Bosses Panic-Buy Spy Software To Keep Tabs On Remote Workers (bloomberg.com) 94
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: With so many people working remotely because of the coronavirus, surveillance software is flying off the virtual shelves. "Companies have been scrambling," said Brad Miller, CEO of surveillance-software maker InterGuard. "They're trying to allow their employees to work from home but trying to maintain a level of security and productivity." Along with InterGuard, software makers include Time Doctor, Teramind, VeriClock, innerActiv, ActivTrak and Hubstaff. All provide a combination of screen monitoring and productivity metrics, such as number of emails sent, to reassure managers that their charges are doing their jobs.
ActivTrak's inbound requests have tripled in recent weeks, according to CEO Rita Selvaggi. Teramind has seen a similar increase, said Eli Sutton, vice president of global operations. Jim Mazotas, innerActive's founder, said phones have been ringing off the hook. Managers using InterGuard's software can be notified if an employee does a combination of worrisome behaviors, such as printing both a confidential client list and a resume, an indication that someone is quitting and taking their book of business with them. "It's not because of lack of trust," Miller said, who compared the software to banks using security cameras. "It's because it's imprudent not to do it." The software can also be a way for employers to grant more flexibility to workers to fit their jobs around other parts of their lives. It may also let managers spot areas that are overstaffed or where they may need additional hands. Sutton from software maker Teramind says employers worried about workers' every moves might have a bigger issue to deal with. "It's not about spying on the user," Sutton said. "If you hired them, you should trust them. If you don't, they have no reason to be part of the organization."
Have you been required to use surveillance software while working from home? If so, which software is your employer using?
ActivTrak's inbound requests have tripled in recent weeks, according to CEO Rita Selvaggi. Teramind has seen a similar increase, said Eli Sutton, vice president of global operations. Jim Mazotas, innerActive's founder, said phones have been ringing off the hook. Managers using InterGuard's software can be notified if an employee does a combination of worrisome behaviors, such as printing both a confidential client list and a resume, an indication that someone is quitting and taking their book of business with them. "It's not because of lack of trust," Miller said, who compared the software to banks using security cameras. "It's because it's imprudent not to do it." The software can also be a way for employers to grant more flexibility to workers to fit their jobs around other parts of their lives. It may also let managers spot areas that are overstaffed or where they may need additional hands. Sutton from software maker Teramind says employers worried about workers' every moves might have a bigger issue to deal with. "It's not about spying on the user," Sutton said. "If you hired them, you should trust them. If you don't, they have no reason to be part of the organization."
Have you been required to use surveillance software while working from home? If so, which software is your employer using?
Mediocre bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mediocre bosses (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you have to understand. Eventually they fill up all the space in their spare bedroom with panic-bought toilet paper, to the point where they can't hoard any more - but they still feel the need to panic-buy *something*..
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Re:Mediocre bosses (Score:5, Insightful)
Metrics might be useful in some areas, but I'm not sure my work output really can be quantified that way easily. Certainly it'd be fun to game that system.
The process we use seems straightforward: we discuss accomplishments from last week, discuss priorities for upcoming week, I state what I think I can do by next week. We then evaluate my statements next week. My boss knows what I'm doing and how much progress to expect, when I'm sandbagging and when I'm being too aggressive.
The only thing wfh has done is improved my productivity that I probably can do more than I'd ordinarily do, so far no effort has been made to claim that excess productivity.
Honestly I'm not sure what spyware would accomplish.
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Metrics might be useful in some areas, but I'm not sure my work output really can be quantified that way easily.
It depends on how the metrics are used.
If you get your work done and hit your deadlines, then the metrics should be ignored.
But if you fall behind, the metrics can be used to see who is working hard but struggling and who is just plain lazy.
My neighbor used to work for Yahoo. He worked from home one day per week. He spent most of the day mowing his lawn, raking leaves, and playing with his dog. This went on for years, and that fact that Yahoo had no metrics for detecting slackers convinced me that they h
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Why didn't his boss ask questions? I've failed to hit my self-imposed deadlines, but my boss wanted to know what's holding me up. How does one explain that his dog ate his productivity for years? Was his bosses dog also very needy?
