Employee snooping is big business. Expect it to get bigger

By | July 2, 2020
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I wrote previously about how snooping on employees is going to become the norm as managers scramble to deal with a workforce that is reluctant — or unable — to return to the workplace. Enabling this will be a host of tools available for companies to do this. It’ll be impossible for a lot of bosses to resist.

There’s already a whole market — worth $4 billion by 2023 according to this report — of employee surveillance tools. Some of them sound cute (Hubstaff, Time Doctor), some less so (VeriClock, ActivTrak, StaffCop and Work Examiner).

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The second question asked of you before you can access Time Doctor’s home page. 

They all feed off the fear of the Manager By-Line-of-Sight, like Workpuls:

Remote work has certainly made employees more independent from their superiors, if nothing else, then because they simply aren’t in the same physical location. That means you are never quite sure if the staff is watching funny videos or actually working.

While no one expects people to work for eight hours straight, it’s important to ensure that they are working on tasks that actually have high priority, and not just answer a few emails and go out for ice-cream and rollerblading for the rest of the day.

This perception is fed by a longstanding piece of ‘data’ which claims that workers actually only work 2 hours and 53 minutes in any work day. This study is regularly cited, though its source rarely, as proof positive we’re all lazy gits when it comes to home working. I’ve written a separate piece debunking this little gem.

So what do these tools do? Well, most monitor what software you’re using and what websites you’re logged into, for a start. The idea is to virtually handcuff you to work. For example, Time Doctor will

  • ask the user if they’re still working when they visit a social media site. “Whenever an employee accesses unproductive sites like these, the app automatically sends them a pop-up asking them if they’re still working. This little nudge is usually enough to get them off the social media site and back to work.”
  • Managers will have access to a ‘Poor Time Use’ report that details what sites an employee accessed and how long they spent there. Time Doctor can also take screenshots of employees’ screens at random intervals to ensure that they’re on productive sites.
  • Some, like Keeper, will monitor employees’ browsing history, ostensibly to check they’re not venturing onto the dark web.

Workpuls, meanwhile, boasts

Our all-seeing agent captures all employee actions. From app and website usage, to words typed in a program, right down to detecting which tasks are being worked on based on mouse clicks.

The more sinister aspect to this is that managers not only don’t trust their employees to work remotely, but they don’t trust them not to steal stuff. And we’re not talking paperclips. This is called Data Loss Prevention, or DLP, and is itself big business. One estimate has the market worth $1.21 billion in 2019, rising to $3.75 billion by 2025.

These tools include (this according to a deck from Teramind)

  • machine learning which scans an employee’s workflow, ‘fingerprinting’ documents and then tracking any changes and movement
  • ‘on the fly’ content discovery
  • clipboard monitoring — everything you copy and paste will be collected
  • advanced optical character recognition: think studying images and videos watched and uploaded by employees to check for steganographic data exfiltration (steganography is when data is hidden in a supposedly harmless message, often a picture.)

It’s not so much the eye-popping technology involved, as the realisation that everything that an employee does on a work computer (or a work-related computer) can be, and probably is, being monitored.

To be fair, companies like Teramind are focusing less on employee productivity and more on catching the bad apples. But these tools still sound to me overly intrusive. And in my next post I’ll show why.

Working from home will get ugly, but don’t blame the workers

By | June 30, 2020
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Working from home has been a relative success story of these Covid-19 times, but from here on in it’s going to get ugly.

Working from home isn’t for everyone, but that’s often because people haven’t tried it. Covid-19 has given a proverbial leg-up to those still wary of the fence. There are technology hurdles to overcome, as well as social ones. People who worked in offices and relied on pinging IT support as soon as a key started sticking, or grabbed a coffee as an excuse to chat with co-workers around the bean-grinder would inevitably face hurdles.

But surprise, surprise, turns out there are advantages of working from home, that those of us who already did it had worked out some time ago. Now the rest of the workforce is catching on. A survey in the UK (by a nursery provider, so you could argue it’s not exactly in their interest to promote this) has found that only 13% of those 1,500 surveyed ” want to go back to pre-pandemic ways of working, with most people saying they would prefer to spend a maximum of three days in the office”, according to the Guardian.

Nearly two thirds of those believe their employers would be up for it. And well over half believe it would increase their loyalty to the company.

Of course the survey shoehorns in some other stuff, which arguably strengthens their business model: parents say they have had trouble coping with younger kids (and presumably could do with a nursery should this work from home lark continue beyond Covid-19. As you can see below, employers don’t like kids.)

But I think it’s good that more people are realising that, the stresses and isolation notwithstanding, working from home has its merits. If nothing else, it wakes people up to how unproductive the workplace can be. Meetings, people dropping by to chat, open plan offices, sick buildings: all are a big distraction, a threat to health and a time-suck.

And the pandemic is bringing home another reality: most of this office stuff can be done from home. A survey by Deakin University in Australia has found that 41% of full-time and 35% of part-time jobs can be done from home. The study uses a similar methodology from a U.S. study, which reaches similar conclusions. My tuppennies’ worth: that number is extraordinarily high, if you think about the different kinds of work people do. But as countries dispense with production and move to services, and the Internet of Things improves the remote (and automated) control and monitoring of physical objects, this proportion will grow further. I’ve rarely come across someone in the services sector who couldn’t do what they do out of a Starbucks. Even, sadly, the Starbucks employees themselves.

