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New Office Sensors Know When You Leave Your Desk (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: About a year ago, in a widely reported story, journalists at British newspaper the Telegraph found little black boxes installed under their desks. The devices, which had "OccupEye" emblazoned on them, detected if employees were at their workstations. Not shockingly, writers and editors were suspicious, worried that bosses were monitoring their moves, even their bathroom breaks. The National Union of Journalists complained to management about Big Brother-style surveillance. The company insisted the boxes were intended to reduce energy costs, ensuring that empty cubicles weren't overheated or over-air-conditioned, but the damage was done, and the devices were removed. Sensors that keep tabs on more than temperature are already all over offices -- they're just less conspicuous and don't have names that suggest Bond villains. "Most people, when they walk into buildings, don't even notice them," says Joe Costello, chief executive officer of Enlighted, whose sensors, he says, are collecting data at more than 350 companies, including 15 percent of the Fortune 500. They're hidden in lights, ID badges, and elsewhere, tracking things such as conference room usage, employee whereabouts, and "latency" -- how long someone goes without speaking to another co-worker. Proponents claim the goal is efficiency: Some sensors generate heat maps that show how people move through an office, to help maximize space; others, such as OccupEye, tap into HVAC systems.
>how long someone goes without speaking to another co-worker.
The length of time I go without talking to a co-worker is directly proportional to my productivity.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Barring absolutely needing the job not to be on the street, I would not work at such a place.
This sort of thing will get to the point where even the rabid anti-union types will be rethinking that opinion, and maybe companies who would like to remain union-free should think about such things.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
No, they want to micromanage people in the name of profit.
Employers aren't using this for anything other than trying to squeeze as much productivity out of people as possible by treating them like robots or animals. This isn't a new trend, as employers have been using monitoring software on computer workstations that determine when people aren't at their desk typing/etc, and keeps track of when they use the bathroom or take a coffee break. It's a terribly short-sighted thing, as people don't function like machines. I'm just glad I work at a job where my output is what's important - that I do the work I'm supposed to, whether I do it quickly or slowly, whether I take breaks or not, and whether I take 30 or 60 minutes for lunch, or whether I waste time posting to Slashdot or not.
There is going to come a point in the not-far-off-future where most consumer facing gear wont even run unless a user is actively present, has ID'd them self through social media and is operating it. See Oculus Rift for an example. It wont run if the sensor says it not on my head. Now i understand in most use-cases thats fine, but sometimes i want a game to play out, even if im not attending it right then. I should have the option of taking off the HMD without it pausing everything.
Good-bye
Proponents claim the goal is efficiency
Yes, but what kind of efficiency? You're making a ton of assumptions that being at a desk, in a meeting room, or elsewhere leads to work being done, which leads eventually to profit. Work rarely is so attached to anything of the like that attempting to measure an individual's output for anything other than CO2 production is a waste of time, money, and thought.
Work, as we all know it, has been as industrialized as it possibly can be. And not everything that could be put into some sort of process needs it. Part of work is knowing where things can lead, it's following your instincts since you're supposed to be familiar with what you're doing.
And then there's the whole being valued by what work you do. That whole thing where your personal worth and wealth is directly tied to how "good" you're viewed as. Wealth as a virtue signaling! How sickening is that? How messed up as a society to you have to become to think that way?
Fight this sort of bullshit. Fight it hard.
If we only had more unions BS like this would not even make it to the install part unless there is a big list of things needed to fire someone / rules in place to make so that the boss needs to show that to use this to fire some takes a lot of paper work.
It's like alot of the BS metrics that just end up making people cheat the system / hurt things in areas that are not tacked.
This article sums up a lot of the problems I had with the office: https://shift.newco.co/why-i-o...
