Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid A woman in Canada failed in her claim for wrongful dismissal due to evidence from software designed to track her work time activity. As a well as losing the case — and failing in her efforts to secure C$5,000 ($3,729) compensation — she was ordered to pay her former employer, remote accounting services business Reach CPA, C$2, …
If activity monitoring systems were required to provide the employee with daily or weekly reports, then the employee would have a chance to make the case that their work effort was being under reported before it became a condition of employment. Any monitoring data should be transparent to both the employee and employer.
If employers believe employees are gaming the system then they need find a better system or go back to more traditional methods.
Time honed methods like shouting and micro managing, or hitting people with sticks...
Failing that, try to hire people that are no air thieves (yeah, difficult). I think as long as we do all the work in reasonable time things are OK. It is up to my boss to clearly communicate if there are deadlines we are not aware of. Otherwise I'll prioritise the deadlines I know of.
Looks rather like she failed to deliver results. Also failed to complete hours trying to deliver results. Got caught and fired, and that would be the end of it if she hadn't tried to take to court despite knowing they had evidence.
Hard to think ifs not a fair outcome.
I dont feel it reflects badly on time tracking: those operating it, didn't use the data until they had their hand forced and were obliged to defend their position in court.
1) if I ever hear of a place which uses this “TimeCamp” then there’s no chance I’ll ever work there.
2) she’s blocked/closed/locked down her LinkedIn and other social media profiles. Can’t say I blame her. Her name is out there now and I can only imagine the “attention” she’s getting now.
While that case of the article does hint her being inefficient, I know others who do the same amount of work in half of the time compared to other coworkers.
In IT efficiency can have a 10:1 or more impact, by being able to script out things which others do manually with more mistakes.
There are even cases where the customer knows that this one only worked for five hours, billed eight hours with a higher rate than someone else, but still pay happily since that someone else would still be double cost due to their "efficiency".
"In IT efficiency can have a 10:1 or more impact, by being able to script out things which others do manually with more mistakes."
Having a long deep think about any action that seem to be a good idea (at the time) before really stuffing up could pay unquantifiable dividends. Group think is a clear and present danger here - just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it is a great idea for your situation. Sometimes restraint is the best policy.
I am certain corporate IT is littered with the expensive corpses of ill considered actions.
This sort of monitoring, and the policies that it reinforces, promotes hasty actions with unforeseen and possibly catastrophic consequences. The purchaser of twitter might have benefited from this advice. :)
In IT efficiency can have a 10:1 or more impact, by being able to script out things which others do manually with more mistakes.
Oh, that is a nice one! Explains why I still work as IT service provider. If I'd enter as a corporate IT employee I'd optimize myself out of the job :D. And, as you know from many El-Reg WhoMe and OnCalls: They only notice your efficiency once you are gone.
Having worked in organisations that monitored how many support calls you answered in a day, I can tell you that such metrics don't tell the full picture. As one person could be stuck on a tricky call for a hour troubleshooting a problem where someone else answers 10 calls in the same period that were all trivial to resolve.
And the person who got stuck on the long call was then punished for not meeting their hourly call answering targets. This resulted in people fobbing off the person on the end of the phone with quick 'fixes' which in know way would ever resolve the problem but would get the person off the phone so they could answer more calls.
A real example of this was when a caller phoning to say they cannot connect to the internet was told to defrag their hard drive and call back when its finished, just so the support person could end the call and let someone else deal with it when they called back, since there were 90+ staff so there was little chance the caller would get the same support agent person again.
I worked in Customer Support for ICL back in the 80's there was a well known progression of technical staff call rate progression, starting at 4-5 calls per-day ramping up quickly to 10-15 (we were a second line outfit) then becoming quite randomised with call rated varying from 1-3 per day up to 25 for the same employee. The reasons were simple and explainable. People initially needed lots of support to answer fairly simple problems, once they had their initial knowledge set embedded they would increase the call rate for common problems. Some people would then sit thee for the rest of their career, working 9-5 and doing a good job. People with more ambition would start to do pre-sales support and out of hour's implementations / upgrades on customer sites,this exposed us to the real world way our systems were being used and would often require incredibly in depth knowledge to understand why something that had worked on one machine . O/S version failed on the upgraded system.
