UK mulls making employers ask before installing bossware The UK government is considering forcing employers in Great Britain to consult workers before rolling out "bossware," opening the door to new rules covering everything from AI-powered productivity scoring to keystroke logging and biometric surveillance. The Department for Business and Trade wants to know whether the rules …
Surveillance of this nature (probably all surveillance actually) is never for benefit of the surveilled since it pre-supposes they will do something wrong and need to be observed doing it. Naturally, not wanting to be observed means one MUST be doing something wrong. God forbid I be given engaging work and be trusted to do it.
In my experience managers just believe themselves to be brilliant rather than the team telling them they are. They excel in annual review management bullshit talk where they can make ordering some notepads sound like they kept the company running. Don’t get me wrong, I have worked for some brilliant managers, I’ve just had the misfortune of working with way more arseholes who think they’re great.
I’ve worked for a few good managers and one truly inspirational leader (who became disillusioned with all the shit managers and went off to do something else), but the vast majority of managers - 90% - are shit charlatan cowboy bullshitters.
I became a manager through blind ambition and when I got there I realised I didn’t like it and was shit at it so I quit and went back to playing with tech. I really wish they all had that same introspection. Shit managers cause stress and toxicity.
Unfortunately though, there aren’t enough good managers.
A manager can be good and not omnipotent. If they don't know that some staff are bad, they're probably not managing well, but they can know and not have the power to fix it. If that happens, it can be hard to tell the difference from the point of view of a single team member.
Let's assume manager Alice knows team member Bob is not doing good work. She's unlikely to come to the rest of the team and insult Bob so everyone knows she knows. That's unprofessional and ruins any possibility of improving Bob's work. Maybe she tries assigning Bob to a different kind of work, which others can see as giving him a better project or a chance at a promotion when in fact she's trying to move him away from things where he can cause the most damage. Maybe she asks someone else to work with Bob on something, which was intended to have Bob learn from someone better, but to the person nominated it seems like they're stuck with a liability that will hurt their performance. Unless it's bad enough that Bob can simply be fired, which it often isn't and is not the simplest thing to do, it isn't immediately obvious whether the manager knows or not.
Shouldn't know if some of your staff are taking the piss, based on their job performance? If you have to install spyware to make sure they aren't away from their keyboard too much to be able to tell if they are underperforming then BY DEFINITION you are not a "brilliant" manager.
The only thing such spyware might detect that a brilliant manager could possibly miss is a brilliant employee slacking off to the performance level of an average employee. However if you pay a brilliant employee capable of doing 2x the work of everyone else on the team the same as the rest (or a token 5% higher salary) then I don't blame them for slacking. I would too in their situation. A "brilliant" manager would move heaven and earth to insure such an employee was properly compensated to insure they performed at the level they were capable.
If you are monitoring whether your staff are "away from their keyboard too much" then you are measuring the wrong things anyway, unless they are working in a call centre or similar role where availability is key.
Brilliant managers should care about outcomes. Results. Meeting targets. Deliverables.
Measuring how much time someone is at their keyboard is as stupid as measuring lines of code produced (rather than whether the code does what its supposed to do).
All very true but given the rise of people talking about how many side gigs they are running, the demands to work from home, the social media posts about taking time on the beach, the requests for 'personal time', the UK's productivity being at an all time low and you can see why companies do this. The assumption increasingly seems to be that the worker is paid and the company is lucky to get the benefit of that pay in a timely or productive manner.
As for consulting with the unions, they are out for one thing, more power for themselves, they do not need to be given even more power, we are already moving into the 70's at pace, those heady days of hard work, a booming economy, low taxes, efficient public services and great manufacturing output. Oh wait, that's the opposite of what happened, silly me.
"As for consulting with the unions, they are out for one thing, more power for themselves[...]"
Pre-note: UK union discussed in this comment, not whatever the US beasts are.
I work for quite a large company, the managers and especially the head office do not remotely care about what their own rules are. They will ignore process, tell you outright lies, or the opposite of what the rule is, and when pressed they will admit a rule that protects you exists but not disclose the bits that actually apply to you and might help you in whatever situation you're in. Our union is there so we have an impartial person to turn to and ask what is actually meant to happen. This also applies to the managers themselves, if they're in the union too. Half the staff don't even know there are rules governing what they're being told, because they blindly accept what their boss is telling them. Since barely any of it is ever written down - except where management want to cover their arses - you have no recourse later on if you find out things should have gone differently.
