Source: Pexels/Reddit
Working remotely is often assumed to be easier because of its flexibility, but in recent years, many have found it to be more challenging than they initially expected. Managing the increasing demands of insatiable bosses is often a larger burden for remote workers to carry than those who continued to work in the office.
How would you handle your work implementing asinine remote productivity measures? One guy recently aired his grievances about his own job to Reddit. Here’s what he said.
My workplace introduced a new “productivity metric” that literally measures how long my mouse isn’t moving
I work in data entry at a mid-sized insurance firm, been there about three years, mostly remote.
The work itself is repetitive but manageable and I’ve never had any complaints about my output.
Seems like one of those jobs where the end result is all that matters.
Last month they rolled out new monitoring software called something like “WorkTrack Pro” and had an all-hands call to explain it.
The main thing it does is track “active time” which apparently means time when your mouse is moving or you’re typing.
Periods longer than four minutes with no input register as “idle” and get flagged on a weekly report that goes to your line manager.
There’s simply no way that’s the best solution here.
They called this a “transparency initiative.”
The immediate practical problem is that my job involves reading documents and cross-referencing information between two different systems.
One of which is a legacy database from approximately 2009 that takes about 35 seconds to load each record.
Sounds like someone in C-Suite didn’t think this through.
I spend a lot of time reading and thinking and waiting for things to load.
None of this generates mouse movement.
I had my first weekly report come back with 23% “idle time” flagged on Tuesday.
He’s just trying to do his job effectively…
Which my manager forwarded to me with the subject line “Let’s chat about this” and a meeting invitation for Thursday at 11am.
During that 23% idle time I had processed 340 records, which is more than my daily target, and I had the timestamps to prove it.
The Thursday meeting was me showing my manager a screen recording of a normal work session which included me reading a 6-page claim document, waiting for the database to load three separate times, and typing the results.
Not exactly the productive use of time I’m sure the manager was hoping for.
He watched it, said “Yeah okay I see what you mean,” and then said the metric still needed to stay because it had been rolled out company-wide and removing it for individuals would create inconsistency.
He suggested I could: “try to keep the mouse moving a bit more during reading periods” to keep the numbers looking better.
That’s a deeply unserious suggestion.
I want to be clear that a senior manager at an insurance company looked me in the eye and told me to wiggle my mouse while reading to trick the productivity software our company just paid for.
I now have a browser tab open with a very slow-moving screensaver that I put in the corner of my second monitor.
My idle time this week was 2%.
Many people could benefit from that life hack.
My output is identical.
Nobody has said anything.
If you can’t beat the system- at least learn to hack it. Let’s see how the Reddit comments chimed in on this one.
One person voiced a controversial, but reasonable take.
Someone else quickly simplified the issue.
Another felt escalating the situation was in order.
If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a contractor who flew along way and spent 3 days on a fix only to find a breaker that needed to be flipped.
The lack of nuance was duly noted.
And malicious compliance was highly encouraged.
What’s measured gets managed…but not in this case.