alt Hacker NewsThis strikes me as an attempt to renege on employment agreements to allow WFH. I'd bet it's either to do soft layoffs, or get people back in the office to justify real estate.
She's got annual positive reviews 8 years running, and has been with the company for over a decade.
The question that really cuts to the chase is: Why does it require a photograph of the employee's face every 3 minutes in order to determine if they're completing their work? Why does that make any sense at all? What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all. There's nobody monitoring work loads or task completion? Nobody is checking for accuracy? There are no clients or customers or community members complaining about poor service? How were they able to determine positive reviews for almost a decade before? Why is your management so incompetent, and why is the price of that incompetence your employee's privacy?
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Many traditional managers manage with their gut. They distrust metrics because they don't understand the work being done and because they suspect every worker is doing as little as possible. When workers are onsite, these managers gauge how to rank them largely based on their affect toward the manager. When workers are offsite, managers of this type are frustrated and suspicious and adopt naive monitoring measures as a grasp at control.
unfortunately keyboard and mouse tracking, screen tracking, "what apps are open" etc. are very common for remote work so I can totally see this being looked at in a similar way
It's to confirm the remote employee is behind the computer. It's not always necessary that they be doing work if there's no work at that particular moment for them to do, but in that case they're still being paid for their time and for some reason these companies don't want their employees doing something else, like going to a baseball game. It's basically no different from an onsite working being at their desk even if they have nothing to do.
It's also the logical corporate response to Younger Millenial remote workers bragging about "working" from paradise instead of actually working. As to why management wants it...this is literally something that management has wanted dating back to the rise of civilization. They have power and want to exercise it even if it's not necessary or efficient.
The logical labor response should be to not work for companies that require remote employees to submit to constant visual supervision.
It feels like the Covid lockdown WFH times where managers mandated everyone has their webcams on. Having been in some of these management conversations, it was purely to ensure no one is just chilling on their bed.
Pretty dumb, as at that time not everyone was had a home office set up, and one can work from their bed perfectly fine, especially when someone wants to put their feet up for a bit during a team meeting.
> What exactly is the employee doing that there are no metrics at all
Anything that needs managers to actually go and check.
It's not that they trust the employee to work with zero supervision, it's just that most managers and execs don't want to do any kind of work.
The webcam checks are pure projection.