This bossware/spyware exists only to collect data which will be used to screw the lackeys and push ever-higher targets. Coupled with the situation detailed before, it's a recipe for constant surveillance and pressure. While I agree that there can be quite a lot of power thirst on the campaigning or political sides of union organising, without them us small fry would have no recourse from leagues of bullshit and "push the blame down" management that exists at a lot of companies.
Interesting set of downvotes from whose with no idea of the circumstances. Briefly, they were:
Union called us out for one day in support of a pay claim.
Afterwards we learned it wasn't even our claim, it was another union's.
Our union was always complicit in maintaining our pay rates less than the others'.
Most members in our organisation then resigned with one issuing a challenge to print his resignation letter in their magazine. They chickened out by claiming they didn't print letters from non-members.
We were small-fry in a group of unions, exploited for our subscriptions and, in this case, withdrawal of labour.
All very true but given the rise of people talking about how many side gigs they are running...
Maybe if most peoples wages had risen in line with anything nearing inflation, rather than a few wealthy people becoming seemingly more wealthy at the expense of the masses then people wouldn't feel the need to do 'side gigs'.
Also, there is also the opposite, the rise of the VC... where companies are bought, then round after round of redundancies make the company more 'efficient' so it can be sold for a profit. (Ideally before burnout takes out the remaining competent people and you find your business knowledge walked out the door two rounds ago).
This is the situation I find myself in, my company is reducing headcount again. Of the two people on my project at risk neither of them could do both the jobs as they're both run off their feet. Yet one will probably be expected to in a few months. Yay!
UK productivity is not at an all time low. It is at roughly an all time high. Output per hour in Q1 2026 was 3.5% above the 2019 average. What collapsed is the growth rate. Historically productivity grew around 2% a year, and it has risen far more slowly since 2008/09. GDP per hour has grown 0.6% a year since 2010, against 1% in France, Germany and the US.
UK business investment runs at 11.1% of GDP against Japan's 18.2%, France's 12.7% and Germany's 12%, and the capital gap against peer economies is 38%, rising to 47% in manufacturing. British workers have 38 per cent fewer tools at their disposal than their counterparts abroad. That is the productivity puzzle. Employers declined to buy machinery for thirty years, and are now buying keystroke loggers instead. A webcam is cheaper than a lathe, and it lets you blame the operator.
On side gigs, you have the causation backwards. A record 1.35 million people hold second jobs, up 121,000 or 10% in a year, and the Work Foundation treats second jobs as an indicator of financial insecurity, with one in six workers struggling to pay bills each month. Average weekly earnings sit £278 below their pre-financial-crisis path. People are not moonlighting for the thrill. They are covering the shortfall left by the employer.
On the unions and the 1970s. Private sector union density is 12.1%, up from a record low of 11.7%, having almost halved from 21.4% in 1995. Membership peaked in 1979 at 13.2 million. We are as far from the 1970s as the series can measure. Whatever is wrong with this country, Arthur Scargill is not doing it.
Then the part that matters. None of it is an argument. Suppose every word of your case was true and the British worker was idle, entitled and permanently on a beach. Installing spyware on their devices is still the conduct the Home Office lists as domestic abuse. Bad workers do not create a right to abuse them. They create a right to dismiss them, which employers already have, and use.
Correct, and that is the point.
"Personally connected" is a jurisdictional test. It says who Parliament could reach. It says nothing about whether the conduct stops being harmful once the person doing it signs your payslip.
You have identified a gap in the law and mistaken it for a justification.
> The assumption increasingly seems to be that the worker is paid and the company is lucky to get the benefit of that pay in a timely or productive manner.
Spot on.
If the company's pay is taking the piss, they can expect the piss to get taken.
If they need to monitor workers to ensure that the bare minimum gets done, well, take a guess what's going to happen.
Well, we could argue that CCTV is for the benefit of most: either dissuading criminals, or capturing evidence if they er - do criminal. Worker surveillance is there to detect the minority who steal/don't work etc. Sadly, we know some workers will fall into that group, so everyone gets watched. I think employers trust most of their staff, but can't afford to be blind to reality.
I've known cameras being installed where it was known there was theft. There weren't many such occasions over the years I'd have known about it. One outstanding example caught at least one till operator surreptitiously rolling up notes and hiding them (memory says there was more than one member of staff involved). The business owner must have been extremely incompetent. He wasn't aware he had a problem until the bank rang him up about the state of his account. Hadn't seen receipts didn't match sales, hadn't seen bank account going into the red.
