Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.
Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.
01 — THE HEADLINE
She refused 160 webcam photos a day and was fired: here's what you need before you monitor remote staff
In August, a US healthcare outsourcing company told one of its remote employees it was switching on new software that would photograph her through her webcam every three minutes, roughly 160 times a day.
Glennis Von Sander-Timinski had worked from home since 2018, with good performance reviews, and had been with the company for more than a decade. She objected, saying the stress would aggravate her lupus, and her doctor wrote asking for the monitoring to be less frequent.
OMG, so this guy was right all this time…?
Her employer, Sutherland Healthcare Solutions, gave her three options: accept it, commute to the office every day, or be fired. The commute would have been about six hours a day. She was fired on 8 September and is now suing. Those are her allegations, and the case has not been decided yet.
But we couldn’t help but wonder what the rules would be here in South Africa…
Would a consent form protect you here in SA?
Plenty of South African businesses now have people working from home, and the tools to watch them are cheap and easy to switch on. The instinct is to get staff to sign a consent form first. But under POPIA, that does far less than most bosses think.
"Employee 'consent' is structurally suspect anyway: a person who needs the job cannot consent freely."
Consent can also be withdrawn at any time, so monitoring built on it can fall away the day someone changes their mind.
What actually protects you
According to Kotze, monitoring such as email and internet use, vehicle tracking and workplace cameras can rest on the employer's legitimate interests, like security or productivity. That only holds if it passes a balancing test, and if your people know about it through a written policy they have actually seen. Reading the content of someone's messages is a separate question, covered by RICA. And completely covert monitoring is a different matter again, which definitely needs a lawyer.
His rule of thumb is the one to keep: monitor transparently, proportionately, and per a written policy. Before you switch anything on, ask whether a photo every three minutes, or whatever you are considering, is proportionate to what you actually need to know.
WHAT TO DO NOW
Write down what you are monitoring, why, and what you will do with it. Show it to your people before you switch anything on. The policy they have seen protects you.
Use the least intrusive thing that answers your real question. If the worry is output, measure output. A camera on someone's face doesn’t give you that info.
Create a route for objections that’s not an ultimatum. When someone pushes back for a medical or personal reason, have the conversation. Skipping it is exactly what the US employer is accused of.
02 — TOOL OF THE WEEK
One tool shaping how people work
LOGISTICS / SHIPPING
Every courier in one dashboard
If your business ships parcels, someone on your team is probably juggling courier accounts, comparing quotes by hand and chasing tracking numbers for customers. Bob Go puts all of it in one South African dashboard. It connects to 11 delivery partners, so you can compare rates and book the best one in the same place, print waybills as PDFs or on a Zebra label printer, and send customers tracking updates automatically.
Rule-based automations take the repetitive steps off your team's plate, and there is a returns centre and a mobile app. Plans start at R286.35 a month including VAT for up to four users, with a free trial. Shipping fees are charged on top.
03 — LEADERSHIP STORY
Tinder's CEO asked staff what success looked like and got blank stares
When Spencer Rascoff took over Tinder, he asked his people a simple question: what does success look like? He got blank stares. The few who answered pointed to the quarterly profit targets promised to investors, even the designers and engineers building the app.
Nobody had a measure of whether Tinder was actually working for the people using it.
"In a lot of ways Tinder had lost product market fit with its users because it hadn't innovated."
So he gave every team one shared target, called "sparks": conversations between matched users that reach at least six back-and-forth messages, the point at which Tinder's data showed people start flirting and making plans to meet. One customer outcome everyone could work toward.
And it’s working on its own terms: matches are up 14% year on year, though revenue still fell 1% in the second quarter and paying users dropped 5%. So the business has not turned yet.
We think the lesson is the starting point, not the result: if your people can only describe success as a number the bank cares about, they have nothing to steer by day to day.
The question worth sitting with: If you asked five of your people what success looks like this quarter, how many would describe a real customer experience?
04 — THE STAT
R30.25
is what a litre of 95 petrol costs inland from 7 October, the first time it has ever passed R30. It rose R3.33 in a single month, about 12%, and diesel now costs up to R31.95 a litre wholesale in Gauteng. The Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources pointed to higher oil prices and disrupted supply through the Strait of Hormuz. Every kilometre your business pays for now costs more, and so does every staff member's drive to work.
Source: Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources October fuel adjustment
05 — EVENTS
What’s coming up
23 OCTOBER – ONLINE COURSE
Trade Unions in the Workplace
A half-day course on working with unions, recognition, organisational rights and collective bargaining. Business owners are among its intended delegates. Run by Labour Guide.
27 OCTOBER – CAPE TOWN
Optimising Operations in Notion
An evening session hosted by Notion ZA at BBD Software Development, on turning messy operations into systems that run, and building one of your own in the room. Free; apply to attend.
29 OCTOBER – CAPE TOWN
Crisis in Real Time: Leading When the Unexpected Hits
Paul Nel, CEO of SnapScan, and Brad Elliot, CEO of RelyComply, at Innovation City Cape Town on leading through a crisis while the business is still running.
Got an event SA employers should know about? Reply and tell us.
06 — QUESTION OF THE WEEK
If you switched on monitoring for your team tomorrow, could you explain in one sentence what you were looking for and why?
07 — BROUGHT TO YOU BY
PREMIUM SPONSOR
Jem wins two awards for frontline HR
Jem has won HR Industry Innovation Using Technology at the Future of HR Awards 2026, and Excellence in Frontline Workforce Innovation at the Global Brand Frontier Awards.
Accepting, Commercial Director Christopher Hellmann pointed to the employees who wake at 4 am to catch taxis and work long shifts to support their families.
"Those are the people that we build technology for," he said.
Jem helps South African employers manage and support their deskless, frontline teams: payslips, leave, HR admin, team comms and financial-wellness benefits (including earned-wage access), all over WhatsApp. Trusted by 200+ employers and 250,000+ workers.
This space is reserved for a small handful of partners we're glad to stand behind, and we've kept 4 more spots open. If your product belongs in front of South African business owners, hit reply and let's talk.
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