Do you feel cheated by your n + 1? On the other side of the Atlantic, the American bank Wells Fargo dismissed around ten employees whom it suspected of “simulating their activity using a computer keyboard”. In their quest for productivity, American companies no longer hesitate to look very closely at the digital activity of their employees. In the era of teleworking, where managers can no longer have their eyes fixed on their teams, all means are good for monitoring those suspected of being idle.
Since the Covid crisis, employers have increasingly used “tattleware”: spyware to monitor the computer desk, GPS location or even the use of peripherals such as keyboards. In its lines, the Harvard Business Review magazine revealed that a Florida company had software capturing the screen of its employees every 10 minutes: hello trust.
Tips for dodging the patrol
To get around this intense control, employees have a whole arsenal at their disposal, such as simulators that fake mouse movements, so that the computer does not go into standby mode. On Youube and Tiktok, the tips never end: fake PowerPoint presentations to go to sleep in peace, tutorials to equip yourself with a program that imitates the movement of the mouse (we talk about “mouse jigglers”)… It’s the famous keyboard fraud tracked by the companies in Uncle Sam’s country.
As the layoffs at Wells Fargo show, these budding conjurers are at risk. But the world of work is not a professional sports career, where you analyze statistics after each match to judge your performance. And this way of judging productivity by clicks/days would be counterproductive: “Rather than stimulating innovation and trust, this approach will only push employees to find new ways to appear busy,” said AFP AJ Mizes, formerly of Facebook and boss of a consulting company, who criticizes this “worrying trend towards excessive surveillance”. In France, the CNIL prohibits the use of such control methods, except in exceptional circumstances. Like me, you can continue to type on your keyboard in the local coffee shop or from your bed without fearing the Eye of Sauron… for now.