Hearing from certain people about reports tracking amount of time we are “active” and people with low numbers being called out? Any truth to this? Had anyone heard anything similar?
22 replies (most recent on top)
Idk what department you work in but this has been a thing in my department for several years
Yes, it was piloted in tech late last year, but only high up leadership has access (think Charlie minus 3). It adds up out time spent writing emails, on teams calls, working in Jira, Confluence, etc and produces a "digital footprint" looking for 6 hours of productivity. Not sure if it's expanded beyond tech yet though.
They're tracking AI tool usage and publishing reports of daily usage by employee name. But clearly this isn't used for any punitive action. Instead I've always believed that unfavorable commentary in the "anonymous" Pulse survey is used to shortlist people for layoffs.
Google Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target the measure is no longer valid because people can game the system to meet the target. 8 is great. Now keyboard activity. What could go wrong with people randomly clicking keys to bring up their stats. They aren't giving us the exact measures so people can't game the system but if you read about Microsoft's reporting you'll get the gist.
I’m all about the employees who don’t believe this is a thing. Makes my job of sticking around even easier.
That being said I haven’t seen a new report in 3 months, but those I did see it was very clear what was being tracked and down to two decimal points of a second. Nothing like seeing “MS Teams Message. 0.02s. Edge website engagement. 0.3s” repeated 10k times.
What’s captured vs used are two distinct things
SKAN AI - it is in your system tray
Go ask copilot what team usage metrics are captured and potentially reportable to management. There are many metrics captured. If you're a developer, even more metrics around your commits, pr's, everything. Additionally your usage of AI Tools. How much do they use them in practice, not sure?
But Microsoft su-ks corporate d*ck and knows the bs stuff to put out there for management to lap up.
WF tracks days and hours in office only.
Teams monitors time on teams. Just Google Teams productivity monitoring. Now whether or not anyone is using the data? Probably like every other useless dashboard that was created by someone for some reason because “data.”
@bd I like that you wrote that all out and somehow came to the conclusion that its the employees and not the, in your words, "clueless managers" that are the issue
Nobody is tracking keystrokes or activity except hours in office
Its obvious WF thinks it has too many employees doing too little work, at least in some areas. This is their attempt to determine how many people they are paying to do little to nothing on a consistent basis. Is it ideal? Of course not, but WF has so many clueless managers it certainly cant depend on them to determine who on their team isnt doing anything and who is indispensable. One would think if an employee were relatively steadily busy on a consistent basis they wouldn't seem as concerned about keystrokes being measured as so many on here obviously are.
Do you think people would give up posting these things, but they don’t. They just keep doing it. You already got your key strokes in. Just give up for the day.
You would think the one thing Wells Fargo would try at least a little bit to avoid is bullsh-t measures that encourage people to fake things in order to avoid falling afoul of the metric. Simple days in office is one thing, but the 8 hours a day metric and now keystroke level monitoring metrics are the kinds of measures that directly incentivize fu-kery. The more things change here the more they stay the same
Keep upvoting your 5 comments - that’s 5 keystrokes each time dummy
I had a job in mid 90s where the only metric they captured were outbound calls for a Collections team. Most of the accounts were fraud merchants and they did not have good contact info. I found out a month into job that co-workers were calling a list of good numbers over and over to look like they were hitting metrics. I put in my notice and the sh---y mgr said "I knew you would not work out". It took me over a yr to find another job. The stuff going on with WF is only going to promote bad behavior because quitting is not the best option when the job market now is terrible.
Oh god this troll again. Keep replying to yourselves. You’ll get more keystrokes
Activity levels are being captured and tracked. They’re not telling you what those are. Time/activity in email, teams, apps, dev tools, web, training, etc.
When I started with Wells Fargo there was no such thing as "productivity monitoring". We even had admin rights to our pc's. We could make changes and were not held to the high level of BS that current change practices have put in place. We were a senior bunch of engineers who knew there stuff.
These days? Nope. you have Jeet from elsewhere who liked on their app to get the job. Sc--ws up every change. Many of the Senior engineers have retired or been shown the door.
Change metrics? Joke!! Way down. Tons of impacts to the bank. Reaction? Yep, you guessed it, MORE stupid overhead to verify, validate, verify again, and get a name on there for the blame game sure to start post change.
And they want to monitor keystrokes. What a shame, and what a d-mb way to run a bank.
I’ve seen one the counts key strokes and one that counts 8 hours in office. I have not seen one that monitors active time on teams. Has anyone seen this?
Truth