The surveillance tech waiting for workers as they return to the office

Warehouse-style employee tracking technology is coming for the office worker.

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[Shanrak]

This is super infuriating. One way to measure productivity, GDP per capita, of the workforce has never been higher in history but almost none of the benefits of that increased productivity has flown down to improve work/life balance. Instead, it has all gone into historic profit levels which overwhelmingly benefits the few at the top.

 

[FSTargetDrone]

I predict the usual trend: a lot of companies buy this shit, eventually realize how much money it's costing them (no B2B services are a "one and done" payment, they are all perpetual costs), see that productivity isn't improving to make up the difference, and eventually stop.

Good to be an installer then.

 

[Drop table users;]

The people who dream up these nightmares should be flogged in the street.
Modern day technological slave drivers.

 

[Navalia Vigilate]

The only thing an employer needs to track is if assigned duties are being completed. Past that, who cares about "time theft"?

People who do not know how to manage people. Micromanagement is the failure to teach leaders to lead and people how to work within the culture of the place they work in.

There is an assumption that seems to pervade common understandings about what a leader/manager is and that there are natural ones. There are not. At some point a good manager/leader has learned skills that make them a good person to do that job. Sometimes it is instilled in them by parents with good leadership skills, sometimes it is from a teacher, sometimes it is from a coach, most of the time people receive no skills necessary to make them a good manager. And critically they have received additional mentorship at each workplace to help encourage and enforce when necessary the appropriate culture that creates a good work place and motivates staff. Leaders learn skills, then they apply them. No one wakes up a leader.

I've learned that DEI often teaches managers to be leaders; here is what a good DEI program does. It teaches people to lead each and every person on their team, department, and division. Good people leaders think about their staff, the achievements necessary at the company, and how to best motivate and lead those people to success to move the company towards its goals. It creates a positive environment that brings everyone along towards a goal. I'm an older white male and I work in a DEI workplace, I get raises, bonuses, training, accomplishment recogniztion in corporate email and in meetings, and offered promotions. I feel like I'm in a real meritocracy for the first time in my career. The anti-DEI rage is a smokescreen for bare knuckled racism and sexism.

Return To Office (RTO) is for managers that suck at their jobs.

 

[forkspoon]

I can’t wait for this! Specifically, to be used on President Musk, and that creepy figurehead Trump guy. They’d be fired in two weeks.

Heck, if you include historical data, they’d be fired immediately and with cause. Just be sure to put sensors on the golf course and anywhere that’s good for a quick ketamine bump.

 

[mozbo]

... there is a deep feature of human psychology that is reciprocity. If you don’t trust me, I’m not going to trust you. You think an employee who doesn’t trust the boss is going to be working with the same enthusiasm?

It goes far deeper than just distrust. These systems dehumanize employees, reducing them to a numbers on a spreadsheet.

When one group dehumanizes another, the target group will dehumanize their attacker right back. This cycle always ends in violence. Always.

It's happening in healthcare management, right now, in real time. Patients are dehumanized, reduced to a set of costs and premiums. Healthcare CEOs can (literally, thanks to Evicore) turn a widget on a computer screen to "reduce costs" in exchange for increased profits.

One tiny bubble popped in December with the shooting of the HCA CEO, but the dehumanizing systems have not been dismantled, so the underlying tension continues to grow. The healthcare situation is actually a minimum violence situation. Patients' ability to fight back is limited by their disabilities, both directly from physical limitations, and indirectly because disabilities and illness cause isolation. Bedridden grannies and exhausted caretakers rarely take to the streets.

The results of unleashing a dehumanization cycle on the working population, which is generally healthy and capable of fighting back, are easy to predict. Those results will come faster and be far more extreme than in healthcare.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Guillotines. That is all.

Mario is Missing.

 

[RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha]

I asked our facilities dept on "what do you do with the data you collect". The mgr looked at me like that meme German Shepard, "Huh?". I said, "you have sensors in our offices to detect movement so the HVAC comes on or off, and the lighting turns on or off. Where does that data go? is it stored? Shared? " ... He had no idea, just that its more about "LEED ratings and energy saving compliance". I think he's right. But I would like that data scrubbed after a year... or access so I can show in my "Performance Review" that yes, I came to the office and and hour early every day, and left on time."
Our University is so stingy with energy/heating/cooling and yet buildings so old that every dept has space heaters. And I have to trick the thermostats with freon (inverted canned air) during the Winter, or a candle during the Summer. Bet those stats show some really big swings in our wing!

