[imagesource: Zac Freeland/Vox]

Those of us who exist primarily online have heeded the advice of experts and the call from government to work from home.

It’s the simplest way to decongest communal spaces, where the coronavirus could spread if just one employee unknowingly brings it along to work.

The frowned upon boiled egg that stinks out the workplace has been replaced with a highly contagious virus. This is how we live now.

To manage remote working employees, managers and bosses have started using technology to track progress.

The New York Times‘ Adam Satariano tested out some of the technology that managers are using to keep track of employees.

On April 23, I started work at 8:49 a.m., reading and responding to emails, browsing the news and scrolling Twitter. At 9:14 a.m., I made changes to an upcoming story and read through interview notes. By 10:09 a.m., work momentum lost, I read about the Irish village where Matt Damon was living out the quarantine.

All of these details — from the websites I visited to my GPS coordinates — were available for my boss to review.

Demand is high for technology that can track how and when we work, with managers ranking who spends too much time on Facebook and not enough on Excel.

This has, obviously, raised some questions about privacy.

Last month, I downloaded employee-monitoring software made by Hubstaff, an Indianapolis company. Every few minutes, it snapped a screenshot of the websites I browsed, the documents I was writing and the social media sites I visited. From my phone, it mapped where I went, including a two-hour bike ride that I took around Battersea Park with my kids in the middle of one workday. (Whoops.)

The following video breaks down what Hubstaff does – it’s basically the ultimately more terrifying version of the office micro-manager:

Yep, Hubstaff can track which websites you’re using, and even measure productivity by mapping how often you type or use your computer mouse.

Here’s the dashboard, which is apparently the best way to track everyone. The red, yellow, and green dots above the screenshots of workers’ computers contain productivity scores:

Back to Satariano:

To complete the experiment, I gave my editor, Pui-Wing Tam, the keys to the Hubstaff program so she could track me. After three weeks of digital monitoring, the future of work surveillance seemed to both of us to be overly intrusive. As she put it, “Ick.”

Dave Nevogt, a founder and the chief executive of Hubstaff displays a very casual attitude towards the tracking app.

“The world is changing,” Mr. Nevogt told me. Workers know they are being watched, so it does not violate privacy, he added.

Employees can’t choose whether or not they want to be tracked by the software if its part of how their managers want to do things, so the fact that they know they’re being monitored is beside the point.

Regardless, Satariano made an effort to embrace the feedback.

Each day, an email was sent to me and Pui-Wing with an overview of my day: hours worked, the productivity score, and the websites and apps that I was using.

One day last month, when I was putting the finishing touches on an article, I spent 3 hours and 35 minutes editing the document, and an hour inside a file holding background research and interview notes. Another 90 minutes were spent on email.

That was one of his more productive days. On another occasion, Hubstaff showed that he had spent 35 minutes on Twitter and lost 11 minutes browsing Spotify. Slack also ate up 22 minutes of his time, as did a “10-minute hunt for takeout pizza”.

The activity tracker used is GPS to monitor his movements, which included a jog around the park and a visit to a wine shop.

The moment when I no longer wanted to be monitored came on April 23 at 11:30 a.m., when Hubstaff caught me doing an internet exercise class. By the time I realized I had not logged out, it had snapped a screenshot of the trainer setting up to teach the class in her living room.

You can read Satariano full article here, which also includes an account of the experience from his editor’s perspective.

Reading about the experiment made me uneasy. For Satariano, it was both embarrassing and intrusive.

It sounds like it has the potential to turn a previously amicable workspace into a nightmare.

[source:nytimes]