An interesting situation was discussed with me recently by a friend, and it got me to thinking more about it; so I thought I’d post to get additional insights/feedback from the community.
With the rise of remote work, employees have become increasingly reliant on chat platforms (Teams, Skype, etc.) and email for daily communication. This shift has provided employers with detailed and potentially permanent records of interactions—a level of surveillance that many employees didn’t encounter in traditional office settings. While monitoring such things as clocking in, tracking internet usage, or even recording keystrokes has long existed in some workplaces, remote work has transformed communication into a consistently logged activity. For remote employees, almost everything they say is documented, whether through chat logs or email threads. While Zoom calls might occasionally escape this scrutiny, the majority of workplace interactions now have the potential for “permanent oversight.”
This reality raises critical questions about how employers should handle disciplining employees for social conduct. In the United States, where most workers are at-will employees and can be terminated at any time for non-protected reasons, the implications are particularly significant.
The need to respond to certain types of speech are straightforward and necessary, IMO—hate speech, for instance, should always lead to disciplinary action. Other forms of speech, such as discussing salaries, are explicitly protected under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and cannot legally be punished. However, a lot of workplace communication exists in a gray area that is harder to define.
Consider an example: two employees privately discuss a recent promotion. One says, “Looks like they value tenure over competence,” to which the other replies, “Yeah, just 10 more years of mediocrity, and I’ll be at the top too.” These kinds of casual remarks about management or coworkers are not uncommon. In a traditional office setting, such comments would likely fade into obscurity, overheard by few and forgotten soon after. In a remote environment, however, they are logged and could be revisited indefinitely. There could be “flags” associated with company software to ferret out such criticisms of company leaders.
Now imagine these same employees also suggest in a chat that everyone should share their salaries. HR notices this and flags their accounts for review, uncovering that the employees have been privately comparing salaries with colleagues—an activity protected under the NLRA. During the review, HR also stumbles upon a handful of sarcastic or critical remarks about management spanning years. Armed with this record, the company might justify disciplinary action by citing a supposed history of negativity, even though the true motivation could be discomfort with the salary discussions. Officially, the issue becomes the tone of their comments, but in reality, it stems from protected activity.
This kind of selective enforcement could extend to any number of arbitrary or unfair reasons an employer might not want someone around. Explicit or implicit biases, such as sexism or racism, are legitimate concerns. Additionally, remote employees are at a particular disadvantage—they can’t rely on an offhand, in-person remark being forgotten. In remote work, almost everything said is preserved, which makes every word a potential liability.
Many workers are now hyper-conscious of this surveillance. Some avoid searching personal queries on work devices or while connected to company Wi-Fi, fearing that their activity might be tracked. The growing sense of being constantly monitored has also raised concerns about private communication among coworkers. For example, an employee might consider creating a private Discord server to talk with just a group of colleagues who they consider friends outside of work, but they would need to weigh the risks. If management were to discover such a chat room and it was considered a way to bypass being monitored, they could likely justify a termination, even without a clear breach of policy.
How have you approached the reality of this “eternal” storage of communication data? Have you made efforts to keep your professional and personal lives separate? What strategies can employees use to navigate this environment, where management can use plausible reasons for discipline while masking deeper, less acceptable motivations?
Thanks in advance for any responses!