Transcript: Should companies snoop on their remote workers?

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Should companies snoop on their remote workers?’

Liam Martin
If you want the freedom of being able to work remotely, you have to be able to also have the accountability that follows along with that.

Diana Rodriguez
We don’t see any value in watching to see if your employee is online.

Liam Martin
Make sure that you’re excited about what you’re doing throughout your job and you won’t have any problems. But if you don’t like to do your job, then probably, you should do something else. And if you’re using a mouse jiggler every day, that’s probably a big indicator that you should try something else.

Diana Rodriguez
These customers are using the mouse mover not as a slacking tool, but as a desperate plea for a change in work culture.

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick.

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Four years on from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, working from home is still a huge part of our professional lives, and so is scepticism about how much work is actually getting done there. How can managers make sure their teams are working when they can’t see them? Do they have a right to monitor employees remotely? And if they’re being watched, do workers have the right to cover their tracks?

At the top of the show, you heard Liam Martin and Diana Rodriguez. He’s the co-founder of Time Doctor, a software company that allows employers to monitor their employees. She works for Tech8 USA, which manufactures gadgets known as mouse movers. Those devices, also known as mouse jigglers, are little platforms with rotating discs that move your mouse. They can make it look like you’re at your desk, even if you’re not. Liam believes employee monitoring is not only justified but valuable for bosses and workers alike. We’ll hear more from him in a short while. But first, we’re going to hear from Diana. I wanted to know more about how Tech8 USA got into the mouse-jiggling game.

Diana Rodriguez
We started in the gaming world, actually. So we started out that way. And then when the pandemic started, we started to see a surge with the work-from-home professionals and needing something similar to help them with their working and, you know, personal life.

Isabel Berwick
Why do you believe these sort of mouse jigglers are important? Is there a philosophy behind it for the company?

Diana Rodriguez
Well, we think part of it is like the lack of trust. The pandemic compelled numerous leaders to transition to remote management. And so some managers may feel their responsibilities more challenging. Even before the pandemic, overseeing remote workers poised unique challenges.

Isabel Berwick
Have companies, you know, developed software to sort of get wise to the mouse jigglers? You know, have you had to adapt the product?

Diana Rodriguez
We have adapted to those challenges. We offer mouse jiggling or selective clicking or scrolling. So some of our products have some of those features to show or to mimic those movements that you would typically see if somebody was working on their computer.

Isabel Berwick
So is it almost like a competition with the employers that you’re trying to help workers out with them?

Diana Rodriguez
I wouldn’t think it would be competition. I think that we kind of try to offer products for the employees, but we also offer some consulting for the employer to kind of help with the transition from a brick and mortar to virtual workforce world. We see a need for even helping out the employer to adjust to the hybrid work environment.

Isabel Berwick
And what are you telling the employers?

Diana Rodriguez
We’re telling the employers that our customers, they fall into different categories: those who have micromanagers and those who spend the majority of their time on the phone instead of actively using the computer. Employees, if they know their employee is trying to track them with some type of software surveillance, they go into what, I guess is the best word, productivity theatre, where the employee fills their calendar with meetings and schedules to make them look like they’re busy. But on the, yeah, on the employer side, it’s more of a productivity paranoia because they don’t have confidence that their team is productive.

Isabel Berwick
But even if an employer is surveilling their workforce, you know, shouldn’t employees do the work without misleading their employers? Is there a line of, is there a right and wrong here?

Diana Rodriguez
We think that those customers of ours are not the ones that are trying to cheat and steal from the company. I think they just want to be able to, you know, step away from your computer if you need to take care of some personal things. We think these customers are using the mouse mover not as a slacking tool but as a desperate plea for a change in work culture. In the end, we wanna champion the employee, because if you have that relaxation that you don’t have to be in front of your computer from this time to this time, and you have that flexibility, you’re more than likely to want to be productive. We feel that those who are in a presence prison, the employee, you know, we say find another employer that fosters trust with you and, you know, values your work. Conversely, if you’re an employer, you know, if you have an employee who uses remote work as justification for slacking, you know, to me, it’s time to let them go. Let them slack somewhere else.

Isabel Berwick
Do you believe that employers actually do have a right to operate surveillance on employees? Or do you think fundamentally that’s wrong?

Diana Rodriguez
We think fundamentally that’s wrong. We don’t see any value in watching to see if your employee is online. We think that’s a waste of the time of the manager.

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Isabel Berwick
Let’s be honest: some of the people using mouse jigglers will be doing so to dodge work. But I think Diana’s right to say that the popularity of these devices is a plea for more flexibility at work. The freedom to work when it suits us has been one of the big wins post-pandemic. If managers are looking at when people are working, not their output, they might be looking at the wrong thing. Diana doesn’t believe employers have the right to track their staff. But Liam Martin doesn’t agree. That’s not a huge surprise. He is the co-founder of a company that sells time-tracking software. I asked him to explain what Time Doctor actually does.

Liam Martin
So it’s a time-tracking tool that really focuses on the analytics of where you spend your time. So a lot of other tools just measure the amount of time that you spend on a particular task. But we measure the efficiency of that task to then allow you to be coached and optimised towards doing that task better.

Isabel Berwick
So for someone like me, where my employer isn’t tracking what I do when I’m remote, I sort of feel a bit mistrustful of the idea of Time Doctor. Could you sell it to a sceptic?

Liam Martin
Sure. So I think, number one, you don’t know whether or not your employer is really monitoring you. So if you have a VPN inside of your company, they are definitely monitoring what websites you’re interacting with. And they could be monitoring which applications, but you don’t have access to that information.