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Why didn't his boss ask questions?
Software development productivity is notoriously hard to measure. It is common for even competently run projects to run way over schedule.
I assume he was working on the other 4 days of the week when he went to the office. A 20% shortfall can easily go undetected.
If he was creative at coming up with excuses, he could coast for years.
His stock options were underwater, so I don't think he cared much about getting fired.
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The bottom line though is that he was either delivering well enough to justify his salary, and no one cared to motivate him to do better, *or* someone was mismanaging him. The former is fair, many companies simply cannot afford to pay for top tier performance and often lose such people to higher food-chain companies who can pay better. If he's willing to stay with them in exchange for slacking off, eh... sounds like both parties walk away happy.
In either condition I am not clear on why physically being in t
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In either condition I am not clear on why physically being in the office would be expected to get him to produce better results.
Because neither his lawn nor his dog is at the office.
Likewise, my kids get their homework done much faster when I unplug the router.
Some people can handle distractions better than others. A big part of proper management is recognizing who can work with distractions and who can't.
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Because neither his lawn nor his dog is at the office.
And you think this person won't get distracted in the office? That isn't my experience with offices. They're alternative distractions, replace kids, dogs and lawns with meetings, water coolers, and smart phones. The only solution that makes sense is to find a motivation for him to perform to your expectations, one way or the other. This seems to work equally well in both locations.
Likewise, my kids get their homework done much faster when I unplug the
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Certainly it'd be fun to game that system.
Exactly. Nothing makes up for incompetent management.
Our current WFH process requires an 8am email every morning to management telling them if we're working or taking vacation or sick time. Why? "For effort planning during these uncertain times." You know, something that we've never had to do before, and which is clearly a "don't let those slackers sleep in" mechanic.
How many of us don't know about scheduled emails?
Luckily my direct management is a bit more functional. We've got a google sheet of the things
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I've worked helpdesk. People know how to game the metrics.
Need to bump up your ticket solve rate? Then that laptop that someone dropped now gets to be a ticket for the screen, a ticket for the case and a ticket for the dent in the keyboard. What was one ticket is now three, and you look a little bit better in the metrics.
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Re:Mediocre bosses (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly.
I had one task yesterday: Write up a whitepaper on some internal research we've been doing.
Expected time to complete it in normal circumstances? Day or maybe two.
Actual time to complete it in my quiet, sunny office with birds chirping outside, some excellent fresh coffee, and a cat snoozing on the chair behind me? Two blissful, uninterrupted hours.
So then I poked at some other things on the far back-burner, put half of those on the daily task log, and my boss was excited about how productive I was.
Could I have been more productive? Yes. But I'm already so much more productive than being at work that there's a real danger in making that the new standard.
I do not want to set the "write a research brief" standard at 2 hrs, because in the office that would be lunacy. We need to understand that these are weird times, and for a lot of us, if we can keep productivity vaguely around what it was, that needs to suffice.
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Surely there are real metrics to measure productivity that are far more important than using spyware.
What you call "metrics" is what TFA is calling "spyware".
IMO, it is only "spyware" if the employees don't know they are being watched.
Otherwise, what you do with your time while your employer is paying you, is the business of your employer.
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IMO, it is only "spyware" if the employees don't know they are being watched.
I disagree with that in the same vein as I disagree with "you have zero expectation of privacy in public". The characteristics of what the software does and how it is used also go into determining if the product is spyware.
For example, does the product on some reasonable interval (e.g. daily, weekly) make an assessment of what has been achieved towards a goal, or does it constantly monitor an employee or create the sense that they could be being monitored at any time, with the goal being to motivate the emp
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The period doesn't determine whether something is or isn't spyware.
It's spyware if you aren't aware and/or aren't in control of the monitoring.
If your employer requires you to have a monitoring app on your PC, it's spyware.