This issue in particular:
ROWE (results only work environment) is a fantastic framework that needs to be adopted in places employing knowledge workers. You should be measuring the output of your workers, not the amount of time you can see them sitting in your office. I refuse to work in a place with such a cynical view of their employees. If you really think your employees will not be working if you cannot look over their shoulder to check, you have the wrong way of looking at the relationship with your employees (especially at a startup). You should be hiring people who are engaged by their work and believe in the company’s mission. If people slack off when you aren’t watching them, your company has a disease, and you have discovered a symptom. You cannot treat this symptom and expect the disease to be cured. More on this later (Remove the safety nets and let the bad actors fail).
If you are looking at your employees through the lens of “I can’t give these people freedom and autonomy to do work in the best way they see fit:” You should consider finding different people for your organization instead of pursuing an authoritarian regime.
The company insisted the boxes were intended to reduce energy costs, ensuring that empty cubicles weren't overheated or over-air-conditioned
What a load of bullshit. A cubicle by its very nature is a division of a larger room. It has no ceiling to hold heat in or meaningful insulation, and it's certainly not climate controlled on an individual level.
A more believable excuse would be that the device shut down the computer and desk lights when the employee was not in to save energy, but most businesses leave machines on to facilitate after-hours backups/maintenance and with modern high-efficiency lighting, there would be no net cost benefit to controlling lighting with them.
Years ago I developed an early mobile computer app (on palm pilots) for use in field work (exotic vegetation control, mosquito control, that kind of thing). And the supervisors would often warn me that the workers were unhappy and hostile toward the idea of a new system.
So I'd take the field guys aside and talk over their concerns. Inevitably the question would come up whether their supervisors would be tracking their movements all through day. I'd assure them that no, the system couldn't tell if you stopped to grab a cup of coffee or take a whiz, but I warned them that it would give management a very precise assessment of how much work each individual worker actually accomplished.
And here's the thing: everyone was OK with that. They didn't mind being evaluated on accomplishment, they just didn't want to be treated like children or judged by some bullshit metric.
As a manager you need data, but you shouldn't have a bias toward easily obtained data. Someone who is on top of his employees' performance doesn't need an ass-in-chair time tracker, unless an employee's actual function is simply to sit on a chair.
If you're really doing your job as boss, the people who report to you won't be worried about being tracked. They'll worry about doing a good job. Because when they do a good job, you notice, and when they do a bad job, you notice... and promptly. Nobody is going to think you're judging them on bathroom breaks.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No, they want to micromanage people in the name of profit.
No, profit doesn't have a factor in it, at least in what I've seen. It's just metrics for the metric god. The management bureaucracy wants to see numbers which they can then pretend to read like tea leaves. From that point they issue some nonsensical decree ("There are too many commits to the repository! Why can't you guys get your software right the first time! I want to see less commits!") and go pat themselves on the back for being effective managers. In the meantime, the employees who have to deal with that BS expend mental energy trying to make sure whatever they're doing results in good metrics, possibly at the cost of productivity and efficiency.
Depends. If someone can execute 10 tasks in 8 hours, and I can perform the exact same tasks in 4 hours, then what are you going to do?
- Send me home early?
- Assign me additional tasks?
- Assign me additional task and give me a pay rise?
- Ask me how I manage to work so quickly, and if my methods could help other employees improve their throughput?
- Promote me?
- Request a "random" drug test?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This is just another scam sold by Dogbert to the Pointy-Haired Boss.
Time spent in chair doesn't equal productivity. I could put an inflatable Bozo doll in my chair and be just as productive.
Time spent typing doesn't equal productivity. I'm not a typist, my product is software, not letters in a document.
Lines of code certainly don't equal productivity, since I consider many of my most productive days to be those when I end up with fewer lines of code than I started with.
You cannot measure people with Procrustean standards and fixed metrics. All those are is a lazy managerial excuse. You can use them as a club to threaten to fire people. You can make an idol of them and worship it instead of actually spending time walking the trenches to see what's really going on.
If you reward people for digging up red jelly beans and punish them for digging up blue ones, you can rest assured that there will be cans of red paint everywhere and people will spend a lot of time that could have been employed digging up jelly beans painting them instead.