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WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

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Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#11

Post by SkyPuncher »

DANmode wrote: post #8
kmatthews812 wrote: post #7

Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past. These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environmen…

Benefit of surveillance over checking their deliverables, go.

Yep, management best practice is “Outcomes over Outputs”.

Nearly every performance tool I’ve seen only measures outputs. Now, outputs are critical to outcomes - but they’re not the goal themselves.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#12

Post by BlargMcLarg »

kmatthews812 wrote: post #7

Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past. These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environmen…

You can already do this in any decent devops system/management software without the surveillance.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#13

Post by troad »

kmatthews812 wrote: post #7

Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past. These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environmen…

> With a good manager, you should be able to simply do your job and the metrics, in context, take care of themselves.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#14

Post by JoBrad »

kmatthews812 wrote: post #7

Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past. These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environmen…

As a manager, I feel that using metrics from productivity tools to measure productivity is lazy and counter productive. If your team is so large that you can’t measure productivity without using these cheats, then your team is too large for you to manage. But you’re also ignoring the fact that people work in different ways, and may be just as productive without generating the metrics you’re looking for. And before you tell me you can just taper the metrics, why not just spend time with your team setting goals that can be measured in an open and direct way?

In my opinion, all these tools do is reward employees that work the way you do, which may improve stats on your metrics, but will encourage group think and diminish creativity.

Happy to be proved wrong, with some facts.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#15

Post by waiseristy »

kmatthews812 wrote: post #7

Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past. These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environmen…

You could also replace the phrase “hold accountable” with “micromanage” and be just as accurate.

If you hire slackers, be prepared to be amazed at how much work they’ll do to bypass your micromanaging. It’s a race to the bottom

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#16

Post by Silhouette »

cebert wrote: post #5

I don’t have an issue being monitored if it means I can work from home more frequently. I think the data would help highlight that I’m more productive working from home than in the office due to less distractions and wasted commute time. It would be helpful if firms monitoring productivity mentioned what they consider productivity to be. However, in doing this, it would also make it easy for individuals to game any p…

This is the eternal problem with all such metrics. What the data actually says and what someone looking at it thinks it says can be very different things. And yet decisions will necessarily be made based on the latter and that can lead to bad decisions.

We could all live in a beautiful world with near-total honesty and little need to protect privacy. We just need the entire human race to be reliably fair and reasonable about every possible issue and to make decisions that affect others only based on a complete and entirely accurate set of relevant facts. Shouldn't be too hard.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#17

Post by bavent »

cebert wrote: post #5

I don’t have an issue being monitored if it means I can work from home more frequently. I think the data would help highlight that I’m more productive working from home than in the office due to less distractions and wasted commute time. It would be helpful if firms monitoring productivity mentioned what they consider productivity to be. However, in doing this, it would also make it easy for individuals to game any p…

I don’t get why it matters where you join a meeting from. If you’re in bed, so what? You’re still on the meeting aren’t you? If I can do my job perfectly fine sitting poolside, and still hit all my metrics, does it matter that I’m at a pool and not sitting at a desk?

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#18

Post by throwaway2056 »

kmatthews812 wrote: post #7

Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past. These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environmen…

Please don't give such justification. Power corrupts, misuse.

- Would you also allow your team mates to know same data about you to them?

- That would be a level playing field.

- Or at least MS tools should 'automatically' report to the User that an Admin did LOOK into their habits.

- This way you will not have intelligent people working in your team. I am saddened that Google does this.

- Are your teammates aware that you can do this?

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#19

Post by Silhouette »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #11
DANmode wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benefit of surveillance over checking their deliverables, go.

Yep, management best practice is “Outcomes over Outputs”. Nearly every performance tool I’ve seen only measures outputs. Now, outputs are critical to outcomes - but they’re not the goal themselves.

It's worse than that. A lot of these management tools don't even measure outputs, only inputs, and then only partially and with doubtful predictive value.

Re: WFH – Watched from Home: Office 365 and workplace surveillance creep (2022)

#20

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

Nearly 20 years ago we used to install monitoring software to tell if a user's mouse or keyboard hadn't been used in a while. More and more places use traffic inspection "for security". Desks now use sensors to tell when warm bodies are near. Doesn't matter whether you're working from office or in the home, surveillance is here to stay.

Good businesses should only care if work is getting accomplished. Bad businesses will continue to use draconian methods to try to squeeze productivity rather than foster it. Quit the bad ones, join the good ones.

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