It’s not the workers, it’s the managers who are the problem

But this isn’t where the problem lies. The problem is going to lie in managing these people. Managing a remote work force is quite different to managing a physical office. It’s about faith: do you trust the people you hired to do a good job? If so, let them do it. I had a boss at my last employer who was upset if we were in the office, quite rightly saying the way to get stories was to go out and talk to people. His successor was the opposite, what I call “managing by line of sight.” She liked to be able to see everyone at their desk and was suspicious if someone wasn’t.

This is where things are going to get problematical. You need much better bosses with a broader range of EQ to be able to support and get the best out of your crew if they’re all dispersed. If you start at the point of thinking they can’t be trusted to be working, then you’ve already lost. On June 26 Florida State University told employees working remotely that it “will no longer allow employees to care for children while working remotely.” Allowing this was in any case a ‘temporary exception to policy’ and approval for the Temporary Remote Work agreement “may be rescinded at any time if an employee:

– is unable to remotely perform the essential functions of their position; or

– is not adhering to the requirements outlined in the Temporary Remote Work Agreement; or

– remote work no longer meets the business needs of the department.1

It’s not hard to see where this is going. Companies — and particularly places like universities — that are largely agglomerations of buildings and people are going to find it hard to shift permanently to a more virtual arrangement. Universities, of course, are going to find it doubly hard because their hefty fees are largely based on the agglomeration factor. But big companies, too, are obsessed with the bricks and mortar of their self-image, and those managers who have risen through the ranks in such environments are going to be ill-disposed, and ill-equipped, to shift to anything virtual.

So expect to see some ugliness creep in. There will be less talk of ‘keeping our workers safe’ and of workplace flexibility and more like the above, as in “we’ve been extraordinarily kind and generous to our employees, but this nonsense can’t go on forever; if you want to continue play hooky you need to start filling out forms.”

Teleworkers have long been used to that kind of passive aggressive intimidation and discrimination. I would expect to see more. Workplace surveillance, possibly in the form of ensuring social distancing. And tools to monitor the user’s computer — something whose heritage I’ll argue in a future post is closely wedded to the world of spam and hacking.

  1. This announcement was ‘clarified’ on June 29 said that these terms applied only to those “whose job duties require them to be on campus full-time during normal business hours (8:00 am to 5:00 pm) and is intended to create flexible work arrangements that serve both the needs of the employee and their work unit.” It does not apply to those who were already telecommuting. ↩︎

How Covid-19 spreads: simulations and visualisations

By | June 23, 2020
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This is a list of visualisations of how aerosols and droplets spread. While not all are related to Covid-19, they are relevant and worth watching. Happy to add more if anyone finds them. 

Covid and the Demise of Distance

By | May 18, 2020
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My brother and I, 1967

I lost my brother the other day. Less than a month after losing my aunt, it is starting to feel like carelessness. And to be clear, neither of these deaths were down to Covid-19, at least not directly, and this column isn’t about Covid-19, at least not directly. But as I spent some virtual time alone with my brother’s closed casket, I couldn’t help feeling that this was a future that might seem dystopian, but was instead rather comforting.

My brother was my only sibling, so there’s only me now from that family unit. And he lived on the polar opposite side of the world, in DC, and so hard to reach at the best of times from my perch in Singapore. But Covid-19 had somehow rendered that distance meaningless; he could have just as easily been across the causeway in Malaysia, and quarantines would have made it almost impossible to be grave-side.

For me it was deja-vu backing up down the freeway.

When my aunt died in a British nursing home a few weeks ago, I could do nothing but send a few photos of her to a small mailing list of people unconnected to each other except through my aunt. (She wasn’t a real aunt, but as a childhood friend of my mother I had known her better and longer than most of my other relatives, and she had outlived most of those.) Most on the mailing list were not geeks, it’s safe to say, so those photos that did come back were usually upside down or sideways, which could have appeared disrespectful, but which would have amused my aunt. Her funeral was of course a small one, remote and ring-fenced by Covid-19, and I never got to hear what she had meant to others, or even see a photo of where she was buried. I had to sit alone with my grief, and read a few scraps from others on the adhoc mailing list about how the day went.

My brother’s death was quite different. My tech-savvy nephew had arranged for me to to spend some time alone near my brother’s casket via Facetime, which was oddly peaceful. And then, with the help of his friends, he hosted a memorial on Zoom. As the introductory music played over a tasteful drawing, I watched as a list of people signing on flashed up on the screen — by the time it started more than 200 people were aboard. I made it through my own eulogy and then watched dozens of others talk about my brother. Most of the people were those I had never met, but it was moving to hear them talk about him, revealing angles of my brother that were new to me, and refreshing, like uncovering hidden doors in a familiar house.

