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Workplace monitoring and productivity rules should apply to everyone.

In this story, an IT employee was asked to track the internet history of every worker in the company to measure productivity.

He did, and he found out that the call center employees were indeed using their time browsing social media and other personal stuff.

But he thought this was normal and boring.

What he found out next was more intriguing and revealed some surprising browsing habits about the founder and president of the company.

Aren’t you intrigued, too? Read the full story below to find out more.

I Was Asked to Monitor Employee Productivity. I Wasn’t Told to Exclude Management.

I once worked as the IT guy for an HR company.

The founder and president became convinced that the sales call center was wasting too much time on the internet.

These were already the lowest-paid people in the company.

But apparently, the solution to that problem was finding reasons to pay them even less.

This IT officer followed the instructions he was given.

In order not to single out any one department, he wanted browser history reporting on everyone in the company.

So managers and HR could review it during weekly performance meetings.

So I complied. I wrote a scheduled task that scraped browser history from every Windows machine on the company domain

Then, I stored it centrally and fed it into a management portal along with the employees’ information.

He thought the call center employees’ browsing habits were too common and boring.

The first reports came in. The call center employees were… surprisingly boring.

Sure, there was Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon.

And the occasional person apparently conducting extensive research into things that definitely weren’t part of their job.

But overall, they were pretty tame. Then HR started looking at everyone else’s reports.

That’s when things got interesting.

He found the founder’s browsing history more intriguing.

The browsing history of the founder, owner, and president was absolutely spectacular. So much adult content!

Like, this man has a sickness level.

And while I wasn’t particularly surprised, I had worked on his home computer before.

I already knew about his rather enthusiastic browsing habits.

I had never expected to see it neatly categorized in the same productivity dashboard he’d demanded for his employees.

HR asked him to stop monitoring the founder’s internet activities.

A few days later, HR asked me if I could exclude certain people from the reports.

I asked who. They gave me a list.

The president was at the top.

Funny how quickly the company’s commitment to objective productivity metrics disappeared when the metrics became objective.

Yikes! Who thought that the founder’s productivity policy would actually expose his own browsing habits? Lol.

That’s really funny and ironic, considering he was the one accusing the employees of doing non-related work during their shifts.

Then, requesting to exclude certain people, including him, made the whole “objective” monitoring system look pretty questionable.

Don’t you think so? Let’s read the responses of other people on this story.

This user shares a suggestion.

Here’s an honest opinion.

Short and simple.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a customer who can’t seem to come to grips with the fact that her reward points will not cover a purchase.

This one makes a valid point.

That’s a security concern, says this one.

Sometimes, internet browsing history comes with a plot twist.