[quote=“Omar_Little, post:15, topic:998519”]
Do you think many employees believe their mouse and keystroke movements are monitored ? [/quote]
(1) Well, actually, yes. I really does seem like many wage-earning employees think management might/could/probably are spot-checking employee’s activities by their mouse-movements and/or the related Present/Away/Offline indicators that are available as part of MS Outlook/Teams/Office suite. I think the real question is ‘Do many employees believe their managers have nothing better to do than spot-check their subordinates’ mouse-movements?
[quote=“Omar_Little, post:15, topic:998519”]
many of my team of several hundred work in a hybrid mode. We don’t deploy any such monitoring. Performance is checked and evaluated on what work gets done. [/quote]
(2) THIS is how performance should be checked.
If I’m your sales manager and you’ve met or exceeded your quota for the period, I don’t care if you did that by working 4-hour days twice a week or 18-hours over six-day weeks. If I’m expecting you to process so much data or provide a number of leads or whatever, I’m a capitalist who doesn’t care how it gets done so long as the numbers are met. [That, of course, led to the Wells Fargo scandal, but we’ll refrain from digressing…]
[quote=“Omar_Little, post:15, topic:998519”]
I recently learned about mouse jigglers and online monitoring of remote workers just a few months ago. How pervasive is this? [/quote]
(3) Apparently pervasive enough that wage-workers don’t want to get caught on the wrong side of it. OR it might be one of those urban legend type things in which people who don’t quite understand the technology they work with are speculating on weird ways that technology might be used – whether or not it has ever been used that way.
When USB cameras were first introduced, people used to put post-it notes or Band-Aids or electrical tape over the lenses because they ‘didn’t want people spying on them’ when they weren’t intentionally using their cameras. It was a non-issue and those people were laughed at because users had to activate the camera-leveraging software to consciously involve themselves in video conversations. But then the next generation of cameras and software had soft-switches and remotely accessing someone’s computer started becoming easier (particularly with the installation of malware from various Internet sources). Then there was a wave of people being extorted by Bad Guys ™ who were using those USB cameras to capture images of people who were partly-dressed and unaware that their camera was active when they were walking past their computer (which they thought was idle). So that ridiculous urban legend had turned into a real problem. And the USB camera manufacturers (and aftermarket gadget makers) made little camera-covers that people could use to actively cover up those lenses – they look better than strips of electrical tape. 
From the IT Support/Infrastructure side, I’ll throw out a couple more anecdotes:
One of our new database geniuses submitted a few support tickets saying his computer was locking him out frequently. The Level 1 Helpdesk people couldn’t replicate the issues. During our IT Team meeting I started asking one of the workstation builder guys some seemingly unrelated questions:
“Hey, Jeff, how long does it take for our screen-savers to kick in.”
“They’re set for 5 minutes.”
“And that’s the squiggly lines that sweep across the screen?”
“Well, you can do that, but the default is the same picture that shows up behind the log-in screen.”
“And, for our security standards, people can’t just wiggle the mouse and make the screen-saver go away; we make people log-in after the screen-saver kicks in.”
“Of course. You’ve done that for over a decade with us.”
“Ah! So Donovan is probably initiating some massive SQL query and, while it runs and crunches numbers, he’s getting up, making a cup of coffee, letting the dog out – maybe throwing the ball a couple times, wandering back inside, reheating his cup of coffee, making a sandwich to go along with it, strolling back to the living-room, and finding that his default log-in screen is showing. Imagine that!”
A mouse-jiggler would have prevented that confusion. He could also have changed his screen-saver so it wouldn’t make him think he was logged-out. If he changed the idle time setting, our group policy would eventually override what he set and go back to a 5-minute limit.
A new team manager came aboard. After a couple months we started getting Helpdesk tickets from him, asking if IT could access phone logs and idle times and network activity and server interactions related to one of the team members he had hired. We fulfilled a few of his requests and the ticket was closed. A couple months later, we got another requests for all those logs related to the same person. It was very clear that the new manager suspected that team member of wasting time. We could not discern whether that team member wasn’t meeting some kind of quota or wasn’t answering the manager’s phone calls or team chats or what was causing suspicion. After a bit of speculation and discussion, we resolved to require such request come from HR rather than any particular team leader. That way IF there’s a search for evidence to support dismissal-with-cause, the HR department would be involved from the start (because HR’s job is to protect the company, not the employees or their managers).
Note that internal logs and tracking are not exhaustive or conclusive as far as grounds-for-termination go. Much depends on the nature of the work and not every job requires a steady unrelenting pace@ of work. As Omar noted, a lot of people are working from home. If someone’s generating sales leads by flipping through the Yellow Pages, that activity won’t register on her workstation or any of the company technology connected to it. Some of our phenomenal litigators are somewhat older and do their case research by using printed books at their local law libraries. We don’t require them to be on-line or off-line when they’re building their arguments; we just care whether or not they lose their cases.
–G!
@Right, Lucy & Ethel/Laverne & Shirley?