What’s Your Return on Visibility?

Digitalization driven by COVID-19 has accelerated and transformed management’s ability to track what and how workers are doing. This growth in networked visibility significantly increases the risk of institutional and interpersonal conflict, as well as challenges to cultural norms.

Many workers rationally fear that enhanced monitoring empowers management — and micromanagement — at their expense. When experienced as corporate surveillance, monitoring implies a lack of trust and an invasion of privacy, especially when people are working from home. That’s not sustainable; no one wants to feel spied on.1 Consequently, if not ironically, leaders are being pushed to make visibility far more visible.

While greater transparency around visibility can allay employee fears, it may also expose and provoke clashes in core values. If the interactions on a distributed work team, for example, are appropriately inclusive, but that negatively affects productivity, what happens next? Workers in general — and remote workers in particular — want credible narratives explaining visibility’s benefits, costs, and trade-offs. Opacity around visibility invites credible accusations of hypocrisy.

Visibility, like capital, compensation, and digital transformation, requires explicit purpose and policies. Leaders, not just HR and IT administrators, should explicitly manage visibility as an enterprise asset.

When Visibility Clashes Arise

The ongoing digital transformation in employee monitoring effectively squeezes people between values-driven visibility and visibility-driven values. The former celebrates creating ever-greater visibility around core values and compliance; the latter emerges as increased visibility lets more people see where, when, and how core values compete, complement, and conflict. As performance analytics and cultural analytics visibly converge, leaders are looking beyond legacy KPIs to assess how well people align with espoused values. In doing so, they will have no choice but to rethink how they balance principles and productivity.

Earlier this year, Netflix provided a troubling case study of a visibility clash. A digitally sophisticated innovator committed to a “radically transparent” culture, the company fired three executives who privately criticized their bosses on an internal Slack channel because their behavior defied a core Netflix ethos.

“Very early on at Netflix, Reed Hastings wrote a culture memo for the company with Patty McCord, then our head of talent,” explained co-CEO and chief content officer Ted Sarandos in a LinkedIn post defending the terminations. “At its heart was the notion of integrity and feedback, which they described as ‘You only say things about fellow employees you say to their face.’”2

Sarandos explicitly noted that Netflix wasn’t and isn’t digitally looking for trouble, writing, “We don’t proactively monitor Slack or email. The Slack channel was open, so anyone could access the conversations even though the employees concerned thought it was private.”3

The unavoidable inference: Netflix’s radical transparency empowers, even obligates, leaders to act upon values violations. Nevertheless, Netflix executives don’t wish to be seen as policing their people. So where should leadership draw its digital lines? If management avoids active or passive values surveillance, does that tacitly encourage workers to become digital tattletales? Or is digital discretion the better part of valor? Between championing core values and ongoing visibility creep, these leadership questions are neither rhetorical nor hypothetical.

Even well-intentioned digital efforts to improve oversight and insight may thus prove counterproductive. A global bank, concerned about work-from-home employee engagement and morale, combined weekly engagement surveys with sentiment analysis to see if its work groups found it appropriately supportive and a good (remote) place to work.

When the results were correlated to KPIs, however, the numbers fell all over the lot: Several measurably unhappy groups seemed to perform quite well, while many underperforming regions and functions appeared to be reasonably engaged. Initial analyses left leaders clueless and confused. As an HR analytics expert at the bank told me, “We thought [this] data would give us insights to help inform managers. I think we ended up upsetting more managers than we helped.”

One crucial takeaway: The bank’s analytics leaders recognized that they needed to consult more closely with both managers and employees about what they were trying to learn about morale and engagement. Simply serving the needs of HR and top management was neither good nor open enough. Visibility needed to be more than an executive resource or privileged perk. To their credit, bank leadership agreed. What began as a data-driven report card is evolving into a more actionable resource for the bank’s workers and managers. Democratizing visibility made it more valuable for more people.

A New KPI

The larger organizational call to action should be clear: Visibility is an enterprise asset that requires purpose, policies, and management. Return on visibility — the belief that measurable value can be had from ethically monitoring people and processes — is more than a provocative idea; it’s a credible key performance indicator.

Greater visibility should make workers feel more empowered, not more vulnerable or exposed. Leaders can’t credibly hide its role as an instrument of managerial control. That means workforces should know where leaders unambiguously champion values-driven visibility and how they will reconcile visibility-driven values when clashes arise.

There’s no shortage of use cases and real-world scenarios inviting companies to better articulate visibility’s virtues and vices. Informed consent has a key role to play: Should companies, for example, create and publish calendar rights that make people’s calendars more accessible and sharable for scheduling meetings and deliverables? Should teams be encouraged or required to review the sentiment analytics associated with their project or process workflows? More provocatively, should colleagues see each other’s intracompany social graphs to see who they know in common and what introductions might make sense?

Many of these questions were anticipated by Google’s Project Aristotle team dynamics research almost a decade ago. The data-driven digital juggernaut had quantified — and learned — the hard way that the best people didn’t always make the best teams. Interpersonal dynamics, team culture, and team management and facilitation mattered enormously. Greater visibility and clarity around those dimensions proved empirically essential to both higher morale and effectiveness. Google’s technology leadership didn’t just understand this; they culturally championed it.4

Proactively clarifying how core values and digital visibility coevolve is leadership’s hard work. Much the way leaders once championed digital transformation road maps, they need to provide visibility road maps. Ensuring that greater visibility improves work and empowers people is not a digital byproduct or afterthought; it is now leadership’s duty and obligation.

Vendors increasingly recognize and acknowledge that the “surveillance brand” of managerial oversight and control is not ethically, culturally, or legally sustainable. Companies, whose growth skyrocketed during the pandemic because managers were desperate to monitor their newly remote and distributed workforces, now look to position themselves as analytic resources to help mentor, coach, and advise remote teams and workers. Startups, in contrast, explicitly seek to digitally assess how well team dynamics reflect and respect a company’s culture. They’re pushing for greater cultural visibility to promote healthier performance and productivity. Making culture more visible invariably makes both performance and productivity more visible, and vice versa.

It has been said that culture is what people do when nobody’s looking. Visibility’s irresistible rise means that looking is always an option. How that option is responsibly, ethically, and productively exercised will define tomorrow’s digital cultures at work. What you see is what you get.