HR department demands employee's personal phone, installs location tracking app on it: 'I questioned this'

How far should work be allowed to expand outside the workplace?

In most jobs, there is a good argument to be made that the personal and professional should be as separate as possible. However, as the working-from-home revolution has swept across the world, the barrier between the two has been further broken down. A remote worker may sometimes be able to run errands between Teams meetings, but their manager may also be able to tell when they aren't moving their mouse.

In the case of many companies, a condition of being able to work outside of the office is the ability for them to still monitor your activity during working hours. Some might say that this is reasonable up to a point, but not surprisingly, a lot of workplaces take it to a point that makes their employees miserable. Many of those who work from home believe one of its main benefits should be a relative sense of freedom; this is not always what happens.

It can be a great disappointment to do remote work for a period of time, and then find out there are more conditions attached. An employee often takes it as a sign that they need to move on.

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An employee had been working from home for three months when they were asked to meet up with the HR manager for their company. The manager demanded to take their phone so that he could install two company applications with location permission enabled.
Immediately, the employee had their suspicions about what it was for, and realized that there was no company policy mandating that remote workers needed to download location tracking apps. The company claimed that it was only for marking attendance, but they still had their doubts. They wanted to know more about what was going on.
HR installed company app on my personal mobile without consent or policy

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