But those were ad hoc installations within a police investigation.
Counting keystrokes is like judging a writer by how often they lift their pen. Debugging code or planning architecture often looks 'idle,' leading clueless managers to assume nobody is working just because they're apparently doing nothing but staring at a screen.
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Which is how a previous production manager viewed how people using the computers.
Far as he was concerned all the time I sat at my desk staring at the PC was time wasted I should be out on the shop floor doing stuff., the fact I was looking at CAD pictures while scribbling stuff on my scratch pad* was time being lost, although I was really trying to plan out fixturing and tools needed for a job. let alone stuffing the CAD model into the CAM and trying to come up with something suitable for ye olde robots to understand.
But hey ho... lets all go the m$ way and sack the lowest 5% of typists....
*no one touches my scratch pad... has important drawings on it of custom tools, fixtures, work sequence numbers , happy faces, sad faces, cats and nuclear explosions wiping out desert islands....
They're the company's machines. They can put on there what they want. They can choose Windows or Mac or Linux or even OpenBSD if they want. They're paying for it, they're supporting it, they get to choose. Tis not your machine, you don't to choose.
Don't like it ? Don't do stuff on the WORK computer that you don't want them knowing about. Or don't work there. Or just put on your big person pants, suck it up, grow up, and get on with your life
Oooo, this is going to get the downvotes. Any bets on how quickly they get into double figures.
Nope, didn't misread "TFA" as you so eloquently put it. I could've rephrased the OS installation bit a bit better, but it was meant as an example of the fact that they can install anything they want on the machines that they supply. Could've just as easy said Word or LibraOffice or monitoring software or spyware or any other piece of software under the sun
It's still their machine, their software, their choice.
> Nope, didn't misread "TFA"
Your previous post>> Don't do stuff on the WORK computer that you don't want them knowing about
There was nothing in this article about doing anything (presumably you mean non-work related) "that you don't want them knowing about".
You just shoved that in as a perfect piece of claptrap.
Not quite: There are laws that limit what an employer can do.
Sure, it doesn't stop them from breaking the law, but if/when they get caught, they get held to account and have to remove the offending software. Fail to do so and that's risking contempt of court - and while the punishment for breaking the law is often little more than a slapped wrist, contempt is serious. Courts don't mess around there.
It also means that they have to be careful with how they use that information: There's fines, law suites and reputational harm to consider. Won't stop them from breaking the law anyway, and try to deflect or excuse it, but if it's there in the law in black and white: Makes it much harder to pretend it was a mistake, and that increases the risk to their reputation as well as the severity of fine and compensation demands. Also means the workers become more aware of their rights and are more likely to demand those rights are respected.
Its the companies laptop so they can live-stream your facial expressions to an AI to gauge interest in your work if they want. Did you just scowl when your boss pinged you on teams? Did you roll your eyes during the company all-hands? Oh wait, why are you getting up from your desk a second time in a 60 minute window? Your keystrokes are lower than the average for your cohort for the 3rd time this month. You have picked up your personal phone again.
Its the companies building, so installing CCTV in every toilet cubicle is fine.
Etc etc
When I started work, there was a lady with a trolley who came round at about 11 every day. She provided a cup of tea and a biscuit, and even sold a few chocolate bars. The management of those days found out that we were more productive if they fed our "personal lives" with a few treats.
Using company computers for personal stuff (like arranging with your other half who worked in a different company who was going to pick up little Johnny from school today) was equally beneficial to improved staff productivity.
You have two choices, both relatively easy in your example:
1. Use the work computer for that, because do you really care if, for example, that gets brought in a legal case which demands all messages sent from the work machine as potential evidence? Probably not. Something you feel more private about should be done on a different machine.
2. Use a personal device, which is a bit easier now that phones, tablets, and laptops are small and light and can connect from many places.
Keeping personal business off work machines isn't to protect the company. They don't care if your privacy is weakened, and by giving you a few warnings, they mostly remove their legal responsibilities*. It's to protect you. You can ignore that recommendation at your own risk.
* A lot of privacy legislation concerns data that was intentionally collected, and that gives lawyers a lot of ways to argue that voluntary personal use doesn't count. You technically can try anyway, but using legislation that doesn't explicitly cover it and that doesn't even get enforced when it obviously applies. If you want to set legal precedent and you have a lot of time and money to throw at it, go ahead. If you want your data to be private in this case, avoiding the problem is easier.
