Re: evaluating "productivity" data can shift power from employees to organisations
Not at all surprised...
A company that I was a contract worker for had at one point OccupEye desk occupancy/motion detectors
https://www.theregister.com/2016/01/12/bosses_install_motion_sensors/
They then went over to Office365 and I started getting these productivity emails - IIRC, you could turn off the feature for the most part, there was one particular metric or feature that it said will still be advised as a helpful gesture, so the snooping still happened.
The same company's Call Centre employees would get measured on various call handling metrics, including time on breaks, time between calls, excess time beyond allotted break times etc, with the team leader getting those reports. If you had to go and speak to one of them, first they had to get permission from their team lead to log themselves off the call handling system, and the team leader would have to be told once you had completed your business with them as the pressure to be actively performing was relentless.
Eventually, much of the Call Centre workers were laid off as the company offshored that - one can only guess that those offshore call centre employees would be under even greater surveillance and performance monitoring.
And the in-house IT support function...? That too got offshored to one of the usual suspects. But even before that, the IT support function appeared to be driven by ServiceNow performance metrics/the emphasis was SLA and just do anything to get the ticket off the queue - resolution of the underlying issue was secondary, and that has been carried forward even with the outsourced function
A comment I made at the time I worked there was that the general work culture at the company was akin to being in a cult.
AC
Biting the hand that feeds IT
