People using mouse jigglers might be cheating the system, or it might be job preservation in the face of bad management. Re-upping an awesome Jodi Kantor piece from 2022. It's worth your time to read all of it, here's one story... ---- Jessica Hornig, a Rhode Island social worker who supervised two dozen other UnitedHealthcare social workers and therapists seeing patients with drug addiction and other serious problems, said their laptops marked them “idle” when they ceased keyboard activity for more than a short while. They were labeled derelict during sensitive conversations with patients and visits to drug treatment facilities. “This literally killed morale,” Ms. Hornig said. “I found myself really struggling to explain to all my team members, master’s-level clinicians, why we were counting their keystrokes.” In recent years, she said, the scores have become even more consequential: On performance evaluations, social workers were rated 1 to 5 based on the amount of time they were digitally engaged — numbers that affected compensation. Ms. Hornig said her team spent hours each week piecing together alternate records but had trouble keeping up without compromising core parts of their job. --- 🔗 Link to full The New York Times article in comments. #Productivity #technology #engagement #culture #remotework
Fantastic piece
How does counting keystrokes and measuring mouse activity square with having “water cooler moments”? Can’t be jiggling your mouse while you are boosting productivity by engaging in creative synthesis with your workmates around the water cooler, can you?
I spent years working with social workers to help them track their caseloads and client interactions. News Flash! most of them don't like computers, and I'm sure a large percentage will tell you it can actually get in the way of doing their job. They spend so much time making sure assessments are done on time, and care plans are up to date, that it sometimes gets in the way of human interaction. A lot of the old school case workers keep notebooks that eventually get entered into the computer system when they have time (or when someone like me would remind them). Trying to measure productivity based on keystrokes is a losing proposition for many career fields. Managers do it because it's easy, not because it improves the work being done.
Nothing new, i worked in an office in 2005 that measured productivity based on number of hours the computer was in an active state, so one of the engineers in the company coded and distributed an auto-clicker so that we could appear as active as we wanted. The mistake we made early on was correlating sitting in front of a computer monitor with value creation.
I don't care what your role is...keystrokes are a poor and unuseful metric. The onus is on leadership to find something that actually makes sense.
Using a mouse jiggler to demonstrate that I am working - that’s losing self-respect. 😢The only comfort is to know that whoever forced me to do so lost it before me.🤣 I am a CEO and I cannot imagine measuring mouse activity. Hope I have people in my team who would run!
Great news for solitaire fans.
It's like Klout scores for work!
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3wRead it all: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/14/business/worker-productivity-tracking.html