Headline, August 22 2022/ WORKPLACE : ''' '' TRACKED MINUTES TRAVERSE '' '''

WORKPLACE : 

''' '' TRACKED MINUTES

 TRAVERSE '' '''

SINCE THE DAWN OF MODERN OFFICES, workers have orchestrated their actions by watching the clock. Now, more and more, the clock is watching them.

TRACKED TO THE MINUTE. COMPANIES TURN TO SOFTWARE to monitor workers and dock pay when they're idle.

A FEW years ago, Carol Kramer, a longtime finance executive, took a new job. Her title, vice president, was impressive. The compensation was excellent $200 an hour.

But her first paychecks seemed low. Her new employer, which used extensive monitoring software on its all-remote workers, paid them only for the minutes when the system detected active work. Worse, Ms. Kraemer noticed that the software did not come close to capturing her labor.

Offline work - doing math problems on paper, reading printouts, thinking - didn't register and required approval as ''manual time.'' In managing the organization's finances, Ms. Kraemer oversaw more than a dozen people, but mentoring them didn't always leave a digital impression. If she forgot to turn on her time tracker, she had to appeal to be paid at all.

'' You're supposed to be a trusted member of your team, but there never was any trust that you were working for the team,'' she said.

Since the dawn of modern offices, workers have orchestrated their actions by watching the clock. Now, more and more, the clock is watching them.

In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous : Not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others. Eight of the 10 largest private U.S. employers track the productivity metrics of individual workers, many in real time, according to examination by The New York Times..

Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, ''idle'' buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.

Some radiologists are scoreboards showing their ''inactivity'' time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues'. At companies including J.P.Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice.

In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like ''Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,'' after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. Public servants are tracked, too :

In June New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees that they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.

Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday. They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years : that their jobs are relentless, that they don't have control - and in some cases, that they don't have enough time to use the bathroom.

In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as ''demoralizing,'' ''humiliating'' and ''toxic''. Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said.

But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world's new clocks are just wrong : inept at capturing offline activities, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself.

UnitedHealth social workers were marked idle for lack of keyboard activity while counseling patients in drug treatment facilities, according to a former supervisor.

Grocer cashiers said the pressure to quickly scan items degraded customer service, making it harder to be patient with elderly shoppers who move slowly. Ms. Kraemer, the executive, said she sometimes resorted to doing ''busywork that is mindless'' to accommodate clicks.

''We're in this era of measurement but we don't know what we should be measuring,'' said Ryan Fuller, former vice president for workplace intelligence at Microsoft.

The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research Work Places, Rules and Observations, continues. The World Students Society thanks authors Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram.

With respectful dedication to The Founder Framers !WOW!, Corporate World, Work Forces All, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the World. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society - for every subject in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and  Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

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