Every Click You Make....I Will Be Watching You
Of late, I have been having interesting conversations around the future of work and the role of management. It is a fascinating subject. Some CEOs like Mr. Musk have required (almost) all employees to return to the office fully; some CEOs are testing hybrid schedules, and some like Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman are encouraging full remote work. Yesterday there was a news report on IBM Consulting ordering staff "back to the office for at least three days a week." Productivity data, however, seems to indicate higher productivity for remote work, but managers trained on "management by sight" and "trust what you see" are distrustful of remote workers. In a Digital.com?survey of 1,250 employers in the U.S. 60% of companies with remote workers indicated tracking employee activity and productivity using monitoring software. The New York Times had an interesting article titled "There’s (Probably) Nothing You Can Do About the New Bossware That’s Spying on You." Gleb Tsipursky, writing in Forbes, suggests "week-to-week" management to address distrust of remote workers.
However, it appears that employee monitoring is here to stay, and perhaps increase in scope and scale. The drive to gather "more data" to train the AI/ML models is too strong to resist! So what is one left to do? Perhaps realize that we will all be working for a "Police" employer who subscribes to the famous song:
Every Click You Make
Everything You Share
Every site you see
Every call you make
I will be watching you
(due apologies to The Police for altering their classic)
Copyright of Steve Greenberg.