My brother and I, 2008

The tools aren’t perfect of course. I forgot to turn my video off after I had talked, and so I dread to think what I was doing for the rest of the gathering. And there were the inevitable glitches. But most important for me was that people were there, wherever they were from. Distance was no obstacle, and neither was familiarity. You never know who will turn up at a funeral: that’s what makes them so fascinating. The former lovers, the unacknowledged offspring, estranged spouses and feuding relatives, all may turn up. The wake is a more selective affair. But here in a virtual room were dozens of people who had heard about my brother’s death, and who could join in to share the memory of someone without fear of somehow not being close enough. It was egalitarian in the way that wakes usually aren’t; no one has to fuss over who to invite, and whether there are enough chairs or canapés to go around. Instead it becomes a festival, where anyone can pay tribute. No one was left out because of distance, either physical or familial, and that seemed to me to be something rather beautiful.

I don’t know what will happen when Covid-19 is tamed. I’m sure a lot more things will go back to normal than people predict. But if we take one lesson from the pandemic I feel it should be this: whether it’s a funeral, wedding, wake, birthday party, bluechip annual general meeting or parish council conclave, offer a virtual version too. Don’t let physical distance decide who has a seat and a voice. And don’t just put a camera in a corner of the room and live stream it. Give it some thought, as my nephew did for my brother. It made a world of a difference.

The Dogs That Haven’t Barked (Or We Just Haven’t Heard Them Yet)

By | May 19, 2020
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I’ve been wondering about the countries we haven’t heard from yet on Covid numbers, or which have just flown under the radar. What I call the dogs that haven’t barked. In short, who’s on the other side of the curve, and who isn’t?

The most interesting data I could find was at EndCoronavirus.org, a website put together by Yaneer Bar-Yam from the New England Complex Systems Institute. They have collected together data from 72 countries and plotted graphs of their curve flattening efforts. They’ve categorised the countries into three. Those which

  • have already beaten COVID-19 (where the curve is back to where it started)
  • are nearly there (where it’s half way down the slope)
  • need to take action (where it’s still near the peak
https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries

That’s interesting enough, but I wanted to get a sense of what that means. First off, I wanted to get a sense of how many people that is — how many people are in countries that have beaten COVID (I actually it’s a little early to say they have, I’m using Bar-Yam’s terminology), and how many people are living in countries which still need to take action?

So I did a bit of downloading and spreadsheeting. This is what we have:

where populations sit on the curve

So according to that data, more than half of the populations of the countries measured haven’t really started to tackle Covid-19. Gulp. There are some big countries in there:

Eight of the 10 most populous countries don’t score well

Now, you could quibble about which countries are at which stage, and some countries have clearly done more than others, but the curve doesn’t really lie. At least, it’s as good a yardstick as any.

So my next question was: how many people are we leaving out? Turns out quite a lot. The countries covered had a population of 5.9 billion, which leaves about 1.9 billion people unaccounted for. The website says that the “set of countries is certainly not an exhaustive list, but we do highlight the countries which we find to be interesting or important in some way.” It doesn’t say why it found them important and interesting. Possibly the data was clearer for those included. Hopefully they’ll add more countries once the data is clearer.

So what does the pie chart of people look like if we account for the missing two billion? We get this:

The missing quarter

The population in countries that haven’t started yet goes down to 42%, which is still a big chunk of humanity, while the ‘good guys’ account for about 23%. A quarter of the world’s population doesn’t appear at all.

So what happens if we put all this onto a map? Where are all these people?

The gray of Africa and Central Asia

It makes for grim viewing. Several things jump out:

  • The countries doing well are flattered by the presence of China. And Vietnam, Thailand and South Korea. In population terms the largest country outside APAC to get a star is Greece, with 10.4 million people. It does not look good.
  • The gray areas are a big concern. Very little data from Africa and Central Asia was ‘interesting or important’ enough to include in the study thus far. As we’ve read in the media, Africa is unprepared for Covid-19, where two countries account for nearly half of all tests carried out in Africa so far, according to data collected by Reuters.
  • The other gray area is Central Asia. A piece in the Atlantic Council’s New Atlanticist this week said that the countries of the region were each ploughing their own furrow, with varied, sometimes suspicious, results: “Tajikistan and Turkmenistan had been clinging to a fantastical claim of zero cases for weeks, despite the recent spike in mysterious deaths attributed to pneumonia. Tajikistan finally reported its first fifteen confirmed cases on April 30, after weeks of speculations and warning from international experts.”

I don’t know what all this says, exactly, but it sheds a little light on the dogs that haven’t barked. Covid-19 is a pandemic, which means it infects people, not countries. Yes, we can seal borders, and keep people from traveling, but at the end of the day the disease will only be conquered when every country has flattened every curve — or, unlikely, never let it rise up in the first place. None of us is going to be able to travel as freely as we once did, or see supply chains and shops creak back into life again, until all the people in these countries are through the same tunnel we’re currently in. That could mean a lot more pain, heartbreak, and death.

So thinking of this by population size, and looking more deeply at the countries that either haven’t seen the curve appear, or aren’t reporting it for one reason or another, is one way of knowing how long we’re all going to be fighting this war.