Your Boss Can Monitor Your Activities Without Special Software (seattletimes.com) 54
"Your boss probably has enough data about your digital activities to get a snapshot of your workday — without using any special monitoring software...." reports the Washington Post.
"Workers should be aware that many online work apps offer data about their daily activities...." Commonly used network-connected apps such as Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Office give managers the ability to find everything from the number of video meetings in which you've actively participated, to how much you chatted online with co-workers and the number of documents you saved to the cloud....
At the beginning of 2022, global demand for employee monitoring software increased 65 percent from 2019, according to internet security and digital rights firm Top10VPN. But popular work apps also offer data. On Microsoft 365, an account administrator can pull data — though it may not be easy and would be tracked in compliance logs — on how many emails workers sent, how many files they saved on a shared drive and how many messages they sent as well as video meetings they participated in on the messaging and video tool Microsoft Teams. Google Workspace, Google's suite of work tools, allows administrators, for security and audit purposes, to see how many emails a user sent and received, how many files they saved and accessed on Google Drive, and when a user started a video meeting, from where they joined meetings, and who was in a meeting. Select administrators on both services can also access the content of emails and calendar items.
On paid Slack accounts, managers can see how many days users have been active and how many messages they've sent over a set period of time. Zoom allows account administrators to see how many meetings users participated in, the length of the meetings, and whether users enabled their camera and microphone during them. And if employees have company-issued phones or use office badges or tech that requires them to sign in at the office, managers can track phone usage and office attendance.
To be sure, several software companies say their reports are not for employee evaluation and surveillance. Microsoft has stated that using technology to monitor employees is counterproductive and suggested that some managers may have "productivity paranoia." In the help section of its website, Slack states that the analytics data it offers should be "used for understanding your whole team's use of Slack, not evaluating an individual's performance."
"Several workplace experts agree on one thing: The data doesn't properly represent a worker's productivity," the article concludes.
"Activities such as in-person mentoring, taking time to brainstorm, sketching out a plan or using offline software won't appear in the data. And measuring quantity might discount the quality of one's work or interactions."
"Workers should be aware that many online work apps offer data about their daily activities...." Commonly used network-connected apps such as Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Office give managers the ability to find everything from the number of video meetings in which you've actively participated, to how much you chatted online with co-workers and the number of documents you saved to the cloud....
At the beginning of 2022, global demand for employee monitoring software increased 65 percent from 2019, according to internet security and digital rights firm Top10VPN. But popular work apps also offer data. On Microsoft 365, an account administrator can pull data — though it may not be easy and would be tracked in compliance logs — on how many emails workers sent, how many files they saved on a shared drive and how many messages they sent as well as video meetings they participated in on the messaging and video tool Microsoft Teams. Google Workspace, Google's suite of work tools, allows administrators, for security and audit purposes, to see how many emails a user sent and received, how many files they saved and accessed on Google Drive, and when a user started a video meeting, from where they joined meetings, and who was in a meeting. Select administrators on both services can also access the content of emails and calendar items.
On paid Slack accounts, managers can see how many days users have been active and how many messages they've sent over a set period of time. Zoom allows account administrators to see how many meetings users participated in, the length of the meetings, and whether users enabled their camera and microphone during them. And if employees have company-issued phones or use office badges or tech that requires them to sign in at the office, managers can track phone usage and office attendance.
To be sure, several software companies say their reports are not for employee evaluation and surveillance. Microsoft has stated that using technology to monitor employees is counterproductive and suggested that some managers may have "productivity paranoia." In the help section of its website, Slack states that the analytics data it offers should be "used for understanding your whole team's use of Slack, not evaluating an individual's performance."
"Several workplace experts agree on one thing: The data doesn't properly represent a worker's productivity," the article concludes.
"Activities such as in-person mentoring, taking time to brainstorm, sketching out a plan or using offline software won't appear in the data. And measuring quantity might discount the quality of one's work or interactions."
My boss has better things to do (Score:4)
Because she also works and not only "manages". Typical situation in a small company. I think any boss that has time to do things like that should remove themselves, because they are the most obvious point of low productivity.
Re: (Score:2)
Because she also works and not only "manages". Typical situation in a small company. I think any boss that has time to do things like that should remove themselves, because they are the most obvious point of low productivity.
This.
