Makes me glad I no longer work in grey, boring offices.
I’ll put my badge in a lead box.
It wasn’t essentially useless since FT gets a lot of good publicity.
I worked for a bunch of paranoids. The CEO was half nuts, while the COO was completely crazy. The office was bugged, taped and monitored remotely.
I lasted four months before I quit. Keeping track of performance is one thing. Monitoring for every single casual remark or wisecrack is Winston Smith territory.
Anyone who wants to downsize government should push for this technology in the federal workplace. Many of those people do almost nothing. That’s not just an expression — it’s fact. Many federal employees, even some high in the food chain, are just barely showing up. They’ve got 15 years or so to retirement, and they are in full “coasting” mode.
Get evidence that they are ripping off the taxpayer, and get rid of them. (Federal Employee Unions should be illegal, IMO.)
Companies that let employees relax, come in when they want, and hang out, generate more loyalty. You’re going to have less turnover, and when things get ugly more folks will stay later and get more done. Now obviously you still have to hire the right people, but you’ll KEEP those people. Slave grinding companies have high turnover, and no ability to pull together for the big win. They can’t hire the right people, because the right people hear about that place and stay far away.
Its like the NSA
No corporation will have the manpower or spend the money to actually monitor employees in real-time. Rather, like the NSA, the data will be stored somewhere, and when they want to fire you, they can go back and bring up every coffee-break and comment.
Ah, another Music Man. It might sound appealing to control freak bosses but if and when the job market tilts away from employers - and chances of that have improved greatly - the grapevine will quickly identify those companies with oppressive, even paranoid environments.
They did this because of issues with people showing up, or showing up long enough to hang their coats up in their offices/cubicles then taking off to do something else. What they found was more than 40% of the people they "monitored" would spend entire days not sitting at their desks. Combined with the data from the card readers, they found people walking in, placing their coats, then either swiping out or "tailgating" someone else leaving the office so they didn't have to swipe out.
All this happened because those of us in the U.S. complained vigorously about never being able to reach our counterparts in London and Guernsey and getting stuck with doing their work on top of ours.
Eventually a number of people in London and Guernsey were let go (EU's strict labor laws made that extremely difficult!) and those jobs came back to the U.S.
Well, the "jobs" did, the people to fill those jobs didn't and we're still stuck doing all that work....
I worked in a place like that. When I left, bomb threats were common. I was very happy to leave.