One of the consequences of the pandemic is the accelerated spread of work tracking systems. Investments in this area have grown eightfold in five years. Such software captures the movement of the mouse or the presence of an employee at the workplace. Supporters of this trend say that it improves overall performance. Its opponents talk about stress, health problems and a formal approach to work associated with it.
Mouse tracking
With the spread of technology, the desire of employers to use them for comprehensive control over employees is growing – do they take breaks too often, do they do extraneous things during working hours, do they work fast enough.
One of the most famous examples is the online retailer Amazon. A few years ago, they introduced a digital system that tracks how quickly workers put goods on shelves, fulfill orders, how much goods they loaded into trucks per shift, etc.
In case of insufficient performance, the system issues a warning, and as a result, the employee may be fired because of this.
According to The Verge, in the year from August 2017 to September 2018 alone, the corporation fired several hundred employees on these grounds. Amazon workers have been actively organizing unions in recent years, citing strict productivity standards and constant monitoring in the workplace as reasons for this. And it helped – Amazon recently significantly relaxed the rules: for example, now it only records downtime longer than 15 minutes.
Similar tracking methods are used by many other companies, such as the Kroger supermarket chain or the UPS delivery service. There are also various tracking systems for office workers. It is often referred to as bossware (by analogy with malware – malware).
These are, for example, systems that record mouse movements, use of the keyboard, take a screenshot of the screen once in a certain period, etc.
In some cases, the work activity of employees is reflected on a special scoreboard where you can compare the performance of colleagues with each other.
One such system is based on the fact that all working time is divided into 10-minute intervals. In each of them – at a random moment – the cameras film the worker and his screen to capture what he is doing.
A survey conducted last year by Digital.com of 1,250 US employers shows that 60% of them use tracking systems. Employers who use such systems include JP Morgan Bank, UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest US insurance companies, and the New York City Public Transportation Authority.
Although this area has developed before, its growth was especially active during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many companies switched to work from home and management wanted to maintain control over employees. “The rise of monitoring systems is one of the untold stories of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Andrew Pakes, deputy general secretary of British union Prospect.
This area attracts quite significant investments. According to venture capitalist Jason Corsello, performance management is one of the fastest growing areas, with investment growing eightfold over the past five years. According to some reports, the size of the market for such software this year will reach $53.4 billion.
From Tracking to Stress
Many employees in companies, from warehouse workers and nurses to highly paid lawyers and architects, perceive tracking systems very negatively. The New York Times, which decided to look into this issue, received hundreds of letters in which people said that such monitoring is demoralizing, humiliating, toxic and ruthless, and they themselves are no longer in control of their lives.
Some say that they cannot even go to the toilet without fear that at this time the system will mark their inactivity.
Workers in response to such surveillance unite in trade unions. Another response was the creation of systems to bypass such surveillance, such as software that simulates activity on a computer.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the world’s leading digital privacy and civil liberties organizations, has been a vocal critic of bossware. She also advises workers and authorities on how to combat such software.
The Center for Democracy and Technology released a report last year on the negative impact of bossware on workers’ health. According to its authors, this is due to the fact that such systems do not allow to take breaks in work, which are necessary for the normal functioning of the body, make people work at an excessive speed and increase stress at work.
According to University of North Carolina law professor Ifeoma Ajunwa, workers don’t have much opportunity to fight bossware in the courts because most US labor laws were written decades before such systems were introduced. Therefore, in many states, employers have “carte blanche to introduce these employee surveillance technologies.”
Productivity growth or a formal approach?
Employee dissatisfaction and stress is not the only problem with tracking systems. In most cases, they simply cannot adequately assess performance. The NYT mentions the story of Carol Kremer, who worked as a top manager at ESW, a financial company that was deeply committed to the idea of tracking.
The pay was based on active time at the computer, which, however, did not take into account the time in which Ms. Kremer was negotiating with partners, giving tasks to subordinates, helping them with their work, or simply reflecting on a particularly difficult work task. Ms. Kremer says that sometimes she did some rather meaningless things on the computer to increase her productive time.
As a result, she quit ESW, sued her, as well as the company Crossover, which commissioned ESW to implement tracking systems in it. As a result, the case ended by agreement of the parties – Ms. Kremer received compensation from the companies, the amount of which is forbidden to be disclosed.
Employees of many companies talk about a similar problem. For example, the time that a doctor or social worker spends communicating with patients or caregivers may not be considered productive, because there is no activity on the computer at that moment. And the requirement for fast customer service at the supermarket checkout does not take into account, for example, older customers who may not keep up with the pace of the cashier.
“We live in an age of measurement, but we don’t know what we need to measure,” said Ryan Fuller, former Microsoft vice president of workplace technology.
Critics of the systems say that sometimes thinking about a task, an optional conversation with colleagues or a coffee break is much more important for real productivity than constantly moving the mouse and other meaningless actions at the computer.
However, bossware also has defenders. “If we’re going to stop bringing people back to the office, we shouldn’t give up on productivity monitoring,” said Paul Wartenberg, vice president of Meriplex, a company that specializes in productivity tracking systems, among other things. Developers and buyers of such software say that it allows you to understand who works well – and reward him, who is idle – and fire him or lower his salary. Some say that such systems are completely transforming the way people work, and in a positive way.
According to Federico Mazzoli, co-founder of WorkSmart, the developer of one of these tracking systems, installing such systems significantly increases productivity. Including due to the fact that the workers themselves are beginning to pay more attention to how they spend their working day. “When you see these indicators, these analytics, something changes: you understand how much time you spend doing nothing, or constantly switching between tasks, or not completing things,” says Mr. Mazzoli.
True, after several years of work at WorkSmart, he left the company. Mr. Mazzoli acknowledged that such a system is powerful but dangerous and that it can be considered productive as just pointless mouse movement all day.