More companies are using GPS apps to track the whereabouts of their employees for productivity and safety-related reasons. A 2019 study of 1,585 employees showed that nearly a third of them were tracked via GPS by their employers.¹⁸⁹

Employee tracking is growing in both the commercial and government sectors. For example, the city of Park Hills, Missouri, installed GPS devices in 2018 on city-owned vehicles, including some police cruisers.

The city administrator believed the tracking devices would lead to “better-spent drive time, improvement of the safety of city employees, improvement of job performance,

[and] improvement of services provided to the community.” The system is not very expensive. The GPS devices were provided for free with the city signing a two-year contract and paying a $200 monthly subscription fee.¹⁹⁰

GPS tracking can apply after an employee’s shift is over. If a worker takes an employer-owned vehicle home at night or over the weekend, it might continue sending its location. Tracking devices on mobile phones also may continue broadcasting an employee’s location during time off.¹⁹¹ One in 10 employees responded to a QuickBooks survey saying that they were,

in fact, being tracked 24 hours a day, confirming concerns of around-the-clock tracking.¹⁹²

Employees out in the field may not be the only ones being tracked in the future. Amazon was granted patents for the design of warehouse tracking wristbands in 2018. The company currently has its warehouse

“pickers” stand in front of shelves and move items into bins, tracking each product with a handheld barcode scanner. Amazon says the wristbands will speed up the fulfillment process by freeing up employees’ hands from scanners and their eyes from computer screens.

This isn’t the only information the company can track though. Any wearable can collect personal information about an employee, even unintentionally.¹⁹³ Convergys,

a customer call center in North Carolina,

reportedly lectures employees on “how using the bathroom too often is the same thing as stealing from the company.” The company clocks its employees’ bathroom visits—from the moment they leave their cubicles to the time they return—and sends this information to their supervisors for approval.¹⁹⁴

The legal landscape around tracking employees is

“very vague,” said Lew Maltby, the president of the National Workrights Institute. Federal privacy laws do not explicitly bar businesses from using GPS to track their employees. With this in mind, an employee’s chances of success in court will depend on different factors, including whether or not consent was given to be tracked and whether the device being tracked belongs to them or the company. “It’s essentially whatever shocks the judge,” said Maltby.¹⁹⁵

Questions

What would you do if you were the CEO of a company and your managers proposed an employee GPS tracking system?

1. The company needs to use all means to ensure employee productivity and safety. Employees need to provide consent, as a condition of employment, to being tracked when using company vehicles and/or electronic devices at any time of the day. If you are in possession of company property, the company needs to know what you are up to. Let’s implement the tracking system.

2. The company should not be tracking employees, on or off the clock, as this is an invasion of privacy. The last thing we need to do is play “Big Brother” and demoralize our workforce. Let’s find other ways to ensure productivity and safety.