from the we-know-what-you-did-last-summer,-and-yesterday,-and-today.... dept.
Tracking Indoor Location, Movement and Desk Occupancy in the Workplace: A case study on technologies for behavioral monitoring and profiling using motion sensors and wireless networking infrastructure inside offices and other facilities
As offices, buildings and other corporate facilities become networked environments, there is a growing desire among employers to exploit data gathered from their existing digital infrastructure or additional sensors for various purposes. Whether intentionally or as a byproduct, this includes personal data about employees, their movements and behaviors.
Technology vendors are promoting solutions that repurpose an organization's wireless networking infrastructure as a means to monitor and analyze the indoor movements of employees and others within buildings. While GPS technology is too imprecise to track indoor location, Wi-Fi access points that provide internet connectivity for laptops, smartphones, tables and other networked devices can be used to track the location of these devices. Bluetooth, another wireless technology, can also be used to monitor indoor location. This can involve Wi-Fi access points that track Bluetooth-enabled devices, so-called "beacons" that are installed throughout buildings and Bluetooth-enabled badges carried by employees. In addition, employers can utilize badging systems, security cameras and video conferencing technology installed in meeting rooms for behavioral monitoring, or even environmental sensors that record room temperature, humidity and light intensity. Several technology vendors provide systems that use motion sensors installed under desks or in the ceilings of rooms to track room and desk attendance.
[Source]: Cracked Labs
[Case Study]: https://crackedlabs.org/dl/CrackedLabs_Christl_IndoorTracking.pdf [PDF]
[Also Covered By]: The Register
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DrkShadow on Friday November 29, @10:51AM (5 children)
When a large push for "return-to-office" is the spontaneous "watercooler conversations", it's real hard to make that claim when you're really just ensuring that the worker is at their desk at all times.
Perhaps they could do that desk job from their home desk. With much the same metrics - are they answering the phone or aren't they?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 29, @12:51PM
> a means to monitor and analyze the indoor movements of employees and others within buildings.
Of course, the employee answer for this is: "My classification is not in office, it is not hybrid, it is 100% remote - thank you." The wonderful thing about demanding remote work vs local is: you have a global employer pool to choose from - it's a very asymmetrical competition pool.
As for desk time for the (remaining) office dwellers, if I am spending the time, money and effort to be in office I should be out interacting with my coworkers face to face a significant portion of that time - otherwise I certainly could just be at my desk at home accomplishing the same thing without the commute.
Unless, of course, your boss is the kind who uses a mouse jiggler while they masturbate to porn on their phone... when they project their behavior onto their direct reports, then they would get worried about diminished productivity from home - and moreso: afraid that their employees might be enjoying work even more than they do.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday November 29, @03:30PM (3 children)
Many years ago, an organisation I worked for had a back-to-the-office mandate.
I was required to go to an office more than an hour's commute away, with a change of trains.
The office did not have sufficient parking for all those who were required to be there.
Neither did it have enough desks.
I was the only member of the team I worked in based in that country.
The office was 'open-plan', with correspondingly very high noise levels.
There were no desk allocations - but teams tended to coalesce in the same area, floor, and building each day. Of course there was a 'clear desk' policy.
There were insufficient meeting rooms for the demand.
There were few working wired network sockets, and the WiFi network could not cope with the demand.
I had better network at home, and it was quiet, so I could talk to my colleagues and participate in audio-conferences without trying to find a less noisy area.
When I did need to talk to colleagues in the country I was in, they were, of course, located in different offices: more than one an office one closer to my home.
The situation lasted for months before I changed country. Company policy was that I could not work from home, and had to go the office I was allocated to.
Such idiocy is not new, and pre-dated Covid and the subsequent back-to-the-office mandates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 29, @04:14PM (1 child)
Pretty clearly WFH is regarded as a perk that not everyone deserves. The sociopaths in charge are the only ones allowed to swan in an out of the place on their own terms. Losers doing the same thing need to be humiliated to an equal degree to compensate for the extra status. That's probably about as deep as it gets in office politics [substack.com].
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday November 29, @05:43PM
TBH, unless there's a part of the job that has to be done in person, it should generally be the policy that those that get the work done appropriately remotely can do so. It's cheaper for the employer to not have to rent out additional floor space and pay for bus passes anyways.
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday November 29, @08:54PM
Yeah that sounds so familiar from my previous experience too. They demand you attend the office, due to whatever excuse holds the most weight, but there’s insufficient space/resources/facilities for you to properly do your job.
I now work almost entirely remotely, from home, and go into the office for a couple of days each fortnight or three weeks. Because it’s a one hour flight away. But it’s working well, I do electronics hardware engineering and have my own workshop set up at home so I can test and do any solder rework needed. When I’m in the office, I spend almost the whole time discussing and talking to people. I do find the “let’s work this out around a whiteboard” conversations basically don’t happen when I’m at home though. I acknowledge that a day or two a week in the office is best having done what I do the past two years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday November 29, @11:29AM (3 children)
The problems with managing by what you can measure include: that you don't know if what you are measuring is important; and once it becomes known what is being measured, people game the system in ways that make it no longer reliable to draw conclusions from what is being measured, if it ever was.
It seems every new generation of managers needs to learn these failings at first hand themselves before they (possibly) believe them.
The following needs to be thoroughly understod before attempting to manage by metric:
McNamara fallacy [wikipedia.org]
Goodhart's law [wikipedia.org]
The people selling the snake-oil of new means of measuring things that require (human) management rely on people not understanding these critiques.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 29, @12:52PM (2 children)
> people game the system in ways that make it no longer reliable to draw conclusions
In some fields this is very true. For in-office productivity? I don't think most cube drones try anywhere near that hard.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday November 29, @02:42PM (1 child)
Jacket over the back of a chair to indicate 'presence in the office' that day? (Traditional)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 29, @03:42PM
Yeah, they try just about that hard, sometimes.
🌻🌻 [google.com]