Dr. Michelle O'Sullivan:

The UK. Those are the kinds of data we are discussing. Eurofound did some analysis of the European company surveys and found that half of establishments were using data analytics for monitoring employee performance or improving the processes of work or both. This is a bit of a blurred area. In banking, for example, there is direct surveillance like monitoring emails and Internet usage. From what we have seen in the financial services sector, I do not believe that there is much recording of keystrokes or webcams, but emails, logging in times and phone calls are recorded.

I referred to process improvements. Sometimes, there are indirect forms of surveillance. An employee might say that it is not that his or her performance is being monitored, but that he or she has to fill out an Excel sheet that is part of a process improvement issue and his or her performance is monitored as part of that. People will then tell the employee that they could see from the system that it took him or her X amount of hours to fill out the Excel sheet and ask why the employee is not doing it in less. It also muddies the waters for employees because they do not know whether their performance is being monitored or whether they are just working on a system, an offshoot of which sees their performance being monitored as well.

We have varied levels of surveillance. We know it is growing and that some companies in other fields are using it to a great extent, but we have limited data on its prevalence in Ireland.