Hi, everybody and welcome to the women in tech. Talk about the workplace of the future. Um I'm really excited to have everybody here and remember that we only have tight 20 minutes. So please jump in, ask questions along the way.I've got the webinar chat up and I'll try and answer them as we go along. I really welcome any kind of interaction as we start off. I wanna invite you to imagine a world where your every online move is being watched and exploited. I want to imagine a world where privacy isn't a fundamental right? You can't assume it, but it's a luxury. Your eye movements are being tracked, your physically, your physical location is being watched and known in real time. How many words you write, how many slack emoji reactions you put into each Slack channel? How many Slack channels you're engaging in all of these things are being watched, monitored, counted to see whether or not you're a great worker or not. This might sound like something out of black mirror or out of some kind of dystopian science fiction plot, but the reality is, this is not only a reality for a lot of people, but a reality that all of us are careening towards more than 50% of people who we've spoken to in our research at Express VPN.

This is their lived reality. And there's a big gap as well between employers and employees when it comes to understanding of privacy and what we hope the workplace of the future will look like we've been facing real changes and we need to adapt in line with those changes. So what I want to do today is talk about the future of work, what it looks like the impact on women, particularly on women because it affects us disproportionately and what we can do to tackle the issues and to make sure that we all walk out of here, not feeling afraid but feeling empowered to take an active role in shaping a future workplace where privacy and security are prioritized and we're ensuring that there is a safe and inclusive environment for all.

So before I jump into those things though, I wanted to share a little bit about myself. Uh My name's Lauren Hendry Parsons. I'm a privacy advocate at Express VPN. I'm also the global head of communications. Um You might be thinking because I'm in cybersecurity, do I have a background in it or technology? Actually, I don't. Um My career has been pure coms jumping from Strat coms to radio newsrooms through to um fun pr in the music world. But my academic background is actually in ancient history and philosophy. And you might be thinking Lauren, what on earth would ancient history and philosophy have to do with working in privacy. Um One of the things that I love about ancient history is when we look at it, you can see many data points coming together around different parts of the world which converge or come to an inflection point, a tipping point which then causes major change. And when we look back at it casually, as an observer in the future, with hindsight, it looks inevitable, these events look like they inevitably happened and they seem to be impossible to spot in time change them once they build up steam. But the reality is if we are able to learn to spot the small and seemingly unrelated decision points or changes that are happening in lockstep in a society, in a culture, um We are able to predict what could happen and to take action to actively build the world we want to inhabit.

That's what I'm driven by. The idea that I wanna actively work to build the world I wanna inhabit. And right now in this point in history, we collectively occupied two distinct but intimately interrelated worlds. That's our environmental, physical world and our online world.

And these are two worlds which right now are changing at a new, a massive rate. And the scientists, the A I specialists, the developers, they're all telling us that both of these worlds are coming to an inflection point of major change. And I wanted to put my skills towards something that would let me build that world. And the question was environment or cybersecurity and thankfully express VPN came along and it seemed like a really great fit because it's driven by a mission. I'm united with my colleagues by a shared sense of mission and urgency around the idea that digital rights are not a choice, they're not a privilege, a luxury, they are in fact a fundamental human right. So at Express VPN, we believe digital rights are human rights and you can't uh protect human rights without also considering digital rights. And we're working to create that safer freer internet for everyone. And that's not just about our product to be clear. We have an excellent product but a VPN is not a silver bullet. There is a whole range of uh tools, protections policies, um Players that all need to come into place to create a safer free internet for everyone. And that's part of the work that we do. We look around to think what are the challenges facing us when it comes to a safe free internet for everyone. And as the pandemic hit, what we saw was a huge move from physical to digital life interactions.

I don't need to repeat this, but I'll say it for the sake of illustration. We all lived through the last five years. We know the differences. I don't know about you, but I was living overseas during the pandemic, away from my family. I had a Zoom wedding. I went to two Zoom funerals. Um I did all my work from my living room, all of these things. Um It was an incredible technology but nowhere changed more during the pandemic than work. And not only has that changed, but that has persisted and that's persisted in a way that we can see here that over half of the people right now who we went out and spoke to are working in a hybrid or a remote environment. This creates a whole new set of challenges, privacy and security implications because the things that we used to do in person now need to be done digitally in our personal and professional life. And today, as I talk about addressing those challenges, you might think that I am here to talk about technology and yet technology is a really big part of that. But what I want to emphasize is that I'm not here exclusively to talk about technology. Trust is actually what allows us to work together to be productive, to make change, to innovate.

