
Barclays scraps 'Big Brother' staff tracking system within one week - joshuahughes
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51570401
======
Broken_Hippo
So, they basically treated people like low-level employees at a call center in
the US?

This sort of thing isn't actually new. Those cameras in retail stores are,
first and foremost, used to track employee theft - including theft of company
time spent talking to other employees. Are you a call center employee that has
to go poop often that day or are 3 minutes late from break? Expect a call from
HR for the bathroom breaks and an attendance issue for the tardiness.

I'm guessing if this were in the US and put in place for low-level employees,
it would have never been scrapped.

~~~
Loughla
>Those cameras in retail stores are, first and foremost, used to track
employee theft

In my history, before finding my terminal career, I worked retail management.
I worked for a chain that is no longer open, so I'm fairly certain I can say
whatever I want about it now.

I was fast-tracked for upper-level corporate management (I think it was the
combination of not-giving-a-fuck based on depression and low-grade sociopathy
that did that). During this process we were asked to optimize a store in our
region. This optimization process included outlining for store staff the
process to remove "internal shrink" read: employees stealing.

One of my stores had the highest "internal shrink" and "employee arrests" in
the entire chain. My solution was to make a differential pay scale for that
store. I increased all wages across the board by $3/hr up to the store manager
level.

"Shrink" stopped in the first month. Not just "internal shrink" but external
as well. The employees were actually NOT stealing and ACTIVELY stopping people
from stealing.

I was told it wasn't as cost effective as installing cameras in common theft
areas and outsourcing security to a third party, and it was scrapped after a
year.

That was when I decided to leave retail and the corporate world in general.

~~~
sidlls
What was the cost difference? Did the shrink reduction exceed the $3/hr raise
in value but not by enough? Or was the raise not offset at all by the
reduction?

~~~
pietrovismara
In the end who cares, everyone would have been way happier without resorting
to big brothery solutions and solving anyway he problem. But no, we gotta
chase that additional profit at the cost of any other metric!

~~~
megablast
I mean, the business cares how much profits they make. If it was cost
effective, it is easier to justify moving it to other stores.

~~~
pietrovismara
That's my point. Businesses care only about profit, even when its clearly
detrimental to everyone else. There's no consideration for happiness or
quality of life and no ethic if you only chase profit. For how much we've been
pushed to believe this is perfecly normal, to me it's insane.

~~~
sandoooo
You know what would quickly increase happiness and quality of life for a whole
bunch of people? If you would just donate your entire life savings to charity
tomorrow. Your not doing that is clearly detrimental to all those people you
would have helped. Please consider happiness, quality of life, ethics, etc,
and stop chasing profit.

~~~
pietrovismara
Oh please, do a favour to yourself and use your intelligence before engaging
in discussion. I as an individual have barely what I need to survive. My
choice is not between huge profit and slightly less profit, but between paying
the rent or ending on the streets. Businesses on the other hand have proven
again and again that they will do anything to increase the profit even when
already largely profitable.

------
quelltext
> "Managers would never get away with breathing down employee's necks,
> personally monitoring their screens or logging toilet and water breaks,"

They wouldn't? Isn't that reality for a lot of workers?

~~~
uk_programmer
This actually happens a lot in call centres. This is why I am very polite to
those on the phones because I know they are likely to be working in a horrid
office.

~~~
crmrc114
At least in the US I know a number of call centers that have been sued into
bankruptcy for attempting to use phone agent login status as a timeclock. The
worst of these were telling staff that they had to login to their computers
and get everything ready on their own time... then they would be paid once
they logged in... On another note, I feel that such abuses really need to
start to incur jail time for management since abuses like this still seems to
be pretty common in US Call centers.

To be honest (guessing from the 'UK' part of your username) I figured that the
UK would have better call center protections than the US.... from your post it
sounds like it may be just as bad as the US.

~~~
WaitWaitWha
>To be honest (guessing from the 'UK' part of your username) I figured that
the UK would have better call center protections than the US.... from your
post it sounds like it may be just as bad as the US.

Interesting. How will this revelation impact your future comparative thinking?

~~~
wolco
The US often offers more protection compared to most countries.

Many countries copy the US so it's important they act as a leader.

~~~
brokenmachine
You're kidding, right? Worker protections?

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
"The software, Sapience, claims to create "unprecedented transparency" within
companies."

The spin makes me dizzy.

~~~
peteradio
It is transparency, it was always wrong to think that transparency is some
universal good.

~~~
wpietri
Nah. It's only transparent like a one-way mirror is: it lets the powerful
watch the people they can control without being watched in return.