It should be (and in many cases, is) the case in large businesses too. My boss has her own work to do too, part of that is managing issues that I send up the line (as well as the standard managerial stuff like managing leave/coverage, making sure we all take out holidays, arranging training and the like). I'm trusted to do my job, but also can notify my manager of issues I'm having. It's a little thing called "trust" and it can only work if it goes both ways.
Companies that feel the need to mointo
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, pretty much. It does help that here (Europe) a lot of employee monitoring is simply illegal and anything done must be fully disclosed.
Blah blah blah (Score:2)
Who is paying for these stupid articles anyways?
Whatâ(TM)s next, an article saying that if i donâ(TM)t show up to work, Iâ(TM)ll get fired? An article saying that if i donâ(TM)t do well enough at work, i will get a bad performance review?
Is there a huge population of people who literally do nothing at work? Just sit on the couch and watch tv or something?
Re:Blah blah blah (Score:5, Informative)
Is there a huge population of people who literally do nothing at work?
Yes.
Just sit on the couch and watch tv or something?
Of course not. They sit at their desks and watch TikTok videos so they appear to be working.
Some are like Wally. Some are like Floyd Remora [dilbert.com] They are out there.
A company shouldn't micromanage, but if they don't do some checks, productivity will suffer and also morale and retention, as productive employees see the deadwood get the same raises and promotions.
Re:Blah blah blah (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems that the first step to determining who's who is looking at their OUTPUT. Next, ASK them what they're doing from time to time. If there is a level of trust, that second one can be very informative. If that trust has been broken through spying and micro-management, it will be useless. The Wallys of the world hate that management technique because it cannot be defeated by gaming metrics.
The elephant in the room is that often enough the Wally is in management and he games the metrics by appearing to be busy through the low effort gathering of metrics when he/she should be busy understanding what the department does, what is most hindering those efforts, what resources are available and what resources are needed.
Re: (Score:2)
The elephant in the room is that often enough the Wally is in management
Exactly!!
The only people who do carry a mug walking around all day in the company are the managers. Front line workers are all too busy closing tickets or trying to meeting impossible project deadlines.
Not quite (Score:3)
Not quite true. Even the most incompetant manager/director will eventually notice if an employee is literally doing no work at all. The art of slacking as previous articles on /. have talked about is Quiet Quitting. Do just enough to get the job done without being called out about it and I've been doing it for years. I learnt the hard way not to bother to make an effort at work after being made redundant and also watching brown nosers getting promoted even though they couldn't hack their way out of a paper
Re:Not quite (Score:4, Interesting)
and also watching brown nosers getting promoted even though they couldn't hack their way out of a paper bag.
I read/hear this one a lot and i am left wondering; if you are so capable of doing a good job and you are able to identify what it is specifically others are doing that is a getting them recognition and success - why can't you do it?
Provided we are not talking about brown nosing in the literal sense or some other personally compromising act, if you know a little a sucking up and calling of attention to your actual contributions was going to get you a bigger bonus or a promotion - why don't you do it? Don't say because you really don't care either, obviously you do or you would not be complaining.
Re:Not quite (Score:4, Interesting)
"why can't you do it?"
I'm not interested in pretending I like someone and agree with everything they say 5 days a week plus I earn enough money anyway in dev without climbing the pole into management.
"Don't say because you really don't care either, obviously you do or you would not be complaining."
I don't care about me not being promoted, I care about the wrong people being promoted.
Re: (Score:2)
I learnt the hard way not to bother to make an effort at work after being made redundant and also watching brown nosers getting promoted even though they couldn't hack their way out of a paper bag.
You forgot to mention diversity hires who ask you to do their work because they can't.
Re: (Score:2)
Citation needed?
Bullshit Jobs by the late David Graeber.
Re: (Score:3)
> Who is paying for these stupid articles anyways?
Managers who don't know what they're doing.
If you're a crap manager, you like stuff like this because it validates your crappy method of "management". You can then point to such articles as justification for your mythical dashboard to be created that pulls in "productivity" metrics from various sources and presents them to you. Pretty soon, you get your "single pane of glass" that "tells you information from various sources", yet actually gives you no kno
Re: (Score:2)
Who is paying for these stupid articles anyways?
The advertisements we wouldn't have seen if we were working instead of skylarking on slashdot.
Wow! things done in the cloud are logged (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, I was managing the Slack account for my company for a while, and there is *very* little an admin can see of the company activity, and *nothing* that can be linked to a name.
For sufficiently loose definitions of "monitor" (Score:2)
So if I'm on a work-provided Slack channel, my boss can see general statistics about what I've done on Slack? Oh, no!!