And I think that a really important part of the conversation in any future of the workplace is how can we best create trust and that can be done uh using technology, it can be diminished with technology. And we need to think through those implications whenever we're making technological decisions or other policy based decisions in our workplace. The reason why, for me, it was so important to talk about this at a women in tech conference is because these new challenges that we're facing in the new future workplace disproportionately affect women. I don't think that this is gonna surprise anybody. We know that women are more at risk online. We know that women are more at risk at work. And in fact, hybrid work means new greater risks and challenges for women. When we looked at these new emerging challenges, we thought to ourselves, right? We need to get in there and we need to understand them better because how can we tackle uh risks if we don't understand them, how can we adapt to changes if we don't know what they look like? So we jumped in and through 2020 2021 2022 the pandemic was ongoing. We saw this trend more and more being online with this whole new host of threats and uh challenges to digital privacy.

So we wanted to do some research and in 2020 we went and spoke to 2000 employees and 2000 employers in the US who are working in a remote or hybrid capacity to understand the extent of employer surveillance and how it is impacting people. The following year. We were looking at the trends and thinking, do we talk to remote workers again or do we think more broadly? And we thought about how does surveillance play into the metaverse? 12 months ago, it looks like the metaverse might be a going concern. But as recently as this morning, there was news coming out saying this is unlikely to be something that's gonna be a serious player and we think that this is gonna go away. So I'm not gonna talk as much about that. It's one of the beautiful things about tech, which is you adapt, you find new information, you use it and you move on. So I'll talk a little bit about the trends in the metaverse, but I'm less concerned about preparing people for a workplace in the metaverse, seeing the direction that things are going. But let's talk about the challenge that all of us were facing around the world. How do we solve for a dispersed future of work? What would this look like? Will it go on forever? You know, employees and employers alike were grappling with how do we make hybrid and remote work work? And we went out and surveilled them.

And what we found was employers were really worried. You can see the numbers here. They were distinctly worried about productivity about making sure if people weren't in the office that they were still doing their jobs. And unfortunately, the answer to the challenge of how do we make sure that people are working well was for too many companies surveillance and not only was it surveillance, it was surveillance at unprecedented unexpected levels which were, was not clearly communicated to employees.

And we found that in the um disconnect between employees who said that they were being surveilled with the employers who admitted to surveilling their employees. The numbers, there are just over half of employees said that they were, they thought they were being surveilled at their current job.

While almost three quarters actually admitted to surveilling their employees through huge amounts of data and very different channels. Beyond that, what we saw was a widening gap, not just in the belief about surveillance, but between the experience of employees and their well being and the behaviors of employers and their intent. Let's talk about employee knowledge. One in three employees didn't believe that their employers would actively monitor their online activities and 15% didn't even know it was possible that disconnect is between what employees expect and think is possible and what employers think there's even disconnect between how companies approach this stuff.

What we found was 83% of employers thought there were ethical concerns with employee monitoring and yet 78% use the within the same group use monitoring software. So with that, there's a huge group of people who both understand there are ethical concerns but are still prepared to use it.

And this has huge knock on effects. What we know is nearly half of employees would be willing to reduce their pay if it meant not being subjected to surveillance. In fact, one in four would take a 25% pay cut. That's someone on $100,000 being prepared to take a job for $75,000 where they were not being surveilled. That is a major retention issue and something that is being underestimated by companies everywhere. A huge part of this is that 60% of employees said they're likely or very likely to implement monitoring software in the future. And one in five C, they're unlikely to inform staff if they proceed with it. This is not a healthy situation, cos what that looks like is fear and a lack of trust. You can see here the numbers, the impacts on stress, mental health well-being productivity that that's having on employees at the heart of it. Monitoring was a tool being used to solve the problem of productivity and accountability. But the fact of the matter is surveillance was negatively impacting productivity. 57% of surveilled workers reported a negative impact on their productivity. They feel more pressure, they feel stress, anxiety, they take fewer breaks.

