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I am sharing this article on employee monitoring, which dives into the complexities of tracking productivity in a remote/hybrid work environment.
The key takeaway is that monitoring should be framed as a tool that supports employee well-being and performance rather than a surveillance tactic.
I still find this irritating.
I wish managers could create meaningful relationships and transparent communication that will make these kinds of technologies redundant, but, maybe I am naive. What do you think?
Read the full article here:
<a href="https://www.raconteur.net/future-of-work/employee-monitoring-staff-response" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">https://www.raconteur.net/future-of-work/employee-monitoring-staff-response</a>

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Employee monitoring in remote and hybrid work environments is discussed, emphasizing that it should be used to support employee well-being and performance instead of being seen as a surveillance tactic. The author expresses a longing for managers to foster meaningful relationships and transparent communication that would render such technologies unnecessary.

Employee monitoring Tech

The industry and type of work need special consideration.
Most industries and workers within them benefit from not being remote, because building relations (which is important for long term career building) benefits from direct human interaction.
That said, specific roles in specific industries benefit from remote work when the tasks themselves can be accomplished. That’s where many in tech live, and we have access to many tools that make that easier. Specific to many roles in tech, you have positions which are the antithesis of the factory floor - some workers can generate benefits which are exponentially beneficial over others in the same role, and that doesn’t translate exactly to ‘butts-in-seats’ by the minute measurement.
There is no easy answer because you also have conditions in which you are not able to easily fire those become underperformers. This is one reason why, oh so many years ago, federal bureaus in the USA experimented with ‘tele-work’ but many agencies dispensed with it, because of the untrustworthiness of enough of those workers that instead of working were engaging in child care or even running side businesses on salary time.

This situation is hard to resolve because of several factors:
<ul>
<li>White collar work is hard to track precisely. It has a large variety, often not material and creative. Quite easy to notice when someone does barely anything at all, but noticing a difference between 100% and 60% performance can be really hard.</li>
<li>Levels of honesty and trust vary a lot for different people, and there is no tool to measure that. On employee side it will be on spectrum from people doing voluntary unpaid overtime to ones who do bare minimum to pass. On employer/manager side there is also range from ones who are ok with work done in reasonable time to ones who want to control each minute spent.</li>
</ul>
So basically employers ask “is my employee performance optimal?” and turns out there is no clear answer for that. Some are happy when expected performance is close enough to actual one. Some are not, and then the tracking tools come in.
Probably a good topic to raise at controversy.dev :)

💯 agree!! As a front end user who had no idea about the “surveillance” aspect was/am disappointed and felt exposed by these past employers. But have given me motivation to learn and discover as much as I can about tech and how to develop a CRM that is transparent and easy to use, understand and build with the right tools for the everyday user.

Engineering Lead here.
What I’m doing is taking lots of notes and spend time pairing up with my team, sometimes even as triplets working on a task, so I can write meaningful, hands-on evaluations myself on what my team members are doing.
Automating metrics is detrimental to pair programming, and therefore also knowledge transfer and attempts to reduce the bus factor, as it requires crediting code changes to individual developers, which creates just the wrong incentives. I’d much rather help my team succeed as a team and personally provide the necessary feedback to tell how much the contributions differed in quality, and quantity, per contributor.
I wouldn’t even want to work for a company that tracks time or computer usage. Even as a shareholder, I want a company that amplifies my invest, not uses my money to discipline its employees for no other reason than to make narcissistic, overpaid managers feel good about themselves.
Success comes from teams delivering value to their customers. And that is something that can and should be measured!