At the entrance to TikTok’s headquarters in Singapore hangs a colorful mural that reads, “Come as you are.” Roslan Rahman/AFP via Getty Images
- TikTok is cracking down on its return-to-office policy with new employee monitoring tools.
- The social app has implemented a new tool called MyRTO that monitors office attendance.
- MyRTO tracks badge swipes and asks employees to explain “deviations” from expected in-person attendance.
TikTok no longer just tracks users’ locations. Now the company has started monitoring the whereabouts of its employees.
The New York Times reports that the social media company has implemented new internal software called MyRTO to track and enforce its strict return-to-the-office policies. MyRTO monitors badge swipes employees make upon entering the office and asks employees to explain “deviations” from expected in-person attendance, the outlet reported.
After implementing an attendance policy requiring U.S.-based employees to come to the office at least three times a week last October as coronavirus concerns eased, the company threatened to fire employees whose home addresses did not match the assigned office address, Insider previously reported.
TikTok was previously criticized and banned in several countries for using “Big Brother-like surveillance” after Forbes reported that its Chinese parent company ByteDance planned to use the app to track Americans using GPS information collected through the app track. But this week the company told employees it would unveil its new internal tracking software, which is designed to “provide both employees and managers with greater clarity and context regarding their RTO expectations and office schedules and contribute to more transparent communication,” it said a ByteDance spokesperson told Insider.
Representatives for TikTok did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
Managers across industries are increasingly turning to remote and hybrid workforce productivity monitoring software to monitor how long users are logged in while working from home and to take random screenshots of employees’ screens. For those who need to return to the office, some companies are implementing new attendance tracking software and deploying sensors to measure how busy offices are and to determine when a person is at their desk or using a conference room.
But while CEOs of big-name companies are increasingly touting return-to-the-office policies as the best way to conduct business—Elon Musk, for example, went so far as to call remote work “morally wrong”—employees at tech companies are pushing elected officials to express their displeasure in form of work stoppages and even resignations in order to maintain the social workers’ view that they were equivalent to an 8% salary increase.
“If you allow flexibility, it expands your talent pool,” Insider previously reported Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and a remote work expert.
“Whether the economy is shrinking or growing, outside options are always available to the best workers. So I think if as a company you have a model that doesn’t offer flexibility to your best employees, some of them – not every single one, but some of them – will get poached by competitors.”
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