Callum Jones
Ever since the pandemic took full force in the US in 2020, working from home has become the norm in many jobs.
Of course, a lot of folks had to work every working day at home in those dark times. But as we headed to some form of reality, many employers began offering a mix between working from home and in the office.
Those who work from home will be the first to admit they've left their desk for a short while to deal with the laundry or run the hoover round.
However, such an act can get in travesty - just ask the Australian woman who got fired after her boss used keystroke technology to track her working at home.
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And sticking with that Australian theme, another Aussie boss suspected some of his staff weren't pulling their weight so he decided to do some digging.
As a manager, it's never easy to track an employee's work if they are conducting it at home.
This particular manager was convinced his employees were taking it too easy though, so he decided to look into their call logs.
He already knew something was wrong when the work group chat had grown quieter, email response times had slowed down and calls were going unanswered.
The boss - who can't be named - said: "The time between calls started to get longer. Instead of a call every 15 minutes, it was every 20 minutes and then every half an hour.
"And then there’s like two hour gaps of nothing happening … it showed staff being absent; starting small, but the absence would get longer and longer."
With his suspicions growing, he opted to have some software installed.
"We did have some tracking in place through our CRM (Customer relationship management) Pipedrive," he said.
Pipedrive is a cloud-based software company which essentially acts as a calendar in which staff enter tasks, reminders, and scheduled or completed calls.
He continued: "So typically, a salesperson is probably going to get between four and 10 calls an hour. Someone might ring and they’re busy, they might say call me back in half an hour. So that’s logged as a one-minute call.
"And then they might have another conversation for say five-to-ten minutes. And for each call you put a note — but those things started to not happen. No notes were being left."
Not only were calls not being logged, many were 'ghost calls' - or fake entries.
After 18 months of monitoring his workers, he decided that three of them had to go due to 'insufficient work'.
He conceded that it may be necessary to introduce keyboard tracking if a boss felt they were being taken advantage of.
"Many of us have that friend a couple of degrees of separation away who’s boasting about taking their employer for a ride, in some way or another, especially during the pandemic," he said.
"Staff knew their businesses had vulnerabilities. It was hard to recruit, operating was difficult. And they leveraged that to be a bit more mischievous.
"Sometimes employers are made out to be the bad guys — but some of us are just small companies doing our best."