> Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?
There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value.
Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people.
A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.
I mean, maybe. But a company that spends all of it's time "surveilling" their employees rather than adding value will go out of business. So I'm not sure what the point really is when people bring this up when talking about WFH. If someone doesn't want to be surveilled at work they can quit, right?
Not really. Workers produce the thing the company sells. Those workers are mostly trapped so they deal with whatever nonsense management is up to. Management, mostly useless, maintains its control and viability by asserting that workers need policing and they're the ones to do it. If the policing is relatively easy with WFH, they'll do that. If it's much harder, or less demonstrative of their fake value, screw that, they'll just pass that burden on to workers with RTO mandates.
Why continue the cycle of finding a job and quitting it for solvable problems instead of staying and solving the problem?