So we see stress and burnout cycles. When we zoom out to the bigger picture, this hits women where it hurts the most because already we've got things working against us in the workplace. Hybrid work exacerbates challenges and penalizes women. There's when you don't go into the office, there's less access to mentoring and sponsorship. There are assumptions about your commitment. Are you really committed to the job if you're not in the office and it's hard to speak up and be heard. So not only is the technology being used undermining people's productivity and well-being, but if you take the hybrid option, which lets you balance the rest of your life and maybe get a mental health boost, it may still undermine you. So what I'm saying is the data points are converging right now and it's time for us to take action. This isn't an individual problem. It's a systemic challenge which needs to be tackled systemically. So here's what you can do, enhance your digital privacy and your professional and personal life. This is what that looks like. I'm gonna flash these up. I know people will be watching it, please screenshot it. I know I'm running out of time. So I wanna make sure you know, this these things are not expert level and even if you're not a technical expert, you can still advocate for privacy friendly policies in the workplace.

On top of that, you can conduct if you want your own regular security audits and go beyond by informing yourself about emerging security threats and trends. This doesn't have to be serious, it can be serious, but you can also make sure that you're following the right tiktok and Twitter accounts cos I want you to take ownership of your cyber knowledge and growth, spot the trends and let it be interesting and exciting, develop a strong professional network.

If you haven't yet built relationships with mentors or peers in the cybersecurity field, go out and do it. If you like me are in the cybersecurity field, do what you can to engage more broadly outside pure cybersecurity and make sure that you're sharing your knowledge. And on top of that, make sure you're staying adaptable and resilient because it really is a rapidly evolving field out there. Here's one trend I want to give you a tip to think about everything in B to B becomes B to C. Soon after fingerprint technology was once a serious military affair, a serious security affair. We now have it on our phones and our laptops. VPN S started for corporate inform security. It's now a large part of consumer privacy. Think about watching what companies are doing, think about seeing where they're investing, think about how it might flow down into your life, into your workplace. And on top of that, this isn't just about you. Think about where your company has to play. We need to think about the policies, culture and trust here. I want to go back to the stats for a second Deloitte every year does a really big study into women at work. And what we know about the last year is that a third of women surveyed have taken time off in the past year because of mental health challenges, stress and burnout are happening at alarming levels.

This ties together with workplace surveillance and the negative impacts on uh workers who are being surveilled. I wanna really emphasize that this is something which disproportionately affects women. And so as much as possible where you're in a leadership position, where you're in a policy making position where you can influence it. Think about making sure that there are diverse considerations in the room. I also wanna say if you're implementing comprehensive privacy and security policies, clearly communicate expectations and guidelines to employees. Let there be trust, set them up for success, communicate the expectation, communicate the technology if you want to go down that path and regularly update those policies to address emerging threats. The other thing that we do a lot at Express VPN and that your company culture can do a lot around is encouraging a culture of privacy and security awareness where there's training and resources where there's a designated privacy and security team where you think about embedding privacy by design in everything you do.

I want to give you an example in our own company that we have at Express VPN, which is we don't only think about digital privacy and security. We're committed to the idea of maintaining security without uh having an impact on privacy and that extends to our employees. So when we were remodeling our new offices, we made sure that all of the security cameras point outwards towards the door, not towards any of the workspaces. Why is this critical? Because we've managed to balance the idea of keeping our workplace secure without surveilling our employees, we trust them to be in the office to do their work. We still want to be sure that we know who's coming in and out. So when you're creating policies or you're creating solutions, what can you do? So you don't have to trade off, what can you do to maintain privacy and psychological safety and make sure things are secure? What can you do between balancing productivity and encouraging accountability and reporting?

But still considering privacy concerns, psychological well-being and overall well-being in the workplace, explore alternative monitoring methods, explore alternative reporting methods and even think about prioritizing above all employee well-being and trust because we know we know that psychologically safe people are more productive, are more creative problem solved better and are ultimately better employees, happier people and overall a better happier society.

We are at that inflection point. So I wanna say to all of you think about the places where you can educate yourself, influence others and be prepared for what the future of the workplace looks like. And of course, if you want any more of these resources, you can head to express vpn.com/blog where we have lots of great recommendations for your privacy and security tools as well as all of those deep dives into the research that I presented today. Thanks for being here with me. Does anybody have any questions? Oh, thank you Linda. Fantastic. Well, as always, if you want to drop me a line? You've seen my name. I'm on linkedin. Send any questions through. Thanks everybody for being here. Thanks, Kim.