Why is everyone talking about… location tracking?

Do you think it’s fair to monitor how often your employees work from the office? Come January, that will be the case for the 26,000 UK employees who work for consultancy giant PwC. This is in order to ensure all workers spend a minimum of three days a week in-office or onsite with clients. Employees who breach it will be asked to explain why.

According to The Financial Times, employees will be sent location data each month, which will also be shared with their career coaches. This comes amid employee pushback against employers turning away from hybrid or remote working, demonstrated recently by a remote Google employee who quit after he was refused a move to look after his father.

Compared to other global cities such as New York and Paris, workers based in London have been reluctant to abandon the practice of working from home and return to their pre-pandemic working style, with the average Londoner spending 2.7 days in their office. 

A LinkedIn poll started by Kevin Halligan, Director of STRIVE found that 80% of over 300 people did not think that employers should be allowed to track employees’ location during work hours.

Kevin shared: “There are definitely trust issues and it must be difficult to keep track of everything if you are a firm the size of PwC. This level of monitoring seems a step too far for most people though, judging by the poll results so far!”

“PwC have been monitoring their office spaces for a while[...] so I’m sure they have a deep understanding of how their space is used. Yet monitoring employees’ work locations feels a little different,” says Ian Baker, CIWFM, Head of Workplace at EMCOR, UK.

Although unutilised office space can be costly to businesses, the decision to monitor your employees’ location is not without risk. Your business needs to carefully weigh up the following issues before you decide whether this is something you want to implement:

• Legal compliance: It’s essential to ensure that any planned collection, use, processing and storage of your employees’ personal data adheres to either the Data Protection Act 2018 or GDPR if in the European Union.

• Impact on employee trust: Bear in mind that your employees may feel micromanaged or anxious about these changes, impacting their satisfaction and productivity. Enabling psychological safety is key here.

• Potential for discrimination and damage: If monitoring is not applied fairly or consistently or it’s seen to be excessive, you will risk both reputational damage and accusations of discrimination or unfair treatment.

Ultimately, the surveillance involved in monitoring employee location could sour employee opinion and cause unnecessary attrition. Consider also whether by using this method to encourage office usage this could lead to negative practices such as 'coffee badging'.

• HR study: The power of trust and transparency in employee retention

• 9 ways to effectively track employee performance in 2024

• Does a hybrid work model ‘work’ for your organisation?

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