From Malware to Bossware: Effects of Remote Work

It is no secret to anyone that the pandemic hit business productivity very hard. Either because employees did not have appropriate spaces in their homes to work quietly, or because of the need to combine work tasks with those of the home (such as preparing lunch and washing dishes), or because children of certain ages need supervision adult to be able to carry out many of their tasks and stay focused, or because the distractions that we have in the house make more than one person bloated, or because people still do not know how to put and play the Zoom filters 😂😂, in the vast majority of the Companies have felt the impact of remote and asynchronous work on the productivity of their employees. Watch demo videos at kissanime

And hence the rise of something we know as Bossware: measurement software that companies install in their employees’ devices and that seek to measure their productivity but that borders on espionage because it “looks” and analyzes everything that does – and what does not – an employee while on the device.
Companies like Teramind, ActivTrack, Controlio, TimeDoctor, Hubstaff or EmailAnalytics, to name just a small group, have had a fantastic year due to the increase in demand for their solutions. Julia Gray, from The Business off Business raised this information on the traffic of the web pages of some of these companies and it shows how interest in their solutions skyrocketed with the arrival of COVID-19.

The solutions offered by these companies are similar to malware and analyze which applications are running and how long they are used, the tabs of the web browsers that collaborators use, the time it takes for employees to perform different tasks and even the content of the emails and messages that they send and receive and the time it takes them to respond to them. In several cases, the software even takes screenshots and keylogs what the employee types on their device, also including georeferencing information that allows knowing where the employee was at all times when using the device. And although I understand that the company wants to have control over how an employee uses his time during “working hours” (tomorrow I will write about this because of an announcement that Salesforce made today), it seems to me that a company that has to resort to this has not understood how much the world has changed in these last 20 years.

It reminds me of a boss I had who was a lover of “buttock hour”: the time we spent in the office, regardless of whether we were working, drinking coffee, or playing games. As long as he saw us sitting in the booth (or saw the sack on the chair) he was happy.

Work should not be measured by the time spent on it. The work must be measured by the fulfillment of specific objectives and tasks associated with the role that each employee performs and his contribution to the business. And although I am aware that people abuse and that is why this type of software exists, I think the problem is in the transparency with which employers implement these solutions and in the effects that this can have on the privacy of the employees. So you know. Be careful what you do, and what you do not do, because that panoptic reality that we have seen grow at the government level and in the surveillance economy is also in your company, on your computer and on your phone if you gave it to your company.

It is no secret to anyone that the pandemic hit business productivity very hard. Either because employees did not have appropriate spaces in their homes to work quietly, or because of the need to combine work tasks with those of the home (such as preparing lunch and washing dishes), or because children of certain ages need supervision adult to be able to carry out many of their tasks and stay focused, or because the distractions that we have in the house make more than one person bloated, or because people still do not know how to put and play the Zoom filters 😂😂, in the vast majority of the Companies have felt the impact of remote and asynchronous work on the productivity of their employees.

And hence the rise of something we know as Bossware: measurement software that companies install in their employees’ devices and that seek to measure their productivity but that borders on espionage because it “looks” and analyzes everything that does – and what does not – an employee while on the device.
Companies like Teramind, ActivTrack, Controlio, TimeDoctor, Hubstaff or EmailAnalytics, to name just a small group, have had a fantastic year due to the increase in demand for their solutions. Julia Gray, from The Business off Business raised this information on the traffic of the web pages of some of these companies and it shows how interest in their solutions skyrocketed with the arrival of COVID-19.

The solutions offered by these companies are similar to malware and analyze which applications are running and how long they are used, the tabs of the web browsers that collaborators use, the time it takes for employees to perform different tasks and even the content of the emails and messages that they send and receive and the time it takes them to respond to them. In several cases, the software even takes screenshots and keylogs what the employee types on their device, also including georeferencing information that allows knowing where the employee was at all times when using the device. And although I understand that the company wants to have control over how an employee uses his time during “working hours” (tomorrow I will write about this because of an announcement that Salesforce made today), it seems to me that a company that has to resort to this has not understood how much the world has changed in these last 20 years.

It reminds me of a boss I had who was a lover of “buttock hour”: the time we spent in the office, regardless of whether we were working, drinking coffee, or playing games. As long as he saw us sitting in the booth (or saw the sack on the chair) he was happy.

Work should not be measured by the time spent on it. The work must be measured by the fulfillment of specific objectives and tasks associated with the role that each employee performs and his contribution to the business. And although I am aware that people abuse and that is why this type of software exists, I think the problem is in the transparency with which employers implement these solutions and in the effects that this can have on the privacy of the employees. So you know. Be careful what you do, and what you do not do, because that panoptic reality that we have seen grow at the government level and in the surveillance economy is also in your company, on your computer and on your phone if you gave it to your company.