If they're doing the monitoring of what work you turn in on their end, it's not spyware.
It is none of their business what you do on your PC. Only the results are their business.
If they don't like it, they can buy you a work PC. Then it's still spyware, but the scope is limited to work act
Re: Mediocre bosses (Score:1)
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Otherwise, what you do with your time while your employer is paying you, is the business of your employer.
Exactly, and if they don't like it they can kiss my ass. Go ahead and fire me if you don't like my schtick, I'm fine with it. Having skills and money in the bank lets you not care about a lot of shit.
Re:Mediocre bosses (Score:4, Insightful)
Otherwise, what you do with your time while your employer is paying you, is the business of your employer.
this is exploiter mentality. you don't hire people's time or a portion of their life, you hire their skills and ability to get some job done. as long as the job asked for is done to satisfaction, their time isn't the employer's business at all.
it just happens that with jobs that require the employee's presence the employer gets the chance to influence many aspects of his life and behavior, or demand more than was initially agreed, which if the employer has a strong position its merely an opportunity for abuse or even harassment.
that's why these kind of employers mostly only have low skilled employees in weak or compromised positions. any good and competent professional would tell such employers to kiss their ass.
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this is exploiter mentality. you don't hire people's time or a portion of their life
unless they are hourly
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On the plus side, many bosses have just demonstrated they can be replaced with a piece of software.
Re:Mediocre bosses (Score:5, Interesting)
Surely there are real metrics to measure productivity that are far more important than using spyware. If your employee is never connected, if they are missing deadlines, if they're missing calls, if they're slow to answer emails - then it's a pretty safe bet they're slacking.
The second half of your post contradicts the first half, unless you're talking about customer service (or useless management drones who only produce meetings). Measure people's work product, don't measure things you imagine are signs of productivity, measure actual productivity.
It's also worth noting that people who aren't set up to work from home likely aren't going to be very productive if suddenly dropped into that, especially with the kids at home too. Many people simply don't have the room or floorplan for a distraction-free environment at home when everyone else is home too.
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The second half of your post contradicts the first half, unless you're talking about customer service (or useless management drones who only produce meetings). Measure people's work product, don't measure things you imagine are signs of productivity, measure actual productivity.
If I was quick to answer the phone, regularly checked IM or emails I'd never get anything done. In a big company the reality is there's always some dead weight who will email the entire company demanding help with something they could have figured out from 10 minutes reading the documentation.
Instead they send an email to all-employees@company.com and at least half of the recipients spend 10 minutes reading the documentation, pasting in the relevant quotes to an email and sending it. Now you have an amplifi
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Same goes for some junior folks. For 98% of professional staff however, agree these measurements are stupid and I'd be incensed if my productivity was measured via them. A good manager knows that and won
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Oh, you mean like seeing the end results of their work? If a sales guy is bringing me sales, I really don't care what they're doing with their spare time. They could be working for 30 minutes and spending the rest of the day playing games if they're bringing me results.
I've seen some company owners who want people to be working for every moment while they're in the office, even if they're not being productive. It's pure mental illness.
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Indeed, if you can't measure your staffs productivity by the amount of work they've done then are they doing a job that's needed at all?
When we were Engineers... (Score:4, Insightful)
"I plan on doing absolutely nothing today. I will add more than enough value to justify my salary tomorrow. I am salaried, not an hourly piece-work laborer."
Now we do Agile daily interrogations, and that's the lighter form micromanagement that we've signed up for.
How is it going?
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Yes, been there. And the pay is higher on a "per hour" basis. The issue can be companies want the reduced equivalent hourly pay of "salaried", and equal or greater time allocation. And, it seems, they all do. Thereby eliminating the underlying historical meaning of "salaried" entirely. If they can do it, they can do it. It doesn't mean I need to be unaware.
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I'm a freelancing engineer. I bill by the hour, and I do not bill for hours I have not been working. My managers trust me to both meet my objectives and to bill actual hours worked. They do not check on me, and they do not need to.
Finally, someone who gets it.
