Under desk motion tracker

How interesting. I had no idea IoT workspace utilization sensors were a thing. A micromanager's dream come true.

How would you react to IoT motion-trackers under your desk? These staff fought back | ZDNet

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Comments

colemic

Methinks they took much more offense than was warranted. Not a spy tool, but a utilization tool, they need to get over it.

thomas_

I'm waiting for the "Workstation Random Motion Generation Device" cor employees to install to fool the utilization tool.

markulous

I wouldn't be outraged but sounds like they should have had better communication with their employees about it. Women would probably be concerned with voyeurism but that would have been put to rest had they had a company meeting prior to installing it.

That being said, with it being wireless, I'd be tempted to see how I can fool it. Either by directly hacking or putting like a bowl of hot water underneath it to fool the heat sensor.

UnixGuy

Answering the article's question "How would I react?"

I'd (for real) take if off my desk and put it under my boss desk...if they want to track motion they can track their own. I've got zero tolerance for this kind of rubbish

gespenstern

I would quit if I had enough financial stability. If a risk of a personal financial collapse was somewhat higher I would just start looking for better opportunities because this act shows that employees are treated as deceitful liars who are in a war with their employer.

Kai123

Some places are fairly draconian, so this would be nothing new in some companies.

A colleague of mine mentioned that in a previous workplace (a call center), the LED of the screen would change color after you went over a 1 minute mark, which would prompt the manager skulking around turning up at the desk asking why you went over the time-limit. Similarly it would change to another color if you hadn't made or received a call after a minute or so.

I read somewhere that it benefits "furniture pooling", or something like that. Managers can micromanage worker placements so sharp that they can free up space in the office, or move to a smaller one...something like that.

"The firm extols the virtues of hot desking as a money-saving tip for companies. Hot desking eliminates personal desks and just sets up a central pool of furniture that people use on a first-come, first-serve basis."

Hacks rebel after bosses secretly install motion sensors under desks

OctalDump

colemic wrote: »

Methinks they took much more offense than was warranted. Not a spy tool, but a utilization tool, they need to get over it.

It's a management failure. They were installed without telling staff. Probably if they had gone to staff and explained why they are doing this, and the benefits, and what safe guards were in place, how the information can/will be used etc etc, it would gone more smoothly.

Not telling your staff really does emphasise the "we are spying on you" vibe, and if you don't tell your staff why you are doing it, there will be fear that it is being done for all sorts of reasons.

But there's the whole context of the business as well. If they are spending time and effort here, but there are other areas where more gains could be made, or where there is disgruntledness in the staff already, or there's distrust between staff and management.

I'd be annoyed if this was done in most places I've worked, since there is a whole laundry list of things that they should be dealing with first.

UnixGuy

I think as professionals we should never accept this. We really under sell ourselves if we accept this type of behaviour.

OctalDump

UnixGuy wrote: »

I think as professionals we should never accept this. We really under sell ourselves if we accept this type of behaviour.

Yeah, in the professional context they really need to involve people in the decision making process. The professional needs to see how it will be of benefit to their work, and what the other consequences might be.

The context where I think this could work, is in hot desking, along with other information, to get measures that might help optimise resource use. Those vast call centre arrangements seem like an obvious candidate. But for mobile workers, where you might have transient populations of employees, it could also be useful. You could see which desks are most utilised, the times desks are active etc. You can then use it in conjunction with other information (like talking to employees, login records) to better manage spaces.

It might be something as innocuous as discovering that some workstations aren't used in the mid afternoon because of glare from the sun. Or that you can consolidate 4 workstations and then have room for a small meeting room.

But if you are using it to see if staff are "doing their job" or timing toilet breaks, well that's not how you should be treating professionals. But probably it's the kind of thing that if you tried to use it that way, you'd discover it doesn't work well.

UnixGuy

Our productivity is not measured by how many hours spent 'working'; and honestly managers have a job to do rather than looking at our shoulders/screens. We are knowledge workers.

I had a manager asking me about a web page I was browsing while he was walking, my quick (calm) and immediate response" Why are you looking at my screen?" (I made that loud and clear, everyone heard it...he is a tough guy, ex military...good for him, I couldn't care less). He tried to be nice and tried to make it look like a joke, I said in a very calm and indifferent tone "I'm doing something personal" and looked away.

