HA HA,

Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen employees for faking work using mouse jigglers and keyboard simulation | Tom's Hardware (tomshardware.com)

Uhhhhhhh... don't get me started on the work ethic of the younger generation.  I don't want to get banned. 😉

They said the same about you when you were young.

Cheers

I don’t see any indication of the age of these people?

So Wells Fargo is one of those employers that install software that tracks key presses and mouse clicks in their employees' computers. What a way to build trust🙄

Edited June 15, 20241 yr by Luis Hernandez

A supervisor that supervises by using a screen monitor to look for activity isn't worth the powder to blow him up.

Motion is not the same as production.

Just wait until AI starts monitoring the workplace.

Noel

I'm probably coming at this from the opposite of most.  If you have a handful of lazy employees out of a large workforce, you have a couple lazy people.  If you have a large amount of people not working, you have bad management.  If you see significant numbers of people doing stuff like this, look at your managers.  What are they doing?  More importantly, what aren't they doing. 

Not sure if they are used in this case, but "productivity" software that counts keystrokes, counts e-mails, mouse clicks, etc is super popular in the corporate world.  Imagine thinking "more keystrokes = more productivity". 

Imagine using number of e-mails sent as a measure for "good employees".  I can only imagine that company going under in record time. 

Managers should be measuring results, not keystrokes.  When my boss asks me for a list of things I've accomplished, I'll gladly hand that over.  I even have a personal task board that I'll gladly share.  When a boss asks me to log every minute of my day, I know I'm working for someone who has zero clue what I do.  What I will be doing in that situation is probably very little...

It is an employee's job to be professional, but it is a manager's job to motivate as well.  Bad coaches/managers are obvious in pro sports.  Suddenly, every player looks like they've never played the game before.  Players who had success elsewhere suddenly stop being effective at all. 

Edited June 17, 20241 yr by kerosene31

This is not an example of the "moden work ethic", it is an example of the lack of integrity of those who were caught out.
 

11 hours ago, kerosene31 said:

Managers should be measuring results, not keystrokes. 

Absolutely. Results should be based on what deliverables are achieved and how they keep the business moving forward towards its strategic goals.

'Productivity monitoring'/snooping tools that log keystrokes, programs used, websites visited and capture screens are used by management that either doesn't know what KPIs to track and/or doesn't trust their staff.

Employees are rarely perfect, but if you can't trust your staff, you've either hired the wrong people or the culture in the organisation is wrong. Both of which reflect poorly on those in charge.

@G-RFRY Is that supposed to be Modern Work Ethic?  I'll make the correction if you want!  I've been retired since 2012
and even back then managers always based most of our efforts on numbers.  Luckily there were ways around that! 🙄

30 minutes ago, charliearon said:

Luckily there were ways around that!

🤣😂

I've been retired since 1996 so I really don't have much to comment on today's work ethic except what I observe when I go shopping at the super market.

I see people working pretty hard.  The guys who stock shelves are always busy filling those shelves.  The checkout ladies and gentlemen are pretty efficient at what they do.

I don't know about other places but here they are moving to more human checkout people than checking out yourself at those terminals.  Customers like myself are willing to stand in line to checkout with a real person you can talk to and pass the time of day with as they check out your groceries.  Most of them are pretty friendly with customers and I think that is part of the work ethic.

I remember back in the days I was working, 50 - 60 years ago, you could write off Mondays as everyone in the office or lab were gathered around discussing Sunday's football games.  Do they still do that?

Noel

We eventually become our parents.😁 Heard the same song and dance when I was a kid.

 

Bill W

I'm a tech worker, individual contributor but with a manager title, remote and my boss is 900 miles away with a team spread all across the western US.

We've got a great relationship with our boss, who trusts us to use our best judgment and to be productive. There are days where I'll boot up my laptop at 6 AM and be on it non-stop until noon (today was one of those days), and days where I'm in the field all day and don't even open my laptop (tomorrow is one of those days).

Equally, there are days where work ends at 3 PM for me, and others where I'm doing spreadsheets at 9 PM while wolfing down dinner on the couch.

There are days where I'm "off," but I'm fielding calls from the accounts I manage while on "vacation." And sometimes that means dipping out and stopping into a coffee shop or bar with wifi, so some work can get done, on my day off.

 

This is just the reality of work, especially WFH these days. If you gave me a "productivity tracker" it would likely score me as one of the least productive employees at the company, compared to say, a call center worker, who has 500+ keypresses per hour on the clock.

I don't wanna hear any of this "you millennials don't even work" stuff. Work has changed. Yeah, sometimes I'll bump off for an hour or two to go for a walk, but I pay for it at the end of the day. If the product of the work is the same, who cares if someone is active on their laptop? If I'm employing a loan servicing officer, for example, and they get 30 accounts dumped on them daily, who am I to judge if they're done by 2 PM and just keeping an eye on their email? To me that's a very highly functioning employee if they can get all of their tasks done early, and still have time for themselves. I'm not going to make them sit in front of their laptop and pretend to work for another 3 hours.

 

Work ethic is no better or worse than it was 40 years ago - the way in which we interact with work is what changed. More taking it home, fewer boundaries between work and personal life, almost no separation between leisure time and work time. It's people who don't get that/haven't seen it/haven't experienced it that seem to think there's some giant gap in productivity that doesn't exist.