attendance schedules in detail, it's a red flag for the organizational culture. Why not evaluate employees based on performance?"

Having experienced the major event of the COVID-19 pandemic, work styles, organizational culture, and stakeholder perceptions are rapidly changing. The issue of attendance management and supervision is no different. After experimenting in various ways over the past two years, it is important to actively communicate and find the optimal method based on these experiences.

Editor's Note[Jjinbit] is short for 'Jeong Hyunjin's Business Trend' and 'Real Business Trend,' a corner that shows trends in corporate management such as organizational culture and HR systems. We will deliver fresh and differentiated information and perspectives based on analyses from foreign media and major overseas institutions that have not received much attention so far.