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Is Your Boss Spying on You While You Work from Home?

Photo credit: Thomas Jackson - Getty Images
Photo credit: Thomas Jackson - Getty Images

From Popular Mechanics

  • A company called Enaible has created software that tracks office workers' productivity, assigning them a rating between 0 and 100.

  • The software helps identify the parts of an employee's day that could be more efficient, sometimes altogether recommending automation.

  • It's not the only tool like this out there. Countless others take screenshots of workers' computer screens, track keystrokes, and pit their productivity against one another.


As the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic began to accelerate in the U.S. back in March, non-essential workers started working remotely, and many of us are still holed up in our home offices. Despite the obvious distractions, 48 percent of the workers who responded in one survey said they're actually more productive at home.

But it looks like Big Tech wants to challenge that notion, as countless employee monitoring apps are seeing a rise in popularity. Why guess what employees are doing when you can just surveil them?

According to Google Trends data, searches for "employee monitoring software" hit a high between May 3 and 9. Similarly, "employee productivity software" peaked between April 19 and 25, and "employee tracking" hit a peak between May 3 and May 9. This is in no way scientific, but it does show the search volume for terms relating to employee surveillance tools have increased amid the pandemic.

Photo credit: Screenshot/Google
Photo credit: Screenshot/Google

Time Doctor, for instance, takes screenshots of employees' computer screens at regular intervals. Interguard, meanwhile, generates reports quantifying the amount of time workers spend on given websites and apps their companies deem unproductive.

Hubstaff tracks keystrokes and even uses GPS to let employers know if employees just bailed on the job, and ActivTrak collects worker bee data to create a benchmark for productivity. ActivTrak mentions productivity tracking software often gets a bad rap for being "Orwellian," but claims it's actually a form of gamification that can motivate workers.

One company, Enaible, takes things a step further, using artificial intelligence to actually score workers' productivity on a scale from zero to 100. And with that information, the Boston-based startup thinks it can speed up workers' progress.

"Leadership has always been a competitive advantage. During a global crisis that has scattered the workforce across the globe, leadership is the difference between merely surviving and thriving," the company says on its website.

Photo credit: Enaible
Photo credit: Enaible

Tommy Weir, the CEO of Enaible, told MIT Technology Review the company already works with a few large corporations, including the Dubai customs agency and Omnicom Media Group. He also says the company is in talks with Delta Airlines and CVS Health to implement their software, which is called AI Productivity Platform. Those firms have not yet confirmed the relationship.

It would make sense, though, given that most of Enaible's software features are better suited to repetitive tasks than creative endeavors. It's much easier to track someone working at a call center, for example, than a person writing a newspaper editorial.

Enaible's software runs in the background throughout an employee's entire workday. With an algorithm the company has appropriately dubbed "AI Trigger-Task-Time," the system can start to see patterns among the workforce. For instance, if employees in marketing receive a phone call, the software can figure out if they become more productive than when they receive an email. Meanwhile, the software is also tracking how long those actions take to complete.

"Imagine you’re managing somebody and you could stand and watch them all day long, and give them recommendations on how to do their job better," Weir told Technology Review. "That's what we’re trying to do. That’s what we’ve built."

After that, the system generates a productivity score for the employee, which falls between zer0 and 100. Weir says the kinds of tasks don't matter, so it can compare workers in different departments across a company. Another algorithm, called Leadership Recommender, will actually make calls on which parts of the employee's workflow could be streamlined. The idea is to reward employees who complete their work faster, and double back to employees that are falling behind.

That leads to—you guessed it—some desire for automation. In one case, Weir says, the software suggested automating a quality control task that took about 40 seconds each time. Workers performed this task 186,000 times per year, it found, so eliminating the task altogether could save 5,200 hours.

Of course, computer scientists inherently encode bias into their systems, regardless of their best efforts. That doesn't always come at the macro level—women getting higher scores for men, for example—but it can be as simple as tending to prioritize speed over quality.

If this sounds a bit like "Big Brother Is Watching You," that's because it's exactly what it is.

But the real problem is that it chips away at the covenant between employer and employee: Would you rather work for a company that trusts you completely, or one that will only trust you based on a score?

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