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How employees respond to being under surveillance depends on a number of factors, including how good they are at their jobs.

Digital and online technologies have made our workplace routines faster and easier. They have also made it easier for managers to keep tabs on workers, via monitoring apps designed to capture whether employees are “working hard, or hardly working.” 

But for researchers such as and , professors in the information systems and operations management (ISOM) area at �鶹��Ƶ’s Costello College of Business, the jury’s still out on whether the latest worker surveillance tech actually benefits performance, productivity, efficiency, etc., especially in certain key sectors. 

“Prior research has identified both harms and benefits stemming from worker surveillance,” they state. “But very little research has been done in the retail or sales space, especially in a real-life sales environment as opposed to the lab.” 

In contrast, Bellos and Greenwood’s forthcoming academic paper in Manufacturing and Service Operations Management homes in on one China-based company, an online supplier of baby products (diapers, formula, etc.) to physical retail stores. This B2B company employs hundreds of salespeople to partner directly with small-business owners, not only on promotion and upselling but also helping solve marketing and operational challenges related to the product line. Naturally, the sales force’s job description includes a lot of in-person, on-site collaboration. 

The paper was co-authored by Yingda Lu of University of Illinois at Chicago and Liqiang Huang of Zhejiang University. 

In 2019, the company issued phones equipped with GPS technology to track the frequency and length of salespeople’s site visits. This was not a secret program; sales teams were told they would be tracked via GPS. Due to a technical glitch, not all salespeople received the phones at the same time. The erratic rollout allowed the research team to draw clean comparisons between monitored and unmonitored employees within the same timeframe. 

Almost immediately, monitored salespeople began making more client visits, spending longer at each store and engaging in a wider variety of tasks each time. As a result, overall sales performance—i.e., the gross merchandise value (GMV) of goods sold to clients—rose about 4.75 percent over the pre-surveillance average. 

But that wasn’t the whole story. The GMV for top-performing salespeople went down once they knew they were being monitored, despite the fact that they—like the rest of the sales force—ramped up their sales activity to look good for the GPS. The critical difference was that top performers had successful routines before the GPS came in. Once they started performing for Big Brother, rather than continuing with their familiar working patterns, their outcomes started to suffer. 

“If you tell underperformers ‘We’re going to monitor ��dz�,’ it lights a fire under them,” Greenwood says. “But if you tell high performers the same thing, they try to guess what they think you want them to do and do that rather than just doing their job.” 

The researchers discovered that engaging in more sales calls resulted in diminishing returns for the best salespeople, because they were spreading their skills too thin across a less profitable pool of clients. 

Bellos and Greenwood envision that declining commissions and a disrupted work routine for top performers could lead to negative outcomes for the company. For example, some star salespeople could become disengaged and even start looking for work elsewhere.  

“When it comes to these sorts of MVPs, anything that harms their relationship with the firm opens the door to some very real negatives,” Greenwood says. 

For Greenwood and Bellos, this speaks to the need for companies to be nuanced and strategic in their approaches to worker surveillance. “Whether monitoring works or doesn’t work will have a lot to do with individuals,” they state. “When we treat people like monoliths, it’s hard to understand what’s really going on. You can improve high-level performance while at the same time sub-optimizing other aspects of the firm.” 

Sometimes, proper communication and clarity can make monitoring less problematic, the researchers contend. If employees are fully briefed on the goals and uses of monitoring programs, they won’t have to rely on guesswork as they adjust their routines. This is especially true for workers with a diverse and complicated portfolio of tasks, such as the sales force in Bellos and Greenwood’s study. 

“In our study, salespeople had a high degree of freedom in that within each store, they have several tasks to perform. Plus, each salesperson services multiple stores,” says Bellos. “Managers and platforms need to factor [task diversity] in on the implementation side.” 

“In our study, salespeople had a high degree of freedom in that within each store, they have several tasks to perform. Plus, each salesperson services multiple stores. Managers and platforms need to factor [task diversity] in on the implementation side.” 

— Ioannis Bellos, Director of Master of Business Administration and Master of Science in Management Programs, and Business Certificates