Same here- I do what I do and it gets done. We're not babies that need to be managed. If they start checking on up me, I'm gone.
Land of the formerly free (Score:2)
Not here, but I don't live in the US.
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I do live in the US, and I've never been required - or even asked - to use surveillance software when I work from home.
Actually, I take that back. A past (and rather bad) boss did require that all of us (whether local or remote) be on chat. And, every once in a while, we'd get these random afternoon texts like "Hi, how are you". It did seem pretty obvious he was checking whether or not we were at our computers. But the guy was apparently clueless enough not to realize we could just as easily answer him from
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> > in the US, and I've never been required - or even asked
> boss did require that all of us (whether local or remote) be on chat.
technically, if you live the US and use employer provided equipment, they can monitor every single thing you do each second without telling you. They were probably just being nice on the chat thing.
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Well they’d have to ask one of us to set it up for them, so - no, it’s not likely.
I would quit (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to work for a company that doesn't trust their employees.
If you have managers who can't trust their employees then you or they have obviously made poor hiring decisions.
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For sure. You have shit managers.
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If you have managers who can't trust their employees then you or they have obviously made poor hiring decisions.
Indeed. Nobody should ever hire a non-trustworthy person. Fortunately, all the trustworthy people have a big "T" tattooed on their forehead, so it is easy to recognize them during interviews.
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Indeed. Nobody should ever hire a non-trustworthy person. Fortunately, all the trustworthy people have a big "T" tattooed on their forehead, so it is easy to recognize them during interviews.
You missed the "/s" for the average sarcasm-impaired slashdot reader.
The problem is you can hire a trustworthy worker one year. Through a series of life events their trustworthiness might change.
Perhaps you stiff them on pay rises year over year while promoting some incompetent blowhard. Perhaps you burn them out regularly expecting 60 hours weeks and always declaring it's 'release week, gotta pull the hours'. Perhaps you just gave them a bad manager and they've had it up to their neck with the micromanagem
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Let me tell you, if anybody is getting hired for anything right now, it's to move toilet paper around an amazon warehouse.
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I don't want to work for a company that doesn't trust their employees.
There isn't a company in the world that implicitly trusts their employees. That's why you have performance reviews and bonus schemes that attempt to drive employees to produce a value added result.
You are nothing more than the output of a cost benefit equation. If you cost more than the benefit you bring you cease being employed at the company. It would be a sign of real poor company management to implicitly trust one of your costs.
Now as to how you measure the benefit, that is up for debate. Key strokes, m
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Trust but verify. You have to. I managed a bunch of people. Some were professionals and I didn't have to watch them at all. Others if I didn't watch them like a hawk they wouldn't do any work. Even after a PIP. There's always an excuse. I tended to watch through the work they did, or didn't do.
Stroll by their desk and I'll see them watching videos, etc.
I'd love it to be able to get something with say a days worth of surveillance in say 10 minute increments. In a minute I can tell if they sat on their ass fo
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Did the software not do that? (Score:1)
What worker in 2020 can just walk away from a task and have a customer wait for weeks?
People will want a service, product, support and that call, request has to be responded to.
Not doing an average of all other workers? Why not?
That should all be part fo the office systems in place in 2020.
Now move that to a home.
Same new and very secure network. Just the office desk is a city ISP and VPN away, not on site.
YOU OK? (Score:5, Funny)
From: Your boss
To: You
Larry are you OK? It says here you only did 10 keystrokes in the last 5 minutes. Skype me.
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From: Me
To: My Boss
Those keystrokes triggered scripts which made Tacacs+ changes on 5000 routers and switches in the network today.
I suppose this makes me a horrible employee for not taking a month to do all the changes manually.
Please. . . . find something useful to do with your time instead of treating your employees like they're five years old or
I'll rate limit your network connection back to 1983 .
Hugs and kisses,
Me
Obligatory XKCD (Score:2)
"Compiling" https://xkcd.com/303/ [xkcd.com]
If they're line workers (Score:2)
BYOD, boss. (Score:2)
A reminder (Score:2)
Always keep your résumé stored safely off-site from your place of business.
