Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 24 May 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation
Employee Experiences of Technological Surveillance in the Financial Services Sector: Discussion
Mr. John O'Connell:
I will complement that. We have done studies on stress in work, which scores very high in the financial services sector. The Irish Banking Culture Board, of which I am a member, has also done surveys that showed, over the period of the surveys over a number of years, stress continues to be an issue for workers in the sector. One of the key issues that comes across to us is work intensification. That feeling of work intensification comes with surveillance or monitoring and that oversight piece, where workers feel they have to do certain things because they are being monitored or analytics are being developed regarding what is occurring. Work intensification is a huge issue for the sector. In fairness to workers in financial services, they transitioned overnight to being remote workers and now there is a hybrid element for lots of them. Many workers are still working remotely. That is something people value as a new way of working but it is about that work intensification piece and the expectation and ask continually increasing, which is shown by the quotes in the report, particularly around sales. That led to bad things in banking previously, when that went unchecked. That is a concern.