"You aren't saving ANYTHING by intimidating staff, distrust and tracking. Instead you are wasting money, resources and energy BY tracking, using 3rd party companies to outsource monitoring and gains of negativity."

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Simple, since the company is employing (non contract) the individual (i.e. paying) its explicit that they have the right to decide a proper level of productivity.

If you want to change the power dynamic, perhaps start a business and manage your own time/money. If you employee people as part of that business, please do circle back and let us know your opinion of your employees ghosting during the agreed work schedule.

Typical nonsense, and totally irrelevent. If they want me to do more than what they told me to do, they can pay me more. If they want every second of my spare time when I'm done with the tasks assigned, that's that.

Stop supporting this vampiric nonsense. I'm sick of this selfish reasoning, and the "oh you can just QUIT" stuff. This is why unions happen, so that we can all, collectively, stop working and renegotiate a deal that doesn't involve "just starting my own company", as if that's feasible for every disgruntled employee.
What the hell do YOU do, huh? Justify yourself, and try not to fall back to tired cliches invented in the 1950's.

 

[Yep It's Me]

History says no.

Not sure what history book you've read. The rise of unions. The American revolution. The French revolution. Etc etc etc. History is replete with instances of people becoming upset enough to "do something about it".

The only real questions are ... When will that uprising happen? How violent will it be? Will it just push the capitalism monster back a bit or result in a full-on political upheaval as well?

I think @Psyborgue 's comment about guillotines might be prescient.

 

[bsneeze]

Simple, since the company is employing (non contract) the individual (i.e. paying) its explicit that they have the right to decide a proper level of productivity.

If you want to change the power dynamic, perhaps start a business and manage your own time/money. If you employee people as part of that business, please do circle back and let us know your opinion of your employees ghosting during the agreed work schedule.

how’s that boot taste

 

[AlStar]

Ha - little do they know that I'm perfectly able to commit "time theft" while sitting at my desk - take that, movement monitoring!

 

[Oldnoobguy]

Slightly off topic, but I have to comment on the mention of Splunk in TFA. I have years of experience with Splunk at every level from administration to designing dashboards. At the core Splunk is a tool that can slurp up any well formatted text file into a MongoDB database. One can then use its search tools to query everything in that database to create alerts, reports and dashboards. The Splunk search language is far easier to learn and more powerful than SQL. Simply put, if data is on a computer, Splunk can pull that into a central location.

My experience with Splunk has been in highly regulated financial services. Access control has always been a primary concern. Splunk offers robust user/group controls that can be mapped to AD. The thing is setting these restrictions up requires serious thought and expertise including deciding access rules to indexes, dashboards and the myriad of tools Splunk offers. That Musk and his merry band of juveniles is putting Splunk on government computers gives me nightmares. Splunk is relatively easy to set up, but complicated to properly administer. With Splunk every bit of data on every government computer can be made accessible from one web interface. This is a fucking nightmare, not just for the government workers, but anyone who has data in government hands. That means all of us.

I'm now seriously considering drinking myself into oblivion. Shit!!!

 

[MacCruiskeen]

Pay me more, then give me specific additional tasks for that additional pay.

You are one of the small minority of workers that gets a choice. They would like to eliminate that minority.

 

[DownAndGoing]

So, company resources are tight because they "have to" chase an AI boom that has limited utility for most businesses and almost certainly loses them money. But it's employees "stealing" time that are being targeted for efficiency gains? Wouldn't it be most efficient to just fire the execs who decided to chase trends instead of focusing on the core business?

 

[egbert65]

I'm utterly delighted that I retired early.

What this will do - apart from remove any last vestiges of loyalty or conscientiousness from any remaining employees with functioning brains - is provoke a truly dazzling outbreak of ingenious ways to fool, con, cheat and generally outsmart The Man and his ridiculous software.

 

[mozbo]

It seems management have major trust issues these days.

I'm sure that there are "bad employees". There always have been. But we have existing systems to handle that - mostly procedural, managed by HR.
No technology needed, you just set & communicate goals and then support the employee in accomplishing them. If they don't meet the goals, then you let them go.

Given this, the obvious question is now: What technology can we have that will allow us to find the bad managers?