Use a personal device
Which for some people, is not an option as they aren't allowed them in the workplace. Yes, they can take a break, go outside the security zone, get their phone from the locker, and wait while it boots up to see if there's any messages/to send a message.
Or, as is accepted where I work, you can use the company provided telephony for limited personal calls - as long as you don't take the piss.
That just changes the ease of the options. They're still both options, and it's still only you that faces the consequences. There are very few employers* who will object to you using their equipment for personal uses, whether minor or extremely private. It just isn't the best idea for you, since they will have access to anything you do with that and you won't have access if they feel like removing it for any reason, so for things more sensitive than the minor ones from the post I originally replied to, it is advisable to separate them.
* In particularly secure environments, they will object to that or actively prevent it, for example with airgapped or heavily firewalled machines. Sometimes, they're not that secure and you either get to have a personal device with you or at least nearby, but in particularly secure ones, not even that. Hopefully they thought of that and gave you some other option. The strictest of isolation environments are less fun ones to work in, but usually there's a reason why it's like that if you end up having to.
"It could also mean that rolling out the latest AI-powered workforce optimization suite could become as much an HR exercise as an IT one. "
Anything that gets an extra pair of eyes on this aspect is a good thing.
In fact, it suggests that the whole debate needs turning around. it's not the workforce that needs to be surveilled, it's manglement.
The Department for Business and Slave Trade consults on whether abuse should require a covering letter
The Home Office already publishes a list of behaviours amounting to controlling or coercive behaviour. It includes controlling or monitoring the victim's daily activities and behaviour, for example making them account for their time, and the domestic abuse statutory guidance names use of spyware or GPS locators on items such as phones and computers. Do that to your wife and it is an offence carrying a maximum of five years. Do it to four hundred contact centre staff and it is a productivity investment, and DBT will run a twelve week consultation on whether you ought to mention it first.
The consultation is written as though the evidence is still open. It is settled. Ravid et al. meta-analysed 94 independent samples covering 23,461 people and found no evidence that monitoring improves performance, while increased stress showed up regardless of how the monitoring was done. Siegel et al. pooled 70 samples and found job satisfaction down and stress up, with performance targets and feedback making it worse. Measurable harm, absent benefit, and the department still types "productivity, investment and economic growth" into the opening paragraphs.
So the actual question on the table is whether the employer must circulate a memo before installing the spyware. Lawfulness never comes up. We are consulting on the leaflet.
DBT has concluded that the line between abuse and management is the size of the org chart. There are countries where the state's job is helping employers watch people at their desks. The people who drafted this would be happier in one of them. Sack them.
Yes, because - and I understand this may be hard for you to grasp - your employees are not your wife. It's a completely different relationship and the fact you are trying to equate them proves just how weak your position is if you must prop it up with that kind of nonsense.
Abuse does not stop being abuse when you swap husband for employer and wife for employee.
"Completely different relationship" sounds like an argument until you look at what the offence actually requires. Section 76 asks whether the parties are "personally connected". Married, civil partners, relatives, living together, or previously in an intimate relationship. That is a category, and it is the whole test. The law never asks whether the pair are close, whether there is affection left, or whether anything remains beyond a shared address and a mortgage. A marriage that died a decade ago qualifies. Since the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 removed the cohabitation requirement, ex-partners who no longer live together qualify too.
By the time the offence is engaged, the relationship is invariably hostile, transactional and lopsided in power. Which is to say it looks a great deal like the one you are insisting is completely different.
There is a difference, and an important one, but not a simply quantifiable one. For example, taping your family's personal phone calls is abuse, taping your employees' personal phone calls would be abuse, but taping your customer service calls is not, even if the person hired to do customer service would prefer you didn't. The requirement to doing this fairly is figuring out how to allow valid monitoring, and your approach, where everything is defined as abusive and unacceptable is harmful because it will be rejected as obvious nonsense and lose you the opportunity to prevent the things that are real problems.
You say the difference is real but not quantifiable. It is quantifiable, and you named the variable yourself without noticing. Purpose.
Emergency calls and FCA-regulated order calls are recorded because a regulator requires it, or because a life may depend on what was said. Those recordings evidence the transaction. They are not fed into KPIs, and the operator is not scored on them.
