Three ways 'bossware' surveillance technology is turning back the management clock
If you're reading this during work hours, there's a chance your boss knows about it. The market for "bossware"—digital tools that enable managers to keep tabs on what workers are up to—is reportedly booming.
News reports recount tales of health-care workers being ranked "idle" for not typing while counseling drug patients, and hospice chaplains losing "productivity points" for spending too long with the bereaved or dying.
In the United States 60% of employers with more than 200 workers now use "employee productivity monitoring technologies," according to market research firm Gartner.
Once loaded on your computer, these tools (with names such as Clever Control, Time Doctor, Staffcop and Work Examiner) can track a dizzying array of data—key strokes, how often you move your mouse, if you are using messaging apps, your search queries and the websites you visit.
They can view your screen and record video from your webcam. Work Examiner boasts it can "record every second of an employee's screen activity."
They then turn this into easily digestible data on a dashboard (for your manager), highlighting your active hours and "idle time," awarding you a productivity score, and ranking you against your colleagues.
This may be happening without you even realizing. Even if you are informed, it's done without your input. Too few mouse clicks? There may be a very good reason, but the software doesn't care.
This demo dashboard from Work Examiner shows the ‘productivity’ of an individual worker. Credit: Work Examiner