True transparency would make everybody visible to everybody, while making it
just as clear who is monitoring whom. Often the problem isn't information,
it's information asymmetry. In the offline world, we have a whole vocabulary
for peeping toms, nosey parkers, eavesdroppers, busybodies, creepy starers,
and outright stalkers. That's because observation is in itself generally
observable, and can often be countered with social pressure. It's when, as
here, that one group can observe without being observed or criticized, things
can very quickly get ugly.

------
grawprog
This makes me wonder if there's ever been any studies done showing worker
happiness over time at comparable jobs compared against the increasing rise of
workplace surveillance over time. It would be interesting to see if there's
any correlation between the two. I know personally i've always been happier
and more productive at jobs when I don't have employers breathing down my neck
and counting every second of work I do.

Humans need a level of autonomy and a small amount of freedom to 'fuck around'
as it were. Not to the point where productivity starts to fall, but there's a
balance between oppression and total freedom I feel creates the ideal working
environment.

------
mindcrime
It really does boggle the imagination to think that somewhere, out there,
somebody _actually_ thought this system was a good idea in the first place.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
They stole the idea from American call centers. This sounds similar to the
monitoring in place 20 years ago at a telephone company call center I worked
at.

------
indymike
If your employees love their jobs and trust their leaders, they will not
steal, and will not tolerate other workers who do. In order to be trusted as a
leader you must earn the respect of those you lead. Earned respect is hard,
but worth it.

------
geddy
> unprecedented transparency

I think where they can go a step further here is to install Spy cams in all of
the bathroom toilets so we know how much bathroom time is actually spent going
to the bathroom, and how much is spent on cell phones. It may sound invasive
but I'll bet the efficiency will go up and that's all that matters at the end
of the day, right?

Since efficiency can be broken down into money earned/lost, this should
probably start up the top-most level (CEO) since the highest paid positions
would yield the most gain/loss depending on efficiency changes. So once the
CEOs have spy cams installed in all of their toilets, we can really measure
how well efficiency improves!

EDIT:

I'm coming back to this because I don't think this is _quite_ efficient
enough. We should have a team of resident defecation experts who can detect
exactly when the CEO should start the wiping processes, and gradually phase
them out with AI that learns different pooping patterns. It can also give
recommendations to the employee in terms of eating more fiber to speed up the
defecating process and result in more solid stools, thus optimizing all
bathroom time and shortening the amount of wipes required to as little as
possible, again, to save more time and thus, money.

Not only that, but eating more fiber can prevent troubles like constipation as
well as other health issues, saving _even more_ money for the company when it
comes to healthcare.

These are just a few more ideas, but I have plenty more.

EDIT #2:

I feel stupid for not thinking of this earlier, but another good strategy to
prevent time away from the desk would be to simply remove all water and
refrigerators from the building, and naturally all bathrooms would follow
suit. The bathrooms would be replaced with closets filled with amphetamines,
which are huge efficiency boosters, and bananas, so the employees don't die of
hunger. The amphetamines will keep the heart rate so fast the bananas will be
burned off like fuel.

Now, I know what you're thinking, "but what about the pumping rooms for
breastfeeding moms? What happens to those?" It's a great question, with a
simple solution - Barclays doesn't hire parents anymore. This is about
efficiency, remember? Barclays will henceforth only hire asexual and sterile
men and women to nullify any risk of pregnancy.

However, for those parents who need to keep their job, Barclays will also
offer a free service called "reverse adoption" where you bring in your kids
and the company gives them away. This can save dozens of dollars per day from
employees getting distracted by things like "family" and "not working."

Between this, the spy cams in CEO toilets, the defecation expert AI, and
removing the bathrooms, there will be tons of money saved, a portion of which
will go towards financing the amphetamines and bananas. It'll be expensive for
all the drugs but the efficiency will be so high it'll be a drop in the
bucket!

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Pooping during work hours, that's like stealing from your employer. Just hold
it in like those dedicated staff at Amazon.

~~~
rudiv
I seem to remember a social media story about someone who was fired for
posting a meme on their Facebook account that said "Boss makes a dollar, I
make a dime; That's why I poop on company time".

~~~
consp
If my boss was monitoring me like that, out of work time even more, I would
place a GPS tracker on his car as privacy obviously doesn't matter and neither
does personal time.

------
chriscatoya
These sort of systems for desk workers is the equivalent of measuring
productivity by lines of code. Completely misses the point of generating
value.

------
loriverkutya
This reminds me of one of the big telco company I was working for:

Big announcement came one day that youtube and other "non work releated"
websites were blocked to "encourage" people to work "harder". After two days,
blocking is gone without futher announcement since some C-level started to
complain to IT, that they use it.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
I used to work for a company that turned on corporate blocking for a lot of
sites. I learned a lot about DNS to trying to get around all of that stuff :).
The system was also really stupid because it broke DNS for localhost when
using the corporate VPN.