Ordinary customer service recording has no such purpose. It exists to assess the person on the headset. That is the equivalent of taping your wife to review her performance in the relationship, and calling it quality assurance because you wrote a policy first.
So I am not defining everything as abuse. I am giving you the line you said could not be drawn. What is the recording for, and who is it held against. Evidence, held against the firm, is legitimate. Continuous measurement, held against the worker, is not.
Your warning about overreach applies better to your own post. You have taken the two categories that pass the test and used them to argue that no line can be drawn at all.
Funnily enough, the purpose thing is ridiculously obvious to me and ... well everybody. That doesn't make it quantifiable, and you will note I said it wasn't "simply quantifiable". You conclude that I claim no line can be drawn in a post where I clearly draw a line and say it's difficult to decide where other things fall in relation to it, so I don't think you were really reading it.
The important part to trying to decide whether things are acceptable is indeed purpose, but you've yet again used an absolute which gets most of it wrong. Employees should be judged on their job performance, hopefully not on meaningless indicators. In the case of customer service, recordings are ways to achieve that, so if someone lies to or shouts at a customer, you can know that, prove that, and take action based on what actually happened instead of an unverified customer complaint later on. I could argue that's for the benefit of the customer, or indeed the worker if the recording gets used as evidence that a complaint is unfounded, but it's also for assessing the worker including possible negative consequences. I think you'll find a lot of people don't have problems with that kind of assessment, because it's directly related to work performance and quality.
That makes the test much more complicated than "if you use it against workers, it's bad". You have to ask questions like "is it a reasonable way to measure contracted work performance", "is there a less invasive way that data of equal or higher quality could be realistically obtained", and "does it unreasonably affect the worker to the extent that it must be forbidden", and you need to consider all three. The first two are something that would require a lot of review but probably many people would agree on. The third is pure opinion. That's why it's hard. Your simplistic version is much easier to argue and much easier to poke massive holes in.
People will act in the way that monitoring measures, whether that is what the job requires or not, for fear of being judged inadequate by the monitoring and punished. So if I know that there's a window that measures how many five-minute periods I've been active in, then I'll do something to make sure that I was typing in as many of those windows as possible, even if it means I'm distracted from the non-typing work I was supposed to be doing. Some might use automatic tools. Others could just set up a timer and remember to type and delete some characters when it goes off. Either way, what you're getting isn't productivity improvement.
Other types of monitoring won't give you this method of gaming them but will also have productivity problems. If you have me under constant camera surveillance being monitored by some performance-monitoring AI, there's little I can do to look more productive unless I know how the AI works. If it was me personally, I'd try to find out what AI and research what it says it measures, but not everyone will choose to or be able to do that, so let's consider the other case. It would increase my anxiety about what it's going to do, who might be watching, and what things I might be unintentionally doing that could count against me. Being distracted by worrying about this system won't help with productivity, nor will consciously thinking about all the things I've done unconsciously either because they helped or because they're what I'm comfortable with.
Before I get to the reasons that monitoring is dangerous, there is an important caveat that needs to be made. If you were a top-10-percent employee - one of the best, most innovative and most creative workers in your company... and then your company declared that it was introducing intrusive surveillance on all employees, would you elect to remain... or would you decide that you can get just as well paid for a competitor than didn't have such a draconian worldview? You need to bear in mind that this question isn't an isolated decision for managers and business owners, it is a decision they are free to make but which comes with significant consequences attached. Front of the list of those consequences is that their most talented and capable workers - those most likely to get a good or better job elsewhere - are going to be first out the door when your company introduces authoritarian monitoring controls. Don't think this is an unencumbered decision - it isn't.
OK, with that said, "How does monitoring affect autonomy?"
1. Innovation and Creativity are Chilled - because the foundation for that comes through collaboration... and whether you intend it or not, whether you like it or not, excessively monitoring tends to "close people down" rather than "open them up".
2. Staff Turnover Increases - because people really don't like working in a surveillance state... and when an opportunity arises that means they can work somewhere that doesn't treat them like a "prisoner" in the Standford Prison Experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
or a surveilled occupant of a Panopticon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
they will leave.
3. Cross-Team Motivation and Encouragement is Suppressed...
Do you watch team sports? Do you notice how the team motivate each other? Play off each other? Because surveillance has a chilling effect on communication - because nobody wants to write or say something that "comes back to bite them"... there is a powerful inverse correlation between monitoring and motivation. Which directly impacts staff morale.