I guess now you can add, don't work on your résumé on your spyware laden work system.
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Hey, here's a radical idea: (Score:2)
Bad employees won't produce, and those you fire. Good employees get quality work done on time, and those you keep. Really, it's that fucking simple.
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It's not really that simple, mostly because people are not fungible and have different skill sets. You have someone who is a halfway decent tech but great with people. And someone who is a tech wiz but would prefer to be left alone because people are strange animals to him. Depending on the project you're doing right now, one of them will look worse than the other. Is he worse? Well, not if the next project requires a different skill set. How do you plan to compare their performance?
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In other words, I could replace you with anyone?
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Nope, we daily metrics. Even if those metrics are meaningless. I need to have some way to score my employees and compare them against each other. because I am fucking laying off 20% of them
This is about management making a tough choice next quarter and sleeping at night. It has nothing to do about our actual productivity.
Here's a tip (Score:3, Informative)
...these people are workers in your company, ostensibly with responsibilities and access to stuff.
If they're going to screw you over, they're going to do it in more meaningful ways than spending 5 mins watching a funny cat video on youtube.
Fight the battles that are worth fighting.
You hired these people with at least a modicum of trust.
Perhaps exercise that a little.
PERSONALLY, as a manager I've found that extending trust to people tends to be respected. Sure, there are some bad apples, but treated EVERYONE like potential bad apples will a) not catch the ones that are good at it, ie the dangerous ones, and b) drive off the people who you probably really would prefer to keep.
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If you can't trust them.... (Score:2)
If you honestly think that someone is the kind of person to just take whatever you pay them without offering anything in return if they believe they can get away with it, I'm not sure why you'd have ever hired them in the first place.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Dunno about you, but I'm getting more done (Score:2)
We've always had the ability to work from home, over VPN and/or RDP connections, but for some reason just about always went into the office.
Now that it's been mandated we work from home and our various offices are mostly closed I've found that I've been far more productive. I think this is due to (1) not having to drive to and from the office and (2) not having people appear at my desk asking random questions - especially my own manager who likes to drop a bombshell question and then spend 20 or 30 minutes
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can we get rid of MR PHB that just does meetings (Score:2)
can we get rid of MR PHB that just does meetings and no real work?
Bad Metrics... (Score:1)
Is worse that taking no metrics at all.
If you have no metrics at least you are not likely to make a decision to shoot yourself in the foot based on suspicion.
But if your metrics are bad, they will damn sure say that you must shoot yourself in the foot... or else.
This is how businesses make some of their dumbest decisions, bad metrics.
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If you judge people by a metric, people will stop doing their job and instead do whatever the metric measures. And those that actually do their job will look like they're worse workers, leading to you firing them and eventually losing everyone who is productive and get stuck with peple whose main focus is gaming the system. That's the net effect.
Worst possible time for this crap (Score:2)
Leave it to crappy micro-managers to pick the stupidest possible time for this. First, people not used to working from home, using hastily set up software to access work (where the other end of the VPN might also be hastilu set up and mostly untested) are naturally going to see a dip in productivity. Plus, many are also dealing with their kids suddenly being in 'the office' all day. Next up, because a lot of employers made no plans for this, the employees are using their own equipment at home, so it's quest
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If you want me to install spyware on my machine, your spyware will run in my VM. And the information you get will be the information I want you to have.
Such a setup might work in some environments, but it would certainly fail in our company where half the people spend their spare time at HackTheBox.
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If you want me to install spyware on my machine, your spyware will run in my VM. And the information you get will be the information I want you to have.
Came here to post pretty much the same thing.
Guess who doesn't give a shit? (Score:2)
Q: Guess who doesn't give a shit about being monitored?
A: Me.
If my work gets done on time, that's all I care about and in the end that's all that matters, period. If my manager tries to load me up with extra crap because I'm perceived as "goofing off" or whatever, tough shit. I'll quit and I won't a lose a minute of sleep over it. There are lots of jobs out there and always will be for someone like me. And now they're all remote, lol.
