40% of Spanish companies have installed software to monitor the activity of their remote workers. — AFP Relaxnews
Before the Covid pandemic, working from home was a luxury reserved for a minority of workers in Spain. Since then, things have changed, and a large number of the country's employees now work from home from time to time.
This societal trend has led some employers to rethink the way they manage and monitor their employees’ working hours. For example, many Spanish executives are putting in place various measures to ensure that their teams are engaged in their work while working from home.
They are turning to tools that promise to monitor remote workers, such as keyloggers, software that records everything an employee types on the computer keyboard, or online communication tools that monitor each user’s login times.
As a result, the Spanish workplace is plagued by what the national daily newspaper El País calls “productivity paranoia”.
Recent figures attest to this mistrust of Spanish managers towards working from home. A report from the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) from 2020 estimates that 40% of Spanish companies have installed software to monitor the activity of their employees. In comparison, only 13% of German companies use such systems.
This phenomenon is all the more surprising since Spanish labour law stipulates that employees have the right to know if they are being monitored by their employer and that companies in the country have been required, since 2021, to inform employee representatives of the measures put in place to this end.
This lack of trust on the part of employers is linked to the fact that telework is still not widespread in Spain. In fact, it is one of the few countries in the world where employees actually benefited less from this way of working in 2021 than in 2020, according to Eurostat data cited by El País.
However, working from home is taking root in Spain in large companies, especially in the telecommunications sector, in order to attract and retain young talent looking for flexibility.
But the Spanish workplace is still very much marked by presenteeism: the country’s employees must be seen on the premises of their companies for their managers to consider them productive. However, many studies report the opposite to be true.
The elimination of travel time between home and office that teleworking allows greatly enhances the efficiency of remote workers. It saves them, on average, 72 minutes a day, according to a recent study by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research. Precious minutes that they use... to get even more work done.
All this suggests that Spain’s companies have a lot to gain from embracing home working, even if some are still reluctant to implement it long term. – AFP Relaxnews