At this stage the 'common' problems were quite frankly boring and we would gravitate towards the 'hard to fix' issues which required more knowledge and more customer contact. We were also used on 'system dead' calls. if there was nothing interesting to look at and no major incidents in play we would support less experienced team members and help them grow their knowledge. Occasionally the call queue would start to get out of control and the experienced team members would blitz it for a couple of days to take the pressure off the team.
Needless to say every time we had a change in management they would focus on call rates for a few months. We would then all focus on call rates until asked to focus on high priority calls again. things would then stabalise for 18 months until there was another change in management.
This time tracking your work nonsense was proposed at a place I worked at by my newly hired boss at the time. After implementation, productivity took a nose dive. When staff evaluations came around, this was a talking point on everyone's evaluation. Once it was all pieced together, it turned out that the lost productivity on our jobs was put into entering in what we did, instead of moving on the next fire...
I got fed up with the workplace monitoring by my former employer and quit. They believed the AI was always right and when I proved the AI was wrong (on many ocassions) I was accused of being overly sensitive.
The supervisors couldn't do the type of work we did, but they thought they were experts because they knew how use google and youtube.
Needless to say the high staff turnover rate continues.
> In Project Land, people who always deliver on time or early with no fuss rarely get noticed.
I'm lucky, I DO get noticed for project planning that includes buffer for unforseen and for running projects without causing too much friction. Just had one project last year where Intel 10/1 GBit Fibre LAN cards showed the bug behaviour of not being able to connect 1 GBit SFP modules on the switch, even though other servers with (nearly) the same cards and other switches can, including swapping the SFP modules around, and including all manuals and documentations stating that this card switches back to 1 GBit automatically with the SFP modules used. Until we actually KNEW what the problem was we simply had no connection, no link light. The project planning work "man days" was from me, and after it was solved we were still WITHIN my planning regarding billable hours to the customer.
Other projects were finished a lot faster.
Since I am not the only one doing projects with those customers, like I said, it does get noticed.
(Addendum: Four 10 GBit links, always two combined as fail-over with an addition copper 1 GBit fallback (yes, on Windows Server), and two of the four fibre links showed that bug behaviour.)
Monitoring nonsense pervades all jobs.
Many moons ago, still drooling over the newfangled work vehicle tracking (you've been caught parked up at Greggs taking an unscheduled Steak Bake Break!)
next up - power tools were fitted with telemetry for monitoring productivity.
No vibration recorded = probably skiving. Naturally, the tools were soon heaved into the flat bed and left ticking over, whenever the call of the pastie proved irresistable to the hard-pressed, surveilled workies.
No problem, the software was tweaked to distinguish between idle tickover and fluctuating revs... tut-tut, naughty workie.
The point of the monitoring matter, is that the company was paying a new department and staffers, in order to monitor a handful of understaffed workies. They could have invested in more, skilled labourers and increased productivity (and morale)- but that is not the modern way.
Their reliance on all things IT and monitoring, also ran into a travelling salesman problem, after introdicing JIT logistics software; whereby job allocations were automatically awarded on a first-team-available basis. This resultied in squads spending more time passing one another acrross country, to jobs within 5 minutes of where the other squad had just been - farcical, but it is the new normal.
Manglement continued to insist their new productivity monitoring and logistics was working beautifully, right up until liquidation.
The point? Evangelical productivity monitoring, is mostly bullshit job creation - in out the rain and no heavy lifting. It's a brave new world and you are all welcome to it.
Way, way back l used to work for MDS (Mohawk Data Sciences - RIP) and one weekly overtime task was moving "Stroke Counters" around the tens of data entry machines used by OHIP and Ontario Hydro.
This might seem like a minor matter given that so many people live on smartphones during the working hours these days, but union/government contracts specified equipment details and they specifically excluded production measurement.
--> Analysis of the TimeCamp data showed she had made a timesheet entry for a file she had not worked on,
This line in the article makes it simple to me. You don't need AI to detect this, and it is black and white (presuming its verifiably true). She got caught because she was dumb.
Also, accountants historically bill by the hour... efficience doesn't enter into it directly. They aren't paid to have ideas per se, or to do work, they are paid by the hour.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
