Kurt's Thoughts

Headline: “Your company could be spying on you: Surveillance software use up over 50% since pandemic started.”

Yeah, that’s not unsettling at all. <sarcasm>

I’ve had more than a half dozen customers ask me, “How can I monitor the keystrokes of my employees?”

WHAT?

“Yeah, we wanna make sure that they’re working while they are remote.”

ACTIVITY IS NOT PRODUCTIVITY
This is the most common scenario I’m told is the reason companies are looking for ways to monitor their employees computer activity.

Which if course is ridiculous.  Computer activity is never a measure of productive work. 

The urge to monitor employees however is an indicator that management doesn’t know how to measure employee productivity or their success – and that’s a failing of management, not their employees.

Who cares if the employee works only 3 days a week if they’re not required to be at a physical location?  If they do their job with excellence – why should anyone care? 

EXAMPLE: SALESPEOPLE & QUOTAS
Sales jobs often do exactly this:  They have sales quotas that they have to meet for the year as the metric of their job performance.  I’ve met numerous salespeople that have completely blown out their quotas in the 1st half of the fiscal year… then effectively went on vacation for the remaining 6 months.

Some say this doesn’t translate to other jobs: I disagree.  The majority of jobs do in fact have measurable outcomes.  Everyone has quantifiable goals that their job requires.  And there are tasks that are necessary to attain those goals.  Simply identifying when employees complete those tasks & ultimately, reach the goals & outcomes of their jobs are simple metrics that every manager can establish & do every month, quarter, and review period.

If you can’t verifiably measure an employee’s productivity or excellence, maybe you should spend time & effort on that before you think of doing something as valueless as monitoring employee computer activity.

• Use of employee surveillance software has jumped over 50% since the pandemic started
  https://fortune.com/2021/09/01/companies-spying-on-employees-home-surveillance-remote-work-computer/?n5h26i

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 5th, 2021 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.