Some employers use software to remotely monitor employee productivity

As work continues to shift from in-office to remote, employers are finding new ways to keep an eye on their employees without even being in the same building: employee productivity scores. According to a new report from The New York Times, some of the largest companies in the country are starting to use software that tracks how productive their employees are.

The shift to remote monitoring is taking place against the background of declining overall worker productivity due to the pandemic and a continued strong labor market. While the monitoring software could theoretically help companies keep their employees on the job, the way they measure productivity can overlook work done from the computer and cause employees to miss out on pay.

“The problem is the measurements are wrong,” said Jodi Kanter, who co-wrote the story with Arya Sundaram for the New York Times. She spoke to Marketplace Morning Reportt host David Brancaccio about her findings.

Below is an edited transcript of their conversation:

David Brancaccio: I think many of us knew that Amazon keeps a close eye on its warehouse workers, fulfillment center employees. But it’s not just Amazon, you thought. There is a growing industry in helping companies keep track of how much time we are banging on the keyboard?

Jodi Kantor: Well, and not only that, but this migrates up to clerical work. We were honestly quite shocked to find out that therapists are rated by “idle time,” meaning you know how much time they’re not clicking on their keyboard. We found people with MBAs who were only paid for the minutes they were active on the computer. And we found engineers who had to submit to full-time monitoring if they wanted to work from home. And so in interviews they said the kinds of things that low-income workers have been saying for years, you know, they feel like they’ve lost their agency, that their jobs are ruthless, that they’re out of control.

Brancaccio: You know, what about the thinking time where are the real, high value added things that can take an employee to a higher level at work? Is that checked?

Kanters: Well, so the biggest problem with the software – and listen, a lot of people are arguing for it, there can be a real business case for tracking your workforce very precisely. The problem, however, is that the measurements are wrong. I mean, we just heard crazy stories from employees talking about the discrepancy between the reality of what makes someone great at their job and what these systems measure. You know, when you’re guiding someone, it’s not necessarily captured by these systems, because it doesn’t really make a digital impression.

Brancaccio: And even out there, some systems, you know, these are digital systems, they’re supposed to be precise, they’re not that precise? Don’t they even get it?

Kanters: United Health, for example, is a big, big company, right? It’s, you know, a health and insurance giant. They monitored therapists and social workers for so-called idle time, meaning if their keyboards were idle, the idle time would increase, [which] would even affect their pay [and] their chance of a bonus. What some of these social workers and therapists told us, however, is that their free time piled up because they had sensitive conversations with or about patients. So the systems said they were idle, when in fact they were doing the most important parts of their job.

Brancaccio: Are these systems developed in-house? Or is there a growing industry in providing this kind of software?

Kanters: Both, but part of the reason this story took so long is that this isn’t one technology like Facebook, you know, where we can take a closer look at one platform. In fact, there’s, we called the story “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score” because it’s like there’s a million different pieces of software and widgets and tracking systems. They vary quite a bit in terms of how visible they are and how they work. But they are all meant to do the same. They are designed to help your employer keep track of whether you are working hard or not.

Brancaccio: You alluded to this, but let me just be clear. With remote work, fair enough, right? Define and measure success. You don’t want to fool the people you are responsible for. But it sounds like a lot of this has to be a more sophisticated idea of ​​what you’re measuring.

Kanters: Well, we’ve really heard a lot of stories about remote work cheating. They were quite extraordinary. David, it never occurred to me that with remote working, some people can double their employer and take more than one job at a time and get paid for both. We even found cases of remote workers who outsourced their work to lower-paid workers and they took up the difference. And then of course, like a lot of people, you know, taking naps or watching porn or whatever. There is no doubt that in every industry there are expired people, but as you say, we found that there were also people who were very hard workers and were punished by inaccurate software.

Brancaccio: We meet in your report a hospice chaplain, Rev. Richardson, I believe, there to help when someone is approaching the end of their life. The chaplain’s productivity was monitored and – am I entitled to this – going to a funeral while the person was already dead got higher brownie points in the system than visiting the person while alive?

Kanters: So this is one of the things that scares us the most. We’re calling on New York Times readers to ask about productivity monitoring. And David, we heard from hospice chaplains in different states, like these people weren’t coordinating, they were just writing to us. And you know, we were like, what’s going on? So we called more and more hospice chaplains. And the example we’re giving is actually a nonprofit system in Minnesota, they were already tracking productivity. But two years ago, during the pandemic, they introduced a stricter system with higher point totals. It’s not overnight supervision like some employees have done. They had to project their point total, as you say, you know, everything had a value, 0.25 points for a call of condolence, as little as one point for visiting the dying. And then at the end of the day, the software would calculate whether they had met those totals. The problem they said is that death totally defied planning. So, you know, they would go for the day, and you know, people would cancel them or have emotional breakdowns, or they would die. And they felt that instead of just dealing with those circumstances, in a very clean way, in a way that reflected their calling and why they were doing this work, they were instead concerned about their point total.

Brancaccio: And Jodi, your piece has been out in the world for a few days now. Are there early signs that the stories are prompting a re-evaluation of this productivity monitoring approach?

Kanters: We see so much discussion, David. We received thousands of responses from readers. And in fact, there is one company that changed its policy right after the story came out. So we will write more about that in the newspaper soon.