Employee monitoring is witnessing a notable uptick in adoption. According to a survey, there was a 75% surge in searches for staff surveillance software in March 2020 when compared to the monthly average of 2019. This heightened demand persisted throughout 2021 and 2022.
This surge can be primarily attributed to the shift towards hybrid work during the pandemic. A 2022 survey conducted by Microsoft revealed that 85% of leaders found it challenging to trust their employees’ productivity.
Startups specializing in the development and sale of workplace monitoring software have unsurprisingly benefited from this trend. Just today, Erudit, a company that employs AI to track workforce metrics such as turnover risk and burnout rate, secured $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Conexo Ventures, Athos Capital, Ignia Partners, True Blue Partners, and Fondo Bolsa Social.
Like many other workplace surveillance platforms, Erudit seamlessly integrates with the applications already used by companies, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, in an attempt to gauge the organization’s health. Erudit processes the collected data through a set of AI algorithms, which yield scores across various metrics like “alignment,” “autonomy,” “engagement,” and “satisfaction.”
Alejandro Agenjo, one of Erudit’s co-founders, stated in an email interview with TechCrunch, “Everyone understands that the best decisions are made with the best data. But companies today are partially blind because the people analytics industry relies on lagging indicators. Erudit offers the ability to understand what affects the productivity of employees in real-time without disrupting workflow — and without the biases generated by current data collection systems, such as surveys.”
Despite Erudit’s claims of anonymizing chat data it collects, the notion of software reading private messages may still raise concerns among employees, regardless of anonymization measures.
A 2021 survey by ExpressVPN revealed that a majority (56%) of employees experience stress and anxiety about their employers monitoring their communications, with 43% viewing it as a breach of trust.
Erudit does provide customers with the option to exclude individual employees, teams, or departments from monitoring, but this decision ultimately rests with the administrator.
Aside from privacy concerns, questions arise about whether Erudit’s models consider the diverse ways people from different backgrounds and cultures express themselves through text. Many AI models do not, potentially leading to discriminatory outcomes.
Moreover, temporary lapses in judgment also raise concerns. What happens if a colleague sends a heated direct message in a moment of frustration and promptly deletes it? It remains unclear whether Erudit would penalize such missteps.
Even if Erudit’s technology functions as advertised, employees may rightly fear how managers will interpret and act on the data provided by the platform. Will teams identified as insufficiently “engaged” or “aligned” face unwarranted consequences? What about managers overseeing consistently dissatisfied teams through no fault of their own?
In an attempt to address criticism, Erudit published a lengthy blog post defending its platform’s design and functionality, essentially asserting that Erudit is merely a tool that can be used for both good and bad purposes.
Despite these concerns, Erudit claims to have no difficulty attracting customers, with “dozens” of businesses currently using its platform. The company, which currently has 20 employees, anticipates expanding its team in the coming months, particularly in the areas of customer support, customer success, and sales.
According to Agenjo, “Optimizing processes and enhancing unit economics involve extracting the most business intelligence from the data lakes to which every company already has access; this is a top priority for every C-level executive today. I believe that Erudit is at the heart of all this — people, business intelligence, and AI.”
