Her Metrics Were the Best in the Office, but a New Monitoring Order Left Her Re-Evaluating Her Future at the Company
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Being the top performer in a company is usually a position of strength, not a reason to feel targeted by a new policy you had no hand in creating.
One call center employee was five weeks into a job and already outperforming everyone else with over 800 calls handled and the most jobs booked.
So when new management passed down a questionable surveillance mandate for all remote employees, she started to question whether the job was right for her.
The worst part was that there was an obvious performance gap already visible across the team, some coworkers logging half as many calls, others regularly stepping away with vague excuses about their kids.
You’ll want to keep reading for this one.
Management wants cameras on during entire shift.
I’ve been with this company for five weeks: one week of training and four weeks on the phones at a call center.
By my second week, our manager was fired, and two people from the office stepped in temporarily while they search for a permanent manager.
Soon the new management brought some pretty questionable ideas to the table.
Tomorrow’s meeting is about our quarterly results, but apparently ownership also wants to discuss requiring everyone to keep their cameras on during their entire shift, with a daily Slack call running in the background.
Honestly, I find the idea pretty insulting. I understand accountability, but being constantly monitored feels more like a control issue than a solution.
Her performance really doesn’t warrant much supervision.
The funny thing is that, based on the numbers, I’m currently the top performer in the entire call center. I’ve handled over 800 calls in four weeks and booked more jobs than anyone else. The second-highest performer has been there for about four months.
The performance gap is also pretty obvious.
She can’t really say the same about her coworkers’ work ethic.
A few people are handling roughly half as many calls as the top performers, while others regularly disappear with messages like, “BRB, my son woke up” or “Code brown, gotta take care of my kid.” I don’t want to judge people’s personal situations, but the numbers clearly show that some people are doing significantly less work.
And just using remote work to be less present at work.
This employee now finds herself in a tough spot.
So I’m not sure what to do. I need the money, and the pay is good for me, especially since I get paid weekly. I’m not desperate enough to quit, but I also wasn’t expecting to suddenly have to deal with constant camera monitoring after only five weeks with the company.
I’m going to see what they actually say in tomorrow’s meeting before making any decisions.
This is a textbook example of micromanaging.
What did Reddit think?
It’s best to ask some clarifying questions before rushing into any decisions.
This user thinks management is taking things too far.
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Why not comply maliciously?
Surveilling your employees can become a slippery slope.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a grandson who is tired of driving 5 hours one way to work on his grandparent’s investment property for free.
Getting swept up in a company-wide accountability push, despite being the clear outlier in a good way, is genuinely frustrating, but it says more about management’s inability to address individual performance issues than anything about her own work.
The performance gap she’s already noticed, some people handling half the calls, others vanishing mid-shift, is exactly the kind of thing that eventually forces leadership into broad, blunt solutions instead of targeted ones.
Still, that doesn’t make the camera policy feel less like overkill for someone booking more jobs than anyone else in the building.
If things don’t start turning around soon, she might have to take her skills elsewhere.
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