4. Corporate Cynicism
Oscar Wilde, the Irish writer, coined the phrase, "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." (from the play, "Lady Windermere's Fan"). This translates directly to an organization that employs excessive monitoring: the company becomes the cynic by reducing everything to the "cost of productivity", without consideration of the intangibles associated with it. For example, which would you rather have: employees who sing your praises about the open, collaborative and highly motivated team in which they work; or employees who quietly admit that their employer is some kind of authoritarian wannabe on a power trip? Don't think employees talk about managers behind their backs? Or companies? In that case, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you...
5. Transactional Analysis
If you've spent enough time working, chances are that someone has introduced you to "Transactional Analysis" and the concept of interactions using the Adult-Adult or Parent-Child paradigms.
See e.g. here:-
https://gp-training.hee.nhs.uk/bedford/wp-content/uploads/sites/72/2021/08/transactional_analysis.pdf
The moment you start monitoring your employees using e.g. "bossware", your company is stepping directly in to the role of "Critical Parent". And what is the natural reaction from employees or subordinates when that happens? Answer: they will gravitate towards the "Petulant Child" state.
Put another way, there are *many* deeply researched and robustly documented psychological research papers and experiments which show that the act of close surveillance - the claimed authority and the implicit lack of trust it shows - can do more harm to the productive members of a workforce than it can do good for the unproductive members.
Now, there may be people reading this discussion thread - business owners - who think, "Actually, I don't care about that, because I *want* my middle managers to take a tougher line with my lazy employees! In the short term, that might actually result in productivity gains... But then, as the psychological shift seen in the Stanford Prison Experiment kicks in and managers start to see their subordinates as "prisoners", while they remain "the guards", something else happens. Somewhere, someone in the company is going to abuse their authority. If the employer is lucky, the abused employee will simply quit. If they are *unlucky*, the employee being abused gathers evidence of the abuse and the first you'll hear about it will be when your company name makes the front page - for all the wrong reasons.
Does this mean you can't deploy bossware? Of course not, not if it's your company.
But as Princess Leah rightly pointed out in "Star Wars" : "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers..."
If you want to lose your "stars", go right ahead.
There's a further factor. These systems measure inputs. They may even be measuring the wrong inputs - physical activity rather than mental activity. Measuring inputs is no substitute for measuring outputs. It might be easier to do - making good measurements isn't necessarily easy. Who would do the wrong thing because it's easier? Someone who is either too lazy to put the effort into the right thing or somebody who's too incompetent to know any better (the two are not mutually exclusive).
At the very least, if you feel you have to measure inputs, first make sure you understand the process by which inputs lead to outputs and measure the right ones.
>Economy is not growing, we need to see what proles are doing at all
Presuming you've read the article, how on earth can you say that?
The govt is not looking to push employers to use "bossware", they're considering whether something should be done to restrict its use.
I read it, which is why I said it.
Look at what is actually on the table. Non-statutory guidance, a statutory code of practice, or a duty to consult unions or employee reps before rollout. Not one of those prohibits anything. The most stringent option under consideration is that workers get told first.
And telling them first is worth very little, because the existing remedies are already out of reach. A course of conduct causing alarm and distress is unlawful now. The employee who wants that tested funds litigation against the organisation paying their wages, while still working there. Report it as harassment and see how far it gets past the front desk. The regulator, meanwhile, discovers workplace surveillance largely when it stumbles across it.
So the practice continues, not because it is permitted, but because nobody subjected to it can afford to find out.
A department serious about this would prohibit categories outright and put enforcement on someone other than the person being monitored. Consulting on whether employers should send a memo first is not that.
I used to have a very small script that turned the ScrLk on and immediately off, often enough that the laptop power-down did not occur. I ran this when I was doing a long compile (usually overnight). this is now banned and so I have to compile during the daytime, when I am trying to use the laptop for other things (including incremental compilation)! This was all down to the monitoring software thinking I was actively using the laptop - which in a sense I was.
Anyway - less productive now - the overnight compile was because the IT spyware slowed it down to about 1/15th of its usual speed - daytime compile now because of HR spyware.
Anon because there is no telling where their tendrils are watching!
The one I retired from actually helped develop the basic software years ago, and installed it across their entire network, except for the VC's office and similar level chair polishers. The Trades Unions were never consulted, just informed it was for 'health and safety' to ensure over worked and over stretched admin staff took the minimal required time away from the screen, I.E. they took the required breaks but no more than that.
