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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)

#21

Post by CuriousSkeptic »

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, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive

Is this a cultural thing? As a Swede I can’t even begin to imagine the scenario where this statement makes any sense

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

#22

Post by kmatthews812 »

JoBrad wrote: post #14
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 yo…

"As a manager, I feel that using metrics from productivity tools to measure productivity is lazy and counter productive."

I agree, if that is the only way you measure productivity. These tools create a more holistic view of what a person does at work and should not be the sole measure of performance.

In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days. Graphs that shows no work for long stretches make performance conversations much easier. It's tough for a poor worker to argue their way out of that or fake the metrics going forward.

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

#23

Post by Silhouette »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #20

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…

Meanwhile in 2023 a favourite argument of management who want everyone back in the office is that it's essential to have those casual interactions around the watercooler. When of course your keyboard and mouse won't be used at all.

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

#24

Post by SkyPuncher »

Silhouette wrote: post #19
SkyPuncher wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess I tend to consider inputs and outputs the same in the context of most of these metrics.

From the viewpoint of outcomes, everything beyond outputs is simply too obscured to make sense of.

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

#25

Post by gchamonlive »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #20

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…

> Quit the bad ones, join the good ones.

This is why universal income is extremely important, so that people can pursue better jobs without risking being vulnerable.

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

#26

Post by wizzwizz4 »

Silhouette wrote: post #9
joezydeco wrote: post #6

Now that Microsoft owns LinkedIn, I wouldn't trust them one bit to keep your activity there away from your employer. It would be really easy to correlate your sentiment analysis on Teams/email against your LI messaging traffic.

Fortunately in at least some parts of the world providing personal data based on use of LinkedIn to a third party like an employer who happened to use other Microsoft products would clearly violate legal data protection rules and potentially land both Microsoft and the employer with expensive penalties. It's not the same situation as an employer providing an IT facility to their own employees so they can do their job…

> and potentially land both Microsoft and the employer with expensive penalties.

Yeah, but that's not going to happen for another few quarters, and it'll come out of some other department's budget.

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

#27

Post by ResearchCode »

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…

That's not a trade-off you have to make. There are full remote jobs with no surveillance.

Workplace surveillance needs to be regulated swiftly and strongly.

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

#28

Post by wizzwizz4 »

kmatthews812 wrote: post #22
JoBrad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

"As a manager, I feel that using metrics from productivity tools to measure productivity is lazy and counter productive." I agree, if that is the only way you measure productivity. These tools create a more holistic view of what a person does at work and should not be the sole measure of performance. In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days. Graphs that shows no work for…

> In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days.

I am that worker. I've been praised for "carrying the team" on more than one occasion. If I'm doing my job to a high standard, why is this any of your business?

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

#29

Post by gchamonlive »

Silhouette wrote: post #16
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 reasonab…

I think the problem is more fundamental than just what "data says". I think in a sense the way you measure things carry a lot of information, of course, but the resulting data in itself doesn't tell anything without context. A good book that I think illustrates this is How to Lie With Statistics, by Darrel Huff.
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