We all know that they exist. But none of this technology seems to be aimed at them, and I'm sure that when someone asks them about their presence history they'll complain that they're having their time wasted...

Maybe we need AI systems to monitor their calendars and attendance, and tell us if they're effective or not? Surely it's worth a try?

Of course, it won't happen. This is a manufactured crisis, aimed at selling useless products and services to managers. So anything targeting them is a non-starter.

<snip>

I partially disagree with that last paragraph. These cough "services" are aimed at owners and managers who want (consciously or otherwise) to control and dehumanize employees.

Just look at the opening line line in the PR copy, that talks about "time theft". It casts all employees as thieves. Exactly how GOP propaganda casts all immigrants as criminals. That parallel is not a coincidence.

As a tool for dehumanization, these products will be very effective. So there will be a market amongst owners/managers, regardless of their effect on the bottom line.

The situation is very much parallel to health insurance. Single-payer / universal healthcare are provably far cheaper and better. Yet owners/managers are almost uniformly against it purely for reasons of control and dehumanization, despite the massive effect on the bottom line.

 

[MacScuba]

I'm glad I'm retired.

 

[mmiller7]

This will also provide information to the underlings about how much time the high-up execs spend in their office vs on a golf course or home........right?

As a team lead, I do everything possible to lead by example - and not expect anything of my team under me that I wouldn't put in the effort to do myself.

Biometrics stuff would drive me nuts...every time I have to interact with fingerprint reader stuff its like pulling teeth to get it to register and frequently seems to claim I'm not myself, especially in winter or after I've been doing work on cars or yard equipment at home and got my hands torn up. Really maddening.

 

[equals42]

You think you’re getting access to proprietary company data once they’re done running all regulatory bodies and labor rights into the dirt?

Most companies should be wary of keeping all the data this article talks about. This is ripe for discovery subpoenas in all kinds of cases. A manager accused of sexual harassment could have all this info requested in a subpoena to see if he was in the supply closet with X or hung out at X’s desk more than other desks. Or which people were detected to be in a meeting where it’s alleged <insert crime/activity> was discussed. Most companies are trimming email and record retention to reduce their exposure to discovery. Keeping detailed records on individuals like this would be a nightmare in some cases.

 

[Cryxx]

I had one of these under the desk proximity monitors (all of IT did) when a new SVP tried to remove remote work at a company I was in 2017.

Thing is. they moved the call center next to us while they redid their area of the office. Those workers didn't respect assigned seating, they came in and sat in any desk.
I was working remote due to this because I could not work in the literal middle of a call center.
My mgr new this and didn't care where I worked.

I was in the office 'every' day. Because my spot was in a corner and someone from the call center would sit there every day.

The trackers were to find out who not coming into the office 3 days a week. They used that for non-compliance firings. My co-workers desk across from me, same thing. I told him so.

I still got laid off later because they had ear marked my position during an acquisition ages ago as not needed when they re-sold the product line I was originally doing Security admin for.

at least I got severance pkg from it. My co-worker was offered early retirement and had 6 months to decide, then they laid him off same time as me, and said if you want severance sign this NDA by X date.

He got a lawyer, and said "it was so worth it"

 

[PsychoArs]

The only thing an employer needs to track is if assigned duties are being completed. Past that, who cares about "time theft"?

I am 99% in agreement, but I always try to see the other side of the coin.

Employers do need some degree of feedback to know if an employee has been given too many or too few duties. That someone completes their duties only reveals they aren't given too many. Idle time is a way to reveal they've got too few.

Obviously increasing workload to zero idle time will negatively impact quality of work and is dumb, dumb, dumb. And obviously this tech is creepy.

But the idea of measuring workload does make sense. Used to be managers would wander the halls and just see/hear idle stuff and make a judgement call. This tech lacks nuance.

 

[dr_eeew]

Retirement can't come soon enough!

 

[warblob]

I'm truly glad I'm aging out of this bullshit. The modern corporate workplace is a dystopian nightmare. It's here now.

 

[ZippyPeanut]

OK, Ars: Maybe it's time to give your readers some kind of happy story, something pleasant, something with levity, something goofy. This story (along with most of the news over the past few months) made me want to stab my eyeballs out with a red-hot poker.

