In the 23rd month of the pandemic, the home office has gone from being a novelty to the rule. According to rough estimates, up to 500 million office workers worldwide have been home workers at the same time over the last two years, depending on which region of the world the corona waves were rising or subsiding in. While there was a lot of improvisation in the first and even the second wave of infections due to a lack of experience, there are now routines that make working from home easier. New colleagues are hired via video conference and terminate via the same. Even the most banal office rituals have been relocated to the new and equally reliably banal world of virtuality. It could have been so beautiful. If it weren’t for the superiors.
According to a recent study, 60 percent of German companies have either already introduced measures to control employee productivity since switching to hybrid forms of work or are planning to introduce them. This includes, for example, the monitoring of incoming e-mails, the use of webcams for video surveillance or software that measures whether the employee is also typing regularly or moving his mouse.
And the observer is not at all sure what surprises him more: the sheer audacity of the surveillance itself or rather what a simple, almost Tayloristic understanding of productivity it reveals. As if value creation in the knowledge society could be measured by mechanical movement.
A cacophony of productivity signals should convince the boss that the employee is really busy
There seems to be an arms race between suspicious decision-makers who can hardly stand the perceived loss of control, and the employees who put up with a lot but not everything. Acting out productivity has now become an art form.
The ingenuity is enormous. There is the website, for example http://busysimulator.com. Here you can call up the notification tones of all common messaging programs such as Outlook, Whatsapp, Slack or Microsoft Teams as a sample – and also set how often it should ring. The result is a cacophony of productivity signals that should convince even the most suspicious boss that the employee is really busy.
Already a little older but still worth mentioning the so-called Zoom Escaper. A program that deliberately degrades its own audio transmission in the style of a bad data connection. Here, too, there are additionally playable audio snippets, which should give the impression that it really doesn’t fit right now: an echo, construction site noise or a crying baby.
As always, the boundaries between performance art and serious application are fluid. So-called mouse jigglers are to be taken more seriously. This is an oval bowl on which the home office worker can place his mouse, which is then shaken at irregular intervals. According to manufacturers, there has been a real boom in devices since the outbreak of the pandemic. Such a device costs just under 30 euros. But at least it is then possible to go to the toilet again in the home office without the boss getting wind of it.