Monitoring home based workers
Many workers, parents and non-parents alike, enjoy work-at-home arrangements with their employers.
I’ve never worked from home, so I don’t know how such arrangements are monitored, but an article in the Wall Street Journal shed some light on the current trend of electronically monitoring home based workers:
They’re taking photos of workers’ computer screens at random, counting keystrokes and mouse clicks and snapping photos of them at their computers. They’re plying sophisticated technology to instantaneously detect anger, raised voices or children crying in the background on workers’ home-office calls.
I’m not sure what I think about this.
On one hand, it’s certainly within the rights and responsibilities of a company to monitor their employees, it would be irresponsible not to. But, on the other hand, if companies screen home workers carefully, it seems like they could select those who can stay on task and handle the work.
I guess it depends on the type of business, but it seems to me that a more effective way of evaluating employee performance would be to hold them to the task of producing measurable results with minimal “monitoring” such as the type you would find in most office settings.
Do you work at home? What would you think if your company listened in on your work environment or took pictures of your desk?
I work at home, and I would quit if I had that kind of surveillance going on. I am paid hourly, and I carefully track my work time at home. If I take a 10 minute break to change the laundry over, I make sure to exclude that from the hours I submit.
My boss is quite neat, and if he saw my desk at home, I’m sure he’d be appalled!
They don’t get pictures of your desk, but it’s a screenshot of your desktop or the windows you have open on your monitor, monitoring how you spend your time. ODesk is one of the companies that has this, I know because I downloaded it and then deleted the part that controls that!
ima peccable, this story goes even beyond ODesk, as it says that they “take pictures of workers at their computer.”
I would never work for any client that insisted on having spyware to monitor me and my work “habits.”