We Put the FBI Man Into the Medicine Lodge: Like, if your job is answering tech support chats or whatever, yes, it's important to keep close track of your employee's work on this scale. If you're doing accounting-type work, some "have the Zimmerman file on my desk by Friday" shit, the important thing is that the file's on the desk by Friday.

if you have policies that incentivize employees in any way to use a mouse jiggler and you then run an audit that detects people using a mouse jiggler I think you kind of have to fire those people. you should really avoid the first two things though

Wells Fargo fired a dozen people accused of faking keyboard strokes | CNN Businesswww.cnn.com The pandemic may have released us from the tyranny of the five-day-a-week office schedule. But the grip of America’s busy-work culture is proving harder to shake.

This is true, but it's trivially true. The real problem here is that Wells Fargo's management and C-suite apparently do not believe that the purpose of work is to complete tasks to gain income, it's to have a timeshare in your employee's life.

Like, if your job is answering tech support chats or whatever, yes, it's important to keep close track of your employee's work on this scale. If you're doing accounting-type work, some "have the Zimmerman file on my desk by Friday" shit, the important thing is that the file's on the desk by Friday.

These sorts of policies are an attempt to standardize human beings beneath the level of usefulness and will end up fostering a work environment that's supremely toxic, with managers and workers having an adversarial relationship and the appearance of work being valued more than the work itself.

Productivity and morale will fall, but that's fine in the eyes of the people who make these policies because productivity isn't the goal, much less the health and satisfaction of their employees. The point is that they can control those ungrateful peons.

As someone else observed, this is treating salaried, white-collar employees like call-center workers who get told off for being 15 seconds over their approved time on the shitter, and unlike the latter a banker at Wells Fargo isn't a disadvantaged wretch.

All I'm saying is that I wouldn't be surprised First Citizens and Bank of America started sending Linkedin messages along the lines of "We don't treat you like you're an incompetent bum over here..."

From everything I know of Wells Fargo it reached "supremely toxic work environment" quite a few years ago

Can Confirm.

This is where any system that can be defeated by a mouse jiggler is obviously stupid. For a worker in a chat support role, the thing you care about is how long it takes them to respond. They can tell if someone is in multiple support chats, that may delay a response.

If they're inactive for 15 minutes, you can tell if they're trying to talk to someone else to get an answer. At the end of the day, you can see if they've resolved an expected number of tickets.

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