Employers are Tracking Employees' 'Productivity' - Sometimes Badly

Here's an interesting statistic spotted by Fortune. "Eight out of the 10 largest private employers in the U.S. are tracking productivity metrics for their employees, according to an examination from The New York Times." "Some of this software measures active time, watches for keyboard pauses, and even silently counts keystrokes."J.P. Morgan, Barclays Bank, and UnitedHealth Group all track employees, The Times reported, seeing 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. For employers surrendering in the fight to return to the office, such surveillance is a way to maintain a sense of control. As Paul Wartenberg, who installs monitor systems, told The Times, "If we're going to give up on bringing people back to the office, we're not going to give up on managing productivity.... But tracking these remote workers' every move doesn't seem to be telling employers much. "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 Times. From the New York Times' article. (Alternate URLs here, here, and here.)In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others.... Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, "idle" buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs. Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their "inactivity" time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues'.... Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring. Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don't have control - and in some cases, that they don't even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as "demoralizing," "humiliating" and "toxic." Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said. But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world's new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself.... But many employers, along with makers of the tracking technology, say that even if the details need refining, the practice has become valuable - and perhaps inevitable. Tracking, they say, allows them to manage with newfound clarity, fairness and insight. Derelict workers can be rooted out. Industrious ones can be rewarded. "It's a way to really just focus on the results," rather than impressions, said Marisa Goldenberg, [who] said she used the tools in moderation... [I]n-person workplaces have embraced the tools as well. Tommy Weir, whose company, Enaible, provides group productivity scores to Fortune 500 companies, aims to eventually use individual scores to calibrate pay.

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