 

[smallscreensw]

“It’s very tightly regulated and super, super intrusive, and it’s all based on distrust as the starting point,” she says. “What these tech bros don’t understand is that if you install surveillance technology, which is all about distrusting the workers, there is a deep feature of human psychology that is reciprocity. If you don’t trust me, I’m not going to trust you. You think an employee who doesn’t trust the boss is going to be working with the same enthusiasm? I don’t think so.”

That paragraph says it all. The pursuit of "efficency" at the cost of reducing workers to inanimate objects will have costs. "Time theft" is a truly capitalist concept - the notion that if workers aren't dropping dead of exhaustion, they're underperforming is evil.

Managers, "suits", and owners need to be retrained. The pursuit of maximized productivity is going to have toxic consequences.

 

[Emon]

It seems management have major trust issues these days.

They always have, because insecure people seek out positions of power and authority because it gives them a feeling of control. Usually it's because they perceive a lack of control over their own lives and thus controlling others fills that void. Except it never really does, which is why power hungry managers seem to just get worse and worse and meaner and meaner. They keep grasping for control but they're never fixing their problems so they just keep seeking more of it, making everyone, including themselves, fucking miserable.

Like have you ever heard an asshole who's like, "grumble grumble boss is such a dickhead well one day I'LL be the boss and we'll see who's laughing then!" Well when one of those jackasses becomes manager, guess what, their life doesn't magically become good like they thought, everything is still shit and now they have another, bigger asshole of a boss to deal with. And they're angry about it so they take it out on their direct reports.

Insecurity is a HUGE part of corporate culture that I think has not been studied almost at all. Insecure people hide behind power rather than improving themselves. It's why there are so many asshole bosses. Many managers would have you think they're all just "misunderstood," no, they're literally just miserable wretches who whine when criticized.

Edit: Also, I&O psychology doesn't really address this because it assumes corporate culture status quo is somehow a rational thing. The field has a HUUUGE credibility and reproducibility crisis, worse than regular psychology. Turns out a lot of it is just crap research that favors capitalistic status quo. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691823001816

 

[io6060]

Yeah, but who's tracking the managers? I've had 2 good managers in 40 years. The rest have been useless, incompetent ladder climbers mostly with zero experience in the roles they'd achieved.

 

[fenncruz]

I predict the usual trend: a lot of companies buy this shit, eventually realize how much money it's costing them (no B2B services are a "one and done" payment, they are all perpetual costs), see that productivity isn't improving to make up the difference, and eventually stop.

Don't forget getting hacked somewhere in there because it turned out the monitoring software was protected by admin/admin as the username/password and that allowed the attackers access to all systems.

 

[murty]

For a moment, let’s assume that the bean counters implementing these systems are right about the productivity and further that these systems actually curb these so called “wage theft” issues. I bet my boots that amount of money that is “saved” by these systems will never come even remotely close to the hard costs (software/hardware/support/implementation/etc) for these systems, especially once you get your usual 5-10% cost increase every time you renew your contact. Never mind the incalculable soft costs of a system like this (drop in employee morale, drop in retention of your best employees, recruitment issues when people find out they have to work under these systems, etc).

I also suspect that anyone signing off on a system like this that is worth their salt knows this, and it’s really about power and control and not about saving the company money.

I once briefly worked at a software company that required us to track all of our hours down to the minute (billable and non-billable alike) with timer software (turning on/off timers for various productivity buckets, with the exception expectation of hitting 8+ hours a day and a certain percentage being billable) and I quickly realized a few things:

Everyone wasted a ton of time constantly starting and stopping their timers and stressing about trying to at least hit their minimum time requirements, everyone wasted time wasted time at the end of the day trying to figure out where to inflate their daily numbers a little to make sure they hit their minimum time requirements, and that the reason companies like this have all those “cool” office things (like beer kegs, ping pong tables, gyms, rest areas, etc) is because they want it to become your new home so you’ll have leave.

I can’t even imagine having to stress about that on top of the fact I knew I was being constantly recorded and analyzed by these “wage theft” systems.

I bounced the fuck out of that place as fast as I could, and went somewhere that respects my time and autonomy, as long as my work is getting done.

Coincidentally, shortly after I left, that company got sold to their biggest client (who was based on the opposite side of the world), laid off a substantial part of the work force, and those that were foolish enough to remain had to start working graveyard shifts to be on the same time as the parent company’s time zone.