If I cared about what they thought I'd probably rig up some fake activity
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This is my position on it too. Some weeks I did 70 hours of work on the road, others I did 10 hours at home. The amount of work needing to get done doesn't change, but how often things need repaired or installed at industrial sites is pretty steady.
But I'm not working for a company that spys on me.
If you don't trust your employees... (Score:2)
I'm a knowledge worker with a very in-demand skill, but my productivity doesn't follow a 9-5 work day. If you think for a second that I'm going to adhere to your spyware's idea of what I should be doing, you're on crack. I'll leave in a heartbeat and come back as a consultant at 3x what I'm making now.
Bottom line: if you don't trust the people that work for you, maybe you're the fucking problem.
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Learn from Henry Ford (Score:3)
That old socialist...
What Ford did was pay his workers handsomly. Actually, IIRC he doubled their salary with two reasons: First, his workers would be deathly afraid to lose that job, because even if they found another one, it would only pay half the salary. And second, he knew that everyone wanted his products and his workers wanted them too. Eventually he got his money back from his workers who had then yet another reason to produce good products, knowing that one of them will be theirs.
Another net effect was that he didn't need any kind of surveillance and only very few supervisors because people went above and beyond to keep that job. Not only to have a job, they wanted to keep THIS job.
And in the end, it was actually more profitable for him, because not only did he save a lot of money for surveillance staff, he also got a lot of productivity out of the people who WANTED to work for him.
Of course, this only works if not everyone is doing it. But I am pretty sure we can consider this risk negligible.
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This worked because workers at the tim
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"This worked because workers at the time were grossly underpaid."
If the minimum wage had kept up with executive compensation it would be over thirty dollars an hour today in America. Workers are grossly underpaid.
"because industry was controlled by a handful of men who owned most of the businesses"
Corporate consolidation has led to a small number of businesses which are too big to fail. When Ford initiated his policies there were hundreds of auto manufacturers in the US alone.
"Currently, small businesses ac
They can take these apps and shove 'em .... (Score:3)
I've done years of working from home as part of my job doing I.T. support, and I'd never put up with this kind of spyware. The facts sales are skyrocketing right now is just a barometer of how distrusting bosses really are of the concept of telecommuting.
The future has barged in, kicking and screaming, to a lot of these companies who were too set in their ways to consider allowing employees to work from computers in their homes instead of using the same software on computers on their office desks. They were caught off-guard, and many are struggling to come to grips with concepts like putting trust in their workforce to actually get work done without being micro-managed.
If they're seriously going to waste money on programs that warn them about such things as me working on a copy of a resume? Then they shouldn't be surprised to find a greater number of people doing just that, as they try to find better people to work for!
BS (Score:1)
A manager who needs monitoring software? (Score:1)
It won't be useful unless they have a non-remote work calibration to compare it to, anyway. And once given monitoring tools, most PHB would be shocked, shocked I say! to find their employees don't work 100% of the time. Expect some good Dilberts to lose their jobs.
Mediocre Security (Score:3)
Maybe you're not a good manager. (Score:1)
Fear their jobs are on the line (Score:5, Insightful)
Management has been the one area of growth across almost every business in North America, for the past
three decades, especially in the traditional economy. Many companies now have 1/3 the employees, yet
employ record numbers of managers, based on the delusion employees,are incapable of being responsible
and productive without constant and excessive monitoring,discipline and "mentoring".
Micro management went from the occasional exception to the overwhelming constant in far too many
workplaces.
Many mediocre managers believe working from home is a direct attack on their positions, and
career futures. If their report-to's manage to be equally (or even more) productive and responsible working
from home, why should a company pay premium wages for a glorified babysitter/hall monitor/petty dictator?
Spyware is the answer. Users will argue their staff knew about the real-time monitoring, and they stayed right
on top of the situation, with email and phone call records proving the constant nagging and micro managing continued.
Not because of lack of trust (Score:3)