Good grief, I already log everything I do in Request Tracker. We give all the higher-ups access to the server... and they never even log in.
Re: (Score:3)
I wrote a tool to do exactly that for my organization...
It was all the rage in management for about a month.
Then they moved on to better wastes of time.
Re: (Score:2)
At the time I was managing Slack for my company, I could *not* see any details of what did who. Just anonymized aggregates.
Management by numbers (Score:5, Informative)
If you manage by numbers, you'll get numbers. If you manage by results, you get results.
My manager is fortunately smart enough to try the latter approach.
Goodhart's law strikes again (Score:4, Informative)
Originally applied to the measurement of money supply in the 1970s, Goodhart's law asserts '"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Examples from computing include asking how many lines of code a programmer writes; this does not end well...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news... [bloomberg.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Nice, thanks.
Other time not counted. (Score:2)
Employers damage employee careers using bad data (Score:2)
Highly doubt it (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
He doesn't have to. Because he has special software for that. Microsoft wrote that for him. And it gives him really nice overviews.
Re: (Score:2)
was going to comment (Score:1)
,.... but some ASSHOLE turn anon comments OFF.
So let me just say: FUCK YOU!
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, so you're one of these cowards shitting low-quality comments all over?
Hint: If you can't figure out how to get an email address to use for an additional Slashdot psuedonym, you can't possibly have anything worth saying to Slashdotters.
Re: (Score:2)
Corporate Skype chat by default... (Score:2)
... monitors when you press a key or move the mouse regardless of whether its window(s) have the focus. It then will change your state from "available" to "inactive" after a - presumably - configurable time period. So all my boss has to do is look at the list of his staff logged in and see if they have a green, yellow or red dot next to their name. So indeed - no special software required.
Critics aren't thinking this through: it's a BOON (Score:4, Interesting)
One of my very first assignments in IT was to prepare a report for Accounting that proved that one particular salesman at my insurance agency was spending vastly more on Travel and Expenses than anyone else. She wanted to take that report to upper management and get them to reign him in.
But when she presented the report, the CEO said, "This guy is our top salesman! Ah, now I see how he's doing it -- he's taking clients out to lunch and golfing and closing the deal. Excellent." He thanked the Accountant for the report, said keep it coming, then sent out a memo to the sales department telling them he's tracking expense accounts now, and he better start seeing people taking clients out to lunch.
So, knowing that these business tech apps can track how many meetings someone attends could be great information -- if your goal is to cut down on the number of meetings. How many meetings is a manager calling? How much time are they spending, and how many other people are they dragging into them? Which meetings ended early vs. those which went overtime? The early enders are very likely to be meetings people didn't need to have. The extended meetings are probably the real ones. All great info.
"Without Special Software" (Score:2)
So basically, the metrics software and overview that Microsoft wrote into all their products isn't "Special Software" somehow?
It's certainly not software that makes their products better or easier to use.
it's what they want (Score:2)
I think even the people using such tools know it's an incomplete picture of worker performance, but it's easy to get a snapshot report or a dashboard view to include in a report so...Good enough.
I mean, that's basically the entire selling point of the fantastically successful SAP business model: it doesn't make anyone's job better or easier, but it does produce nice simple (-istic) reports for management.
Re: (Score:2)
I have noticed that too. If you make a software tool for selling to business, your reporting dashboard better be really really good, because the people using it are the ones paying the bills. Whether the software actually does anything is secondary.
Who is monitoring my boss? (Score:2)
Because he's too lazy to put that much effort into monitoring me.
Assume your employer is tracking you (Score:2)
Anything you do on your work computer, you should assume your employer is tracking it and knows about it. If it's company-provided equipment from a larger employer, they almost certainly have custom management software installed to track certain activities. If not or if they let you use BYO equipment, there are still plenty of options for tracking as discussed in TFA.
Don't do anything you wouldn't want your employer to know about. Aside from the obvious things (porn, downloading unauthorized software, et
This is a solved problem (Score:2)
If it's job related ... (Score:2)
Insert free advert for MICROS~1 (Score:2)
Role matters (Score:1)
How useful this kind of analysis is will depend on the employee role.
I work for an IT consultancy. Most of my day-to-day communication is using the client's systems (chat, email, meetings), not my own company's.
On my own company's systems, most of my chat messages are to my huge team, with announcements that save them time and reduces the need for meetings.
The data these systems are not gathering will tell different stories.