EVER since the Covid-19 pandemic turned the world upside down, upending our concepts of what work is, where and how it could be conducted, and whether we need traditional workplaces at all, organizations have grappled with the right approach to take.

Some organizations have started to insist that employees return to the office full-time, back to the way things were pre-pandemic, while some have embraced a full remote arrangement with their staff, leveraging video conferencing and other digital collaboration tools to conduct work as usual.

Then, there are the organizations that rotate their staff from home-based and office-bound schedules periodically or allow them the flexibility to shuttle between the two schedules.

One of the chief concerns of organizations, when they were compelled to adopt work-from-home arrangements, was the worry that productivity would dip; they worried that staff would not perform at optimal levels if they were not supervised as they would be in the office.

Kevin Shepherdson, CEO of Straits Interactive, called this the 'Don't Watch Netflix' Employer Syndrome.

'Many employers may be concerned whether their employees are really doing work at home,' so they resort to surveillance technologies, some of which may be overly intrusive — taking screenshots or recording staff behavior on the computer — and inadvertently collecting personal data.

'[As an employer] you need to take this surveillance into account as part of your data protection and privacy practices.'

I agree with his assessment that productivity has been a top priority in this new normal. In fact, I experienced such surveillance myself even within the office. At my previous employment, the other employees and I had to provide our fingerprints, have our photos taken and key in our employee ID codes every day.

There's definitely a lot of monitoring and even CCTVs installed to watch the workstations.

However, just as Kevin has brought up surveillance, there are significant data privacy and data protection concerns that need to be addressed.

Good habits needed