All this bullshit about “returning to the office” and micromanaging employees isn’t the result of slacking workers.
This is a failure of the organization’s leadership to do their jobs.
My previous shitty employer lost 20% of their workforce when they kept threatening a return to office.
This mega corp pays the lowest wages for their industry, but was fully WFH. You had to live within two hours drive of one of their four offices. They serve a geographically large area, but not densely populated.
They also ran three shifts. Many employees were parents with small children and needed this flexibility. The parents worked nights while their kids slept to avoid daycare costs.
If you were willing to have an office job, and do a shitty commute, you could get a $9 an hour raise going to work for a big financial or insurance corporation a block away. Forced to return to the office, many workers left for the higher pay. It was still not enough to afford daycare.
So the employer decided to embrace WFH and adopt very draconian web cam technology that takes screenshots of workers if they move off camera, have no mouse movement, or anyone else entering the camera shot. They then set a policy if you had X infractions you were terminated.
Management justified this by saying some workers were sleeping and being unproductive. They know who these people are, they just didn’t want to address it directly with the employee when it was occurring. They wanted a policy they violated to trigger HR removing them, because leadership is lazy. They would allow the policy to make the decision who gets fired so they would not have to address slacking directly.
The company had a problem with sleeping on the job in the office. This was not just a WFH issue.
What this really means is that management isn’t doing THEIR JOB of monitoring production and overseeing their staff — whether at home or on site.
Leadership is looking for technology to do their job for them.
What they don’t understand is paying low wages attracts workers who can only get low wage jobs and require MORE oversight. You are going to get more slacking paying someone minimum wage than you are a decent living. This is the result of piss poor leadership.
We need to reframe this argument as not being about workers slacking, but management slacking. If leadership was doing their job, they would not be in this position— they would make a decision to compensate fairly to attract better workers, and would improve production by not hiring shitty people, and immediately addressing slacking instead of relying on technology and policies to do their job for them.
If companies have problem employees on their payroll, it is a failure if the leadership — not the policies of where their staff performs the work.
It is human nature that some people will take advantage when not being watched.
There is no difference between working on a computer at home or in a cubicle down the street. If an employee isn’t producing, that is not a failure of technology, but the manager who is overseeing those workers.
Instituting monitoring programs is basically admitting leadership isn’t doing their job.