------
Ididntdothis
I am pretty sure this will come back just slightly modified. And other
companies will do the same. It will be really hard to stop the trend toward
total surveillance. It gets cheaper and cheaper every year and more capable.

~~~
Mangalor
What should be the response of workers?

~~~
Ididntdothis
individually it’s very hard to do something. Unions or laws would help setting
up a framework for acceptable workplace conditions. But neither of them are
especially liked in the US.

~~~
jb775
I could see unions making a big comeback in the US. They are still alive and
well in the healthcare world (for nursing at least - my wife is a nurse at a
large hospital in the US and has been a member of multiple nursing unions).

If you compare profit margins to wage increases there's an obvious (and
expected via capitalism) disconnect. It's hard to galvanize this type of
activity though. And new unions would definitely need a constitutional
overhaul, probably based around transparency and making sure power and
decision making is distributed.

------
quadrifoliate
Stuff like this is common in the US. And newspapers are still amazed at why
the socialist candidate is leading in the polls for one of the presidential
election nominations.

Honestly, there is no fix for this sort of thing except through the political
system. Corporations will keep pushing the boundaries on maximizing worker
productivity because their CEOs get massive bonuses for squeezing 1% more work
out of terrified employees like this. Even if the initiatives fail, they can
always blame it on economic factors and get their golden parachute.

~~~
kbutler
With the corporations, you can go elsewhere.

With the socialists, you can't leave.

~~~
quadrifoliate
> With the corporations, you can go elsewhere.

Typical quote from the 60s. This may be the reality for in-demand jobseekers
in the current bubble, but it's typically not an option in the modern labor
force.

~~~
kbutler
Show me the machine guns. It may be difficult to leave - mostly because of
what you give up, and the disruption in your life - but nobody is going to
shoot you if you try.

Socialist regimes larger than a kibbutz have always been established and
maintained by force.

Our current economic system is not perfect, but the results over decades are
infinitely better than other systems - particularly socialism.

[https://fee.org/articles/extreme-poverty-rates-plummet-
under...](https://fee.org/articles/extreme-poverty-rates-plummet-under-
capitalism/) [https://reason.com/2019/01/31/global-poverty-decline-
deniali...](https://reason.com/2019/01/31/global-poverty-decline-denialism/)

Contrast with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes)
10s to 100s of millions killed under socialist governments, both direct and
also as a result of failures of the central planning. This includes mass
killings in Castro's Cuba, USSR, and Nicaragua, whose governments were each
endorsed in the 80s by Bernie Sanders. Mischaracterizing non-socialist
economies like Denmark is probably a better strategy.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
The thing is: you guys are talking about two different things but using the
same word. One is talking about Scandinavia and one is talking about The Khmer
Rouge.

~~~
kbutler
Well, Bernie was also endorsing Castro's Cuba, the USSR, and the Sandinistas'
Nicaragua.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhpVAkBDg5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhpVAkBDg5o)
(He visited each of these countries in the mid-to late 80s, when the
atrocities were already well-known).

Not quite the Nordic model.

He praises socialist governments, ignoring their murders and killings of
people trying to escape, and when their economies inevitably tank, he shifts
to different examples (1980s Bernie "Castro...totally transformed society"
visited for the third time in 1989. The "special period" crisis began in 1991
with widespread famine. 2016 "The Cuban economy is a disaster" 2020 "Let's
talk about...Denmark!").

The new strategy of endorsing non-socialist economies (Scandinavian countries
with capitalist free market economies and strong social safety nets) is
probably a better long-term model. Danish Prime Minister: "I would like to
make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark
is a market economy." [https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/denmark-
tells-...](https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/denmark-tells-bernie-
sanders-to-stop-calling-it-socialist/)

~~~
kbutler
When I wrote this comment, I certainly wasn't expecting Bernie would start a
new round of endorsing Castro as the front-runner for the Democratic Party
nomination.

If you have questions about Castro's contributions, you may consider
[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-
comme...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-
commentary/no-fidel-castro-did-not-deliver-a-better-cuba/article33071380/)
"Pre-Castro, Cuba was already better off than most Latin American countries on
such indicators. Also, Mr. Castro's rule knocked Cubans to the near-economic
bottom of all Latin American countries"

------
riazrizvi
> Campaign group Privacy International said: "Data protection rules are very
> clear, strict and do not allow employers to carry out such monitoring unless
> they are able to prove that this is strictly necessary and proportionate and
> it does not severely impact employees' rights.

