
How Employers Track Their Workers - crunchiebones
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/10/employee-surveillance/568159/?single_page=true
======
joewee
I've never seen an employee monitoring system that's built to the benefit of
the employee. But nothing a company does it to the benefit of the employee. HR
isn't there to help employees, HR is primarily a risk mitigation and
compliance department. Who would assume employee monitoring systems are any
different?

"They try to never speak up, never stick out, do nothing that might get
noticed by management. This leads to a vicious cycle, whereby management grows
more suspicious and feels justified in ratcheting up the surveillance."

This is the most troubling thing about surveillance, it changes peoples
behavior. The people who implement these systems don't understand the
psychology of surveillance, so they use the change in behavior as a indicator
of increased risk. Its a vicious cycle.

~~~
toomanybeersies
> But nothing a company does it to the benefit of the employee

This isn't a feature intrinsic to companies, but rather a relatively recent
social norm. There are still a few companies that do look after their
employees, and do things to the benefit of their employees. They aren't very
common though, usually it's smaller (often family run) businesses, and often a
physical trade rather than an office job.

~~~
sonnyblarney
" but rather a relatively recent social norm."

Ask your great-grandfather working in factory, or a mine, or as a tenant
farmer (basically 99% of all work) - how he was treated by 'today's
standards'. Where I did my undergrad, the main office building was built by a
logger baron who literally had strikers _shot_. It's almost universally better
today.

" usually it's smaller (often family run) businesses" \- are usually lower
paying and often less stable. It's really, really easy for a contractor to not
get paid for a job, or to make a mistake costing him $$$ - and then to be in a
position wherein he can't pay his workers the aloted amount. This is common.

Any entity that provides fairly steady, predictable work and guaranteed pay is
doing a good thing for the most part.

~~~
neuralRiot
>Any entity that provides fairly steady, predictable work and guaranteed pay
is doing a good thing for the most part.

I'm not really sure about that, any big busines wouldn't hesitate to fire you
and as many people needed to close the numbers or to cut your hours-wages for
the same reason let's not talk about benefits, there's not "safe job" anymore.

~~~
sonnyblarney
" there's not "safe job" anymore."

Most jobs are safe actually.

First - government, which is a massive employer.

Second - healthcare - generally low turnover, and a huge portion of the
economy.

Energy - parts are up and down, but anything closer to the core is very safe.

Core jobs at any classic company. They are generally safe.

Large layoffs are not common, and this idea that companies will drop huge
numbers of people 'just to save a buck' is simply not true: most layoffs only
happen during economic calamity, when the company is starting to face trouble.
In decent times, firings is rare.

Now factory wok, hourly workers, retail workers - that's a whole other thing.

Remember that companies make money by expanding and hiring, not by laying off.
CEO's are 100x more likely to want to 'grow' than 'shrink' and there's a lot
of political cost with layoffs.

Rubin's startup is flailing, that's why he's laying off, that's to be
expected.

~~~
krapp
>Now factory work, hourly workers, retail workers - that's a whole other
thing.

These _are_ most of the jobs, not government, energy, healthcare and whatever
"core jobs at any classic company" means. Those are also overlapping sets.

~~~
sonnyblarney
No, you can see the breakdown here from the BLS [1]

Most jobs are relatively safe from calamity. Though there is ugly turnover,
the same applies - in retail in particular, companies do not want to layoff -
this would be very bad. They want to hire, it's just that the jobs suck. As
for manufacturing - that's generally the one where 'laying off' might be good
for the company as they would move the jobs overseas.

But this idea that companies are always looking to layoff and drop people is
not right, it happens in specific places.

[1] [https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-
industry-...](https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-
sector.htm)

------
jeffalyanak
When our company first began implementing employee tracking the goal was to
help our staff understand their own performance, co-educate and to attempt to
support a culture of experimenting with every aspect of our work.

Our initial systems ended up being decent at keeping people "moving fast" but
in our first few feedback sessions we found it stressed people out, encouraged
competition instead of co-education and locked people into workflows they
"knew worked" rather than fostering experimentation.

We quickly killed all but the most basic performance tracking aspects of the
project and we found better ways to achieve our goals.

We now have a sort of "opt-in" tracking for staff who are interested in
testing the strengths and weaknesses of a novel approach, for example. This
puts the data in _their_ hands as a tool to convince _us_ of the validity of
their approach and the empowerment is not trivial.

It's far more friendly and humane but it's also something that benefits
everyone at the company.

~~~
icebraining
I'm curious; in the first version, where was the data stored and who had
access to it?

~~~
jeffalyanak
There was an intranet portal available to all the staff and much of the day-
to-day data was presented directly to the staff as they completed their work.

However, only management was really "engaging" with the data, the staff
themselves only interacted with it enough to outrun it.

Now, employees feel excited about the opportunity to dig into datasets that
they created with some specific intent and it's the staff themselves that
engage directly with management.

It's just much better all around.

------
gorpomon
Pretty disgusting stuff. There are plenty of places in the world where a video
camera provides relief and safety, but work is rarely one. The engineers
building this tech should be ashamed, they grew up to be the bad guys.

~~~
Tade0
A few years back a guy I knew from college wanted to have a meeting with me
regarding a "business opportunity".

He pitched me an idea for a system that would essentially spy on IT
contractors through the webcam during work. Fortunately his budget was
laughably small and my participation out of the question so he never went
through with this.

He is known for being utterly shameless but I guess what other kind of person
would come up with such an idea?