The difference between us and a lot of the other products in the market is that you have access to your own data and you can be coached to become better at your job. So maybe filling out a whole bunch of spreadsheet cells, as an example, is a bad expenditure of your time. And we could really look at that data and say, we should probably just send that to somebody else so you can focus on doing more podcasts, as an example. To me, it’s giving you the freedom while also making sure that your employer feels OK about this new remote work thing that until 2020, a very small percentage of the population even understood it.

Isabel Berwick
So a lot of managers have a real basic problem with trusting teams who are remote. Is that where your software comes in? Is it a trust thing or is it a productivity thing, or is it somewhere in between?

Liam Martin
I think it’s somewhere in between. When you think about where accountability comes from, in March of 2020, we were approximately in the United States at 4.5 per cent of the US workforce working remotely. And by the very next month, it was 46 per cent of the US workforce working remotely. So it completely changed everything that we understood about work. And it’s very difficult for managers to be able to see the old school model of if they’re sitting in a seat and they’re doing work to an outcome-based model, which is if they actually complete the work, then that’s how they’re valuable towards the organisation. I think we’re going to see a very long process that’s probably gonna take over a decade to be able to build that form of trust, and that’s the bridge that we provide inside of Time Doctor, to be able to make sure that employees can work remotely while employers get that accountability that they’re looking for.

Isabel Berwick
What sort of pushback do you get from workers, or do you get criticism that it’s invasive? How does it work on the ground?

Liam Martin
We definitely get criticism that it’s invasive, but it’s dependent upon how you want to use it. So you can turn software off and then you can go in on your Facebook page, or you can do your personal banking, that type of thing, and then come back on when you’re ready to work. For me, I actually use it very much in a Pavlovian way. When I turn on my Time Doctor at the beginning of the day, I know that I am “starting work”, and it’s a great way for me to focus and be a lot more productive throughout my workday.

Isabel Berwick
So I know there are companies that make things like mouse jigglers to try to get past surveillance software. Is that something that would affect Time Doctor or are you not in that space?

Liam Martin
Well, we have an AI that can detect those types of mouse jigglers. I find it quite funny because I have seen that pop up as a bit of a cottage industry, and our technology can detect that within 30 minutes to be able to tell you, yes, you’re using a mouse jiggler. And what we do in that context is we message the individual user saying, we possibly have detected this type of a tool. We want to be able to just make sure that you understand that and that you stop using it. And the vast majority of time, people stop. Our estimates are that since the beginning of Covid, five million of those devices have been sold throughout the global market.

And so it’s just about, again, making sure that you have that accountability, not only from the employee side to the employer side, but the employer side to the employee side. So my perspective is mouse jigglers are actually good for business because for us, it’s one of those things that shows that you wanna be able to make sure that everyone is legitimate when they’re working remotely.

Isabel Berwick
But there are some workers who believe they have a right not to be surveilled by their employer when they’re working remotely. But I suppose that’s a conversation for employees to have with the employer rather than for you.

Liam Martin
Yes. And I would also say that if you want the freedom of being able to work remotely, you have to be able to also have the accountability that follows along with that. Otherwise, we’re going to lose this opportunity. And employers we’ve seen today are forcing a lot of workers back into the office, and they wanna be able to see that someone is actually in the office, or they’ve seen instances of people that have been skirting the system, that are job hacking, where they’re running eight jobs at the same time. And that’s not legitimate back to the employer as well. They wanna be able to make sure that they’re getting a full eight hours from their worker as well.

Isabel Berwick
I think you’re right that human nature isn’t able to trust, and perhaps there is a place for seeing what people are doing when they’re not in the office. So it’s very interesting. It’s all quite new to me. So, are you confident that the Time Doctor software is always one step ahead of the game?

Liam Martin
Well, we’re always iterating new versions, but I would say the vast majority of mouse jigglers, as an example, we can detect now. And the beauty of what’s happened in the last year, which is something else that we can talk about, is the rise of artificial intelligence, or at least the understanding of it. And now you can use AI to be able to detect this type of cheating of the system very quickly and easily, much faster than you could have done in any other method.

So to me, it’s be legitimate in your work. Make sure that you’re excited about what you’re doing throughout your job and you won’t have any problems. But if you don’t like to do your job, then probably you should do something else. And if you’re using a mouse jiggler every day, that’s probably a big indicator that you should try something else.

Isabel Berwick
So finally, does Time Doctor use Time Doctor software?

Liam Martin
Absolutely. I’m currently using it right now, and it has told me that I’ve been on for 18 minutes and 13 seconds, and at the end of the day, I can process this all out and figure out exactly where my time is being spent.

Isabel Berwick
Liam, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Liam Martin
Thanks for having me.

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Isabel Berwick
Liam’s view on worker tracking was actually pretty even-handed. Even the world’s biggest work-from-home evangelist couldn’t say no one ever slacks off when they’re working from home. But there’s a difference between taking a break and taking advantage. Liam and Diana are in agreement that if someone is truly disengaged with their work, they’re probably in the wrong job. Maybe allowing bosses and workers to track their time can give employers faith that their teams are working, and give employees a little more freedom to work in a way that suits them.

After we recorded those interviews, we emailed Diana to ask her whether, as Liam said, AI software can sniff out mouse jigglers like the ones her company makes. She said Tech8 USA had been developing algorithms that could outsmart AI detection tools, and that the company would be releasing a product featuring those algorithms in the coming weeks. It sounds like the mouse jiggler wars are just getting started.

You might think that trading a little trust for a little flexibility is a fair deal. You might think that being monitored by your boss is an outrage. Whatever your view, I want to hear it. Email me at isabel.berwick@ft.com or send me a voice memo. There’s a link in the show notes. I’d love to hear from you.

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This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.

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