Workplaces differ when it comes to the balance between trust and control, and how this affects their management style. In this thesis, I will use a spectrum with trust and control as opposite ends to analyze trust and control in the employees’ workplaces. If we consider a spectrum with completely trust-based and completely control-based as its extremes, the companies in this study are not likely to represent the full range of this spectrum. They can all be said to be quite trust-based, but it is nevertheless important to highlight which of these that are closer to trust-based and which are more control-based than the rest of the companies.
In chapter 4.2, the importance of trust between employees was highlighted. But trust between employee and manager is also important. With the information technology
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revolution, technical means of monitoring employees’ work has become available.
However, the use of these is not unproblematic. Kassah (2007) found that they could give employees a feeling of being under surveillance, and that their manager did not trust them to do their job. These findings resonated with those of Bernstrøm and Svare (2017), who in addition found a positive association between employees’ control over decisions and higher felt trust. While control-measures may give managers increased insight into the performance of their workforce, the potential downsides are important to consider.
How does this manifest in the workplaces examined in this study? Do some feel more
“surveilled” than others, and do requirements for documenting work affect them negatively? In this section, important aspects affecting the level of trust will be identified, as well as which workplaces are more trust or control based. To conclude, a figure (Figure 2) will be presented that shows the workplaces positioned on a trust-control-spectrum.
The first aspect is strongly connected to the discussion in the previous section, as it pertains to how free employees are to work remotely. As previously discussed, the cultural department and the construction consulting firm were the workplaces with the most freedom to work where they wanted. The participants employed in these organizations did not experience any significant social opposition to working from home. This has to be interpreted as a sign of trust from the management’s side. The state health agency and the energy company, however, experienced more opposition to working from home, and Helen explicitly said that her employer did not encourage doing this. The freedom to choose were to work, then, is one aspect indicating a higher level of trust.
Another aspect is the use of timesheets. The workplaces are very different when it comes to this, some using detailed versions, while others only use general timesheets. I will argue that the level of detail required from timesheets can say something about the level of trust in a workplace. Again, the cultural department seems to be the most trust-based, not writing detailed timesheets. The health department uses a more formalized timesheet system, as does the energy company. Eric reports that they have a “massive” software that keeps track of work hours, as well as other documents in their company. The construction consulting company has the most detailed timesheets. This has to do with the way they work, as they always work with clients that are to be billed for each hour the company’s consultants work for them.
A final aspect, and an important nuance to the discussion on timesheets, is the visibility of deliveries. If a workplace does not have formal control-mechanisms in the form of detailed timesheets, this does not mean that there are no such mechanisms at play.
Before the pandemic as well, there has been a culture in my workplace where no one is going around controlling [what you do], but it is expected that you deliver. We work in a political system, so things have to be delivered continuously (Charlotte).
Thus, in the cultural department where Charlotte works, there are more informal control mechanisms in the absence of a detailed timesheet-system. The same mechanism is seen in the state health department: “We have quite visible deliveries (…) it is quite obvious if you (…) do not deliver what you are supposed to” (Helen). Elizabeth in the energy company as well, says that missing deliveries will be detected by those that were supposed to receive them. This stresses the point that control may also be maintained by assuring traceability of work, and thus accountability of employees.
In this section, I have operationalized the concepts trust-based and control-based workplaces on the basis of some important aspects discussed by the employees. The first
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was the level of freedom to work where one wanted, in other words the level of mobility.
Second was the level of detail required in timesheets. The third aspect was the visibility of deliveries, and this served as an important nuance to the second aspect on timesheets. In the graphic representation of the levels of trust and control in the different workplaces as shown below (Figure 2), requirements for timesheets is the most important indicator of trust, followed by the degree of mobility.
Figure 2: The trust-control-spectrum.
In general, the employees interviewed did not seem to feel that they were under surveillance by their employer before the pandemic, nor that that they were not trusted.
While it would seem obvious that this was the case for the most trust-based workplace, the culture department, this was not evident in the more control-based workplaces either.
Indeed, Benjamin, who works in the construction consulting firm positioned at the control-end of the spectrum, says that there has always been a trust-based approach to timekeeping in his company. This calls attention to that detailed timesheets are not necessarily experienced as a signal of distrust among employees in this study. This contradicts the findings of Bernstrøm and Svare (2017), who found a negative association between monitoring and felt trust.
However, this does not mean that the conclusion drawn in Figure 2 is amiss. Rather, it points out that all these companies can be positioned towards the trust-end of the spectrum. Nevertheless, when comparing them, the types of timesheets can be a fruitful way of distinguishing them. In this way, the construction consulting firm can be the most control-based in this context, without employees experiencing it as such.
In conclusion, the workplaces of the employees in this study seem to have avoided the use of extensive monitoring systems. When approached from a domestication theory perspective, this illustrates an important point. Although monitoring systems offer ways of increasing control, and in some contexts are a source of conflict (see e.g. Davidson, 2021), the data in this study does not indicate such conflicts. Rather, it seems that, regardless of the workplaces’ managements having access to this technology or not, they have simply not seen the need to use these capabilities. This point may seem obvious, but it is important to highlight that, in the end, humans are the ones that decide whether this is a technology they want to use. The employees, then, seem generally satisfied with the way documentation requirements are, regardless of where their workplace is positioned on the spectrum in Figure 2.
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Now that we have established important aspects of the traditional office and working from home before the pandemic in the previous section, as well as differences between trust-based and control-trust-based workplaces in this one, it is time to address another aspect of work life; the relationships between work time, leisure, and expectations of availability.