~~~
dawnerd
Doesn't upwork and other freelance style sites monitor by webcam/screencapture
as an option?

~~~
Tade0
This man is not known for having original ideas either.

------
nimbius
as someone who works a blue collar job in an auto repair shop, these articles
always make me pause for a moment and ask if i really want to keep learning
python in the hopes of pursuing an office job. The entire environment just
sounds like high school all over again. Why does anyone in an office put up
with it?? is this somehow different than time keeping? do you have a punch
card?

If you asked my boss where i was, shed probably just point at the garage and
wave at the 'authorized personnel only' sign. She has no reason to care what
size wrench im holding or why im beating the living shit out of a siezed idler
pitman assembly. I once drove a car with no doors and a missing windshield out
of the lot and down the street, and the only thing she wanted from me was to
know if id run to leroys donut and pick up a frozen coffee.

Why is this different in an office? are office jobs just not trustworthy?

~~~
danharaj
No one in an office job knows if anyone else is doing anything useful. Or even
if _they 're_ doing anything useful.

~~~
jsoc815
Au contrair. mon ami. Office workers are busy keeping themselves in the
office, which means that the vacation spots, and such are riffraff-free for
their betters until the next major holiday break. That's _quite_ useful.

~~~
jsoc815
I see some people lack a sense of humor and/or that a 'truth' perhaps cuts too
close to the bone.

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paulie_a
It should be titled: How employers lose their best employees.

There are certain jobs that do require extra security and monitoring. But if a
manager actually thinks their white collar underling is going to perform
better, they should not be a manager.

In the case of IT people, it will probably just get hacked and disabled. I've
done it at past jobs. I've also flat out refused to implement this sort of
crap.

------
sologoub
“It’s possible that almost any change—even changing the lighting—would have
prompted a similar increase in productivity.”

Hawthorne effect:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect)

------
tartoran
Also relevant here is panopticon/panopticism

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism)

------
jsoc815
> _“a culture where … people more often alter their behavior to suit machines
> and work with them, rather than the other way around,” and that this tends
> to erode their sense of “agency.” That is, the constant surveillance of
> employees diminishes their capacity to operate as independent thinkers and
> actors._

Isn't this the point? At least until the _people can be replaced_? Personally,
can't wait to see the autonomous robots attempts to subvert the system. That
should be interesting.

------
ecnahc515
How ubiquitous is this for TSA? I hear people on hackernews complain about
theft from the TSA every so often, but according to this, they're being
recorded so it shouldn't happen, or if it does, they should be able to prove
if it was stolen by TSA.

Are people just blaming TSA for their lost things, is TSA covering up thefts
that they know are happening, or what?

~~~
caoilte
It said they were told that's why they were being recorded, it didn't say it
was true.

It's very hard to be certain what's going on unless we install tools that
monitor management. On the plus side studies show this would improve their
productivity.

------
devoply
These type of "tools" are used by low-lives to control people so that they
feel that they have some sense of control over people. In terms of getting
good hard-working motivated people to work for you, this sort of technology
does exactly the opposite.

~~~
Terr_
It makes me think of a piece from Peopleware (1987):

> Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value:
> The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed
> on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn
> to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then
> there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through
> ingenuity and technology. [...]

> The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You
> see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean
> achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean
> extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish
> Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the
> simple mechanism of unpaid overtime.

------
kchoudhu
The bank I was working at tried installing monitoring software on programmers'
computers one day with no monitoring.

I sent my MD an email saying I wouldn't be working that day because of it, and
left. The software disappeared the next day.

~~~
ragequitta
Most companies I've worked for (including a bank) you'd be gone the next day.
Monitoring is so rampant right now. It's disgusting.

~~~
millak
Indeed, I'm working at a bank at the moment. There are half a dozen "endpoint
protection" agents installed on my laptop, and don't even mention the network
filtering - the Docker, Nginx and Vagrant documentation websites are all
blocked for example.

I try to work mostly on my own laptop using Citrix in a web browser to access
the corporate network so that the personal data I generate in a day (for
example, browsing HN during downtime) doesn't get caught up in all the
monitoring but this has some obvious limitations. With the security regime in
place they will actually ask you about every piece of software you have
installed on your corporate laptop (on which you'll need to request temporary
admin access to install most software, of course) or about why you visited x,
y or z website or why you searched this or that on Google. Like the article
says it's best to keep your head down and try not to get noticed - they
collect so much information but nobody looks at it until they have a reason to
do so.

------
ivanhoe
IMHO having a camera over your head is just one (small) step worse than
working in open-plan offices. It got popular only for one reason, for just
like cameras it gives the management that false sense of control.

------
imhelpingu
Workers who are being surveiled should do the bare minimum while developing
skills during free time that benefit future employers and not the current one.

~~~
ravenstine
Sadly, I think this almost always should be the case. That is, unless the
employer actually is benevolent and puts effort into nurturing the futures of
its employees. But how often do we see that?

People should basically work no more than 4 hours a day, and the remaining 4
hours should either be spent developing skills or running a side-hustle on a
personal laptop. Better that than bullshitting, which is what the vast
majority of people do after they're burned out working 3 hours.

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a_imho
Completely off topic but The Atlantic's GDPR notice is the least intrusive and
most compliant I've seen so far. Good job.

~~~
lexicality
Try [https://wikia.com](https://wikia.com). No "manage my preferences" or "are
you sure" etc, just a simple yes/no.

As a side note, basically no one complies with Article 7.3.4: "It shall be as
easy to withdraw as to give consent." ([https://gdpr-
info.eu/art-7-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/))

~~~
a_imho
Personally I prefer the finer grained controls of The Atlantic, but that is
still better than 99% of the rest. Though I'm not sure about the wording, it
only says 'advertising cookies'.

------
itronitron
so yeah, if a company considers surveillance of employees' performance to be
documentation of their work for the company then all employees will do is just
be surveilled.