I think my lucky stars I got the fuck out of there when I did. From what I understand from co-worker, everyone who was talented and wasn’t laid off all quickly found jobs elsewhere, and all that remained were the worst employees. That company’s “cool” office has been empty and for lease for several years now, and all that remains of the original product workforce has been shifted out of country.

Respect your employees and they will respect you back.

 

[smallscreensw]

OK, Ars: Maybe it's time to give your readers some kind of happy story, something pleasant, something with levity, something goofy. This story (along with most of the news over the past few months) made me want to stab my eyeballs out with a red-hot poker.

In all fairness, you can lay the blame at the feet of Wired magazine. They cover tech with a dystopian angle, I have noticed. The current issue (Feb 2025) features a gold men's urinal with gold coins trickling into it and the caption "It's a rich man's world." Wired may be on top of tech, but it has no issues covering the lurid side of it. Maybe the magazine wasn't always like this, but it certainly is, now.

 

[icebergFromLaputa]

In their endless pursuits of ever-increasing profits big capitalists do actions that seem to frequently correlate with people becoming angrier at them, IMHO.

 

[mozbo]

There are relatively few jobs (especially at the white-collar level) that pay employees purely or even primarily for there time. Instead, most are task-oriented.

If I showed up at my workstation, logged on, and sat there all day doing noting (yet present at my desk!), I'm not doing my job. If I split and shuffle my hours around, work a little later because I took a break midday, take a few minutes here and there to read the news or make coffee or call the pharmacist - it's considered a normal part of my day, as long as I'm also doing the actual work I'm hired to do.

There are some jobs that actually do prioritize the worker being somewhere, rather than doing something specific. For instance, there are receptionist roles where someone has to be at the front desk consistently, but is free to read or study or (whatever) when no customers are waiting. But for that type of work, it's typically obvious when the worker isn't present. There's no need to log it with biometric systems.

For someone in a job like me: my work output should tell you whether I'm productive. And if my supervisor can't figure that out, that's on them.

This is a key point. These systems take a problem that's a supervisor deficiency, and shove blame down on the people being supervised.

That's their intention. To prevent responsibility from landing on supervisors, managers and - most importantly - executives.

That's why these tools have a large market, regardless of their effect on the bottom line.

 

[Robin-3]

Agree, work time flexibility is nominal in white collar jobs, its a commonly accepted reduction in productivity which is generally accepted as positive work life balance. However, that standard of productivity (balance) is for the employer to set which is why hours per work week are also customary in employment agreements.

Just because someone could complete all of their currently assigned work in 3 days doesn't mean they can take the rest of the week off as shadow vacation. Unless you're a contractor most companies have "and other work as assigned" verbiage as standard policy hence need to be able to judge if sufficient productivity for work assigned is reached.

Yes, but this has nothing to do with when I'm physically sitting at a desk vs. in the hallways, kitchen, or washroom. This article is talking about technology to track, minute-by-minute, not only whether a worker is onsite but also where in a building they are.

If a manager finds that level of surveillance necessary to tell what workers are doing, there's a bigger problem. And what all these technologies are measuring is location, not productivity.

 

[Emon]

If you want to change the power dynamic, perhaps start a business and manage your own time/money.

You flip the power dynamic by forming a union, dumbass.

"Just go start your own business, it's easy!"

You're literally a capitalist tool, like literally you are regurgitating propaganda, you are someone's implement for misinformation. Literally, a tool.

 

[Emon]

Respect your employees and they will respect you back.

But how can I respect my employees when occasionally one of them is bad? Surely I must treat ALL of them as though they are lazy miserable slugs and surely this can't be some form of projection on my part??

Lots of that from managers every time one of these threads pop up. Shit managers pretend like they're victims, it never ceases to amaze me.

Not just Ars, but anywhere. There's always someone who knows they use the shit practices everyone is criticizing, so they come out with, "durr you don't know how hard it is!"

Parents who beat their children use identical arguments.

 

[ThatEffer]

You could always be doing more.

And you could shut the fuck up.

 

[ezelkow1]

But I thought many of us were fed the BS line of, we need RTO for "collaboration" and to generate "water cooler ideas" and "we are better together". I guess as long as together means, sitting in front of your laptop with your eyes glued to the screen not actually talking to coworkers physically and god forbid you get up from your desk to have a conversation then you aren't doing real work since you aren't staring at your screen

Or, shocker, it was never about those things and just being gaslit by your employer which drags down employee morale even further