Working from home has become the norm in many jobs since Covid hit in 2020 - and some employees have used it as an opportunity to push their luck and see how little work they can get away with doing.
While leaving your desk to attend to your laundry is probably forgivable, an Australian woman recently went viral after keystroke technology allegedly found she consistently started late, finished early and didn't do all that much work inbetween, leading to her getting fired.
Another Aussie boss also suspected some of his staff weren't pulling their weight and did some investigating.
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Convinced that his employees were taking it too easy, 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.
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"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.
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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."
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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'.
However, he deemed tracking the rate of keyboard strokes to be a step too far.
"If you’ve got a great employee, I’d never dream of putting that on him or her,” he said.
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"Some business owners I know refuse to put trackers in their fleet of cars, because they don’t want their staff to feel like they’re keeping an eye on them."
He did concede 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.
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"Sometimes employers are made out to be the bad guys — but some of us are just small companies doing our best."
Ben Thompson