Is this an EU or UK thing? Does anyone know the law implied?

~~~
OJFord
They'll mean the 'Data Protection' Act:
[https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/contents/enacte...](https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/contents/enacted)

But I'm not familiar to cite a specific section on needing to 'prove that this
is strictly necessary and proportionate'.

See also: [https://www.gov.uk/personal-data-my-employer-can-keep-
about-...](https://www.gov.uk/personal-data-my-employer-can-keep-about-me) \-
the implication might be that the burden is on the employer to prove that it's
_not_ 'sensitive' data _or_ it has permission, and that 'time away from
computer' has implications for health & habits and _is_ therefore 'sensitive'.

------
scotty79
I briefly worked for Barclays as a subcontractor and they would improve their
efficiency much more if they monitored in such detail how slow are the
(virtual?) machines they provision remotely to their contractors and
employees.

------
11thEarlOfMar
What problem are they trying to solve _really_?

Seems to me that their management skills, training, hiring is the issue. If
there is a perception among managers that workers are slacking or over-
working, they should be able to solve the issue without invasive tracking.
Moreover, if they are genuinely interested in improving productivity and
reducing work-related stress, they'd communicate all of that in advance and
resolve employee concerns before installing it.

Sounds like management does not have an open, healthy dialog with employees in
general.

~~~
lainga
Whatever physical or social friction stands in the way between me, an upper-
mid-level manager, getting mad because (?? someone cut me off in traffic?
indigestion?) and being able to express it by summoning a giant fist and
crushing one of my neo-slaves to death with a comical "splat" noise. They're
not genuinely interested in anything that doesn't relate to their own prestige
or comfort or ability to discharge discomfort.

------
wiradikusuma
At work, my staff (20ish developers) usually clock in/out sharp bcoz of
attendance, but they take 2+ hours lunch break and ~1hr for prayer breaks (2x
within work hour), which I don't mind. But what frustrates me is their work is
slow and low quality (not everyone), and I do thought about "short term"
tracking like this. Thoughts?

(I just joined, so I "inherited" this)

~~~
factsaresacred
'2 hours lunch break and 1hr for prayer breaks' and the work is low quality.

You don't need to track those people, you need to replace them.

~~~
speedgoose
A 2 hours lunch break is the standard in France.

~~~
fennecfoxen
"You can't fire these people" is also the standard in France.

Also standard: a stagnant economy (~0.25% GDP growth on 0.18% population
growth) and sky-high youth unemployment (20-25%).

~~~
speedgoose
You can definitely fire people in France. I don't know how you got the idea
you can't.

Also quality of life is perhaps more important than these numbers. People
don't care about the GDP growth, don't want to have artifical employment with
terrible and badly paid jobs (looking at you Germany), and prefer to eat good
food for 2 hours.

~~~
refurb
_People don 't care about the GDP growth_

They most certainly do when thinking about about the social programs GDP
funds.

------
abhijat
Does anyone here know if HSBC is still using this sapience software? I know
they bought into this a couple of years ago.

------
m463
"Barclays said axing the tracking system was a response to "colleague
feedback", but would not say if it was permanent."

Quietly put it in when the controversy has died down, and disable these
notifications:

"and sent warnings to those spending too long on breaks."

------
awinder
I’m amazed that someone would think that the investment banking division would
be an appropriate trial. I don’t know about long breaks but that seems like a
crew that definitely puts in over 8 hours a day.

------
freepor
Employee panopticons only work if you want your employees to perform a
precisely defined task with no improvisation. As soon as you watch someone
their creativity drops to ~0.

------
jamestanderson
> In a statement, the bank said: "We always intended to listen to colleague
> feedback as part of this limited pilot which was intended to tackle issues
> such as individual over-working as well as raise general productivity."

Riiiight.

~~~
GordonS
If they intended to listen, or indeed cared an iota about their employees,
they wouldn't have rolled this out in the first place. This level of intrusive
monitoring would very clearly be hated by those it monitored, and make then
feel very uncomfortable.

Seriously, in this day and age, how on _earth_ did this get enough support at
the management level to pilot it?

~~~
nonbirithm
> Seriously, in this day and age, how on earth did this get enough support at
> the management level to pilot it?

They valued maximizing the amount of profit one worker produces over privacy.

~~~
GordonS
I rather doubt that miserable, downtrodden employees are more productive than
happy, motivated ones are.

~~~
banannaise
They don't teach that in MBA classes. They just teach that employees who
aren't at their desks aren't being productive right now.

------
NullPrefix
Systems like that are actually great for the employees, because every minute
is accounted for and when you stay an hour longer at work you can expect to be
paid for it at overtime rate.

~~~
Loughla
Not when everyone is classed as Exempt staff and therefore ineligible for
Overtime.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
It's weird that exempt employees can be required to clock in and out. My
current employer does this but claims it for tracking capital vs operational
expenses and has nothing to do with productivity or policy enforcement. I'm
rather skeptical. One thing is for sure, the definition of what constitutes an
exempt employee has expanded far beyond its original intent.

~~~
jandrese
I'm exempt and have to do a timecard because of how we bill projects
internally.

~~~
scottmcf
Very common if you're handling government contracts/etc. too. Often a
requirement.

