Remote work is here to stay, and employers are not happy about this. In order to maintain control, eight of the ten biggest employers in the U.S. are tracking remote employees’ every move. Much more than they did in the office.
According to Fortune, companies like JP Morgan and UnitedHealthGroup are tracking “everything from how long it takes to write an email to keyboard activity. There are repercussions if workers aren’t meeting expectations: a prodding note, a skipped bonus, or a work-from-home day taken away, to name a few.”
But all this tracking isn’t doing much. Measuring productivity is a difficult thing to do when employees aren’t manufacturing concrete widgets. And everyone types at their own pace, right?
“We’re in this era of measurement but we don’t know what we should be measuring,” Ryan Fuller, former vice president for workplace intelligence at Microsoft, told the New York Times.
A study from Qatalog and GitLab found that tracked workers waste an average of 67 minutes each day proving that they are working. If employers don’t even know what they’re measuring, maybe it’s time for Big Brother to check out of everyone’s computers? Seems like that might increase productivity.