Next time he asks, I'll ask him why is he walking around looking at screens? (granted there will be no next time, he never looked at my screen again, he knows I'm not one to be scared easily. Happy to pull out company policy in the open and discuss it with HIS boss if need be, and happy to walk away from the job any time I want).

What I'm trying to say is, if a manager is trying to manage us IT professionals who spent decades or more of our lives working and learning the same way a fast food joint is managed, we should immediately stand up and make it clear that this is not acceptable; it's usually a sign of a manager who don't know what they are doing and have no understanding of their management duties and hence got so much free time in their hands.

tpatt100

I remember reading how UPS implements so many tools and training to maximize efficiency for their drivers. I doubt I could handle that level of management as a career and would only view the job as something to pay the bills until something better comes along. I get that there is "efficiency" but sometimes it can go to the extreme and make workers doubt themselves.

I think some tools are useful to implement in order to find deficiencies that need to fixed but sometimes employees will just game the system to their advantage or out of a need to keep their sanity.

TWX

I'm salaried. I wouldn't put up with something like this. Besides, between the hundred-odd sites across a metro area that I support plus the datacenter it wouldn't present an accurate picture of my work anyway.

If I were hourly and saddled with crap like this I'd set up a very small fan with a piece of ribbon attached to it, preferably a fan that oscillates. I'd get a seven-day timer and program it to operate during my work hours, ie, when I'm there. After all, the climate control isn't perfect so adding a bit of air circulation is good for me, right?

Things like this happen because middle-management is too chicken or too lazy to actually enforce company policy, so upper-management has to do it for them. If middle-management actually dealt with issues with the end-workers then it wouldn't be necessary for upper-management to use technology to track if the worker was sitting at his desk or not relative to what his duties call for.

There are only a few applications that I can see that are good uses of this kind of tech, and they're all based on jobs where a person has a post to man, and if they're not at their post then very bad things can happen. This would mostly be security-related work in environments where someone actually has an observation post or control room that must be attended to at all times lest something posing a danger to people happens. There's not really any other application that I can think of where monitoring if an employee is sitting at the desk with this much detail really says that much.

OctalDump

A lot of the comments focus on this technology being used to manage people, but I think its real strength is in managing resources. If you are paying $1000/m2 for office space in hot desk situation, and discover that you could reduce this by 10% by reducing the total number of seats, that's fairly compelling.

It could also be interesting to correlate with logged in sessions on desktops and if screens are locked. If you know that most trips away from the desk are three minutes, it might tell you when is good for the screensaver lock to start up. Or if a terminal is showing a lot of activity and no one is at the desk...

It could also tell you something about which desks are most active for people to sit down, get up, etc. You might discover that a particular position in an open plan office is bad for anyone put there - maybe it is too far from the toilet, or is next to a door, so they are interrupted openning it for people, or is too close to a reception desk so that they end up being the receptionist when the receptionist is on their break, or is right next to the aircon controls.

Or it might be the opposite, and a concern with people spending too long at their desks. The workplace might want to encourage people to move more.

If you want to track individual workers, there are probably better ways. An RFID tag under the skin, perhaps.

TWX

OctalDump wrote: »

If you want to track individual workers, there are probably better ways. An RFID tag under the skin, perhaps.

How about just using RFID-embedded ID badges and requiring their use to operate doors?

That actually has a degree of security application. Taking a crotch-shot doesn't.

Chinook

@UNIXGuy

I agree with you. Too often managers forget the kind of hours we put in. If you take issue with me looking at a website then I'll remind you of...

- the countless lunches I never took
- the early mornings, late nights & unpaid overtime
- forever being chained to a mobile phone.
- having to forever upgrade ourselves. Continuous education is part of this jobs like it is with a doctor. Only we don't make doctor wages.

Now, if I found one of these under my desk, I'd bring in a tablet with Kali Linux installed & fire up airmon-ng......and on dress down Friday's I'd wear a shirt that says "The quieter you become the more you are able to hear"

techfiend

While the average doctor with a high pay floor makes more than average IT pro. With the right knowledge and company we're capable of making more than most doctors. If you count family physicians as doctors they make less than many of us here. I know roughly the salaries of a couple surgeons with 10-15 years experience. Dozens on here make more with less experience. Surgeons are a good career comparison, they're forced to learn and occasionally work really long hours. In IT at some point you can eliminate studying and still advance. Surgeons would lose their jobs if they decided to do that.

In most companies we are looked at as mainly an expense hence they'll go through drastic measures like this to cut costs. Is there another 'professional' career that has more turnover than IT?