Badge swipes. Hours online. Emails sent. Meeting activity. Websites visited.
Organizations can measure more about how employees work than ever before.
But there is a management problem hiding inside all that data: employees may not trust what leaders are doing with it.
New Gallup research published September 24 found that only 20 percent of employees who regularly use a computer or device at work have "a great deal" of trust in organizational leaders to use employee data responsibly. Another 43 percent trust them somewhat, while 37 percent have little or no trust.
The management lesson isn't necessarily to stop measuring.
It's to stop assuming employees understand why you're measuring.
What counts as workplace data?
Gallup examined two broad categories.
Activity data can include hours worked, badge swipes or email volume.
Content data can include emails, meeting content or websites visited.
Those tools can serve legitimate purposes: cybersecurity, compliance, workforce planning, workplace safety and understanding how work gets done.
But employees can interpret the exact same technology very differently.
Leadership may think:
"We're trying to understand workflow."
Employees may hear:
"We're checking whether you're working."
That gap is where trust begins to erode.
Measurement without context feels like surveillance
Managers should distinguish between collecting information and creating understanding.
If employees don't know what is being collected, who can see it, how long it is retained or how it affects decisions about their performance, they will fill in the blanks themselves.
Usually not in management's favor.
Gallup's findings show just how closely this issue intersects with engagement. Among engaged employees, 40 percent reported a great deal of trust in leaders' handling of workplace data.
Among actively disengaged employees?
That doesn't establish that data practices cause engagement or disengagement. But it does show that trust in leadership and confidence in data use are deeply connected.
Before collecting data, answer five questions
Managers don't need to become privacy attorneys.
But they should be able to explain:
What are we collecting?
Why are we collecting it?
Who can see it?
How will it be used?
What won't we use it for?
The fifth question may be the most important.
Imagine telling employees that badge-swipe information is being used to understand office utilization.
Employees may reasonably wonder whether it will also appear in their performance review.
Leaders should answer that question before employees have to ask it.
Don't turn proxies into performance
There is another management risk.
Data can make something measurable without making it meaningful.
An employee sending 80 emails isn't necessarily more productive than someone sending 20.
Someone attending more meetings isn't automatically more engaged.
Someone who spends more hours logged in isn't necessarily producing better work.
Managers should therefore be cautious about turning activity metrics into performance metrics.
The question shouldn't be:
"How much activity can we see?"
It should be:
"What evidence actually tells us whether this employee is delivering the results the role requires?"
In many jobs, outcomes remain more meaningful than digital exhaust.
Transparency is a management practice
Gallup found employees who had discussed workplace-data use reported greater trust. Gallup.com
That points toward a relatively straightforward intervention:
Talk about it.
Don't bury workplace-data practices inside an onboarding document or privacy policy.
Managers can explain what systems capture during team meetings. HR can provide plain-language guidance. Leaders can describe how aggregated information informs workforce decisions.
And employees should have somewhere to ask questions.
Transparency won't make every employee comfortable with every form of measurement.
But secrecy almost guarantees suspicion.
Why This Matters
Trust affects how people interpret management decisions.
An employee who trusts leadership may see workforce data as a tool for improving work.
An employee who doesn't may see the same system as evidence that management doesn't trust them.
And once that perception takes hold, the technology itself becomes part of the employee experience.
Organizations spend enormous amounts of time deciding what they can measure.
They should spend more time deciding what they should measure—and how they will explain it.
Management Signal
If you can't comfortably explain a workplace metric to the employees being measured, reconsider why you're collecting it.
CTA
Ask your management team to identify every source of employee activity or content data currently being collected.
For each one, answer:
What is it for?
Who sees it?
Do employees know?
Any question the leadership team cannot answer clearly is a conversation worth having before collecting more data.
How StrikeForce Can Help
StrikeForce helps organizations strengthen workforce strategy and management practices around the people behind the metrics—supporting employers as they build productive, engaged teams and make better-informed talent decisions.