Work intrudes further into the home with monitoring software

Question: I just found out that the company I work for uses software to track when I'm at my computer and whether or not I'm doing work from home. The program attempts to report when I log on in the morning and off in the evening and on my weekly average hours (although I've noticed it's inaccurate).

Putting aside the moral issues (I stumbled across this and don't think anyone was going to tell me or my colleagues about it), what's really the point? If I was spending all my time taking the dog for a walk and playing video games (or whatever they're worried about) they could tell without any software because my work would suffer.

Answer: The ethical side of this is really concerning. So is what we might call the cultural side of it – what such an initiative says about how higher ups in your organisation regard everyone else. (As Associate Professor Sarah Kaine wrote in a Work Therapy column earlier this year "surveillance is very damaging – it denotes a lack of trust and by implication questions the integrity of all employees as it assumes everyone is trying to ‘game' the system in some way".)

But I'm glad you've brought up the element of basic logic. My guess is that even if a proponent of such a system could prove it's ethically acceptable and culturally innocuous, they'd struggle to answer your question: what's the point?

The thing I can't get past is why do your bosses need to know how long you spend on your computer (or even within a particular application on your computer) every day?

If it's because they want to get an idea of how long it takes different employees to complete different tasks or projects, it seems odd that it's only being implemented now when everyone's at home. Wouldn't that information be just as useful when people are working in the office? And even if it's just a coincidence, wouldn't any disparity – Team Member X spends an average of five hours on Task A but Team Member Y spends on average 15 hours – demonstrate a potential problem that would be already blatantly obvious to any manager worth his or her salt?

This brings me to what I really think is happening here. Systems like this aren't used to complement output or productivity measurements – they are the measurements.

As we in the western hemisphere have moved away from making stuff, we've been left with fewer and fewer jobs where the position description says "Each day, make a certain number of things in a certain amount of time".

While it's true that output isn't as easy to quantify as it might once have been, it's not impossible. Organisations are still producing stuff, even if that stuff takes the form of a service, or isn't tangible like a shoe or a car (employee monitoring software, for example). Employees contribute to that production and, as has been the case for hundreds of years, one essential part of a manager's job is to understand the nature of individual contributions.

Now, some managers aren't as insightful or experienced or thorough as others; some might cling to pretty crude or sloppy measurement methods to make up for a lack of familiarity with what really constitutes "good work". But "hours spent at your desk" goes beyond crude, past blunt and ventures outside the borders of primitive. If a company has resorted to tracking their employees' every digital movement it's not hard to infer that they believe their managers are totally bereft when it comes to understanding what their charges do and how well they do it.

I doubt this is the case. I doubt your company employs an entire tier of wildly incompetent people who genuinely can't tell the difference between good-quality work and played-Call-of-Duty-for-seven-hours-before-whipping-up-something-in-fifteen-minutes work. So how does the tracking help anyone at your firm?

You asked "What's really the point?"

I don't know. And I wonder whether those at your company responsible for the monitoring system, if they were being totally honest, might give you the same answer.

Suspect you're being surreptitiously surveilled by your corporate overlords? Or just think your office coffee is a bit rubbish? Send your question to Work Therapy: jonathan@theinkbureau.com