Trust is essential in all businesses, but it’s particularly important for remote workers to feel trusted. Managers need to know people are productive and committed to achieving what is expected of them, without being able to see them regularly or catch up with them in the way they might in a busy office environment. And in turn, employees should be able to get on with their work without additional stress or anxiety of being monitored.
“Using tracking and surveillance in remote teams will provide a leader and their organisation with basic work data, but will undermine any type of trust between employees and their leader,” Duff says. “Using surveillance implies that there is zero trust in the working relationship and therefore an employee will have no incentive to build trust. They will simply perform the tasks they have been given.”
