I had a consulting firm that was doing ok from 2021-2022, but ended it do to personal circumstances. At the peak of it I had 10 small business clients. About half of them were absolutely paranoid about their employees slacking off. They would just constantly be worried their employees weren’t working and would try to figure out ways to monitor them.
When I stopped my business, I only kept an ongoing relationship with my biggest client. He is the worse for this. He puts cameras all over his warehouse, production facility and office. There are three office employees, and everyone of them has a camera pointed at their computer screen in the front corner of their office. He also makes it very clear to them that he has “bossware” which monitors every activity on their screen and constantly takes screenshots.
I don’t get this at all. I worked as a financial professional for 10 years prior to starting my consulting company. I only had one company that had this type of software and it was really offputting. I didn’t like it all. I do my thing, it makes me really uncomfortable knowing everything I’m doing on the company computer is strictly monitored in detail.
While I had my consulting firm, I had two employees. I had a private office in a co-working space, and whenever they worked a shift, I would let them in to the office and just let them do their thing. I would often not even be present. I knew I could evaluate them based on the results they provide. If I pay them for a 4 hour shift and they get done what I want to get done, I don’t give a shit if they spent half the shift browsing their phone or even social media on my laptop.
Since I’m getting back in to it, I’ve had a meeting with a client that owns some properties and he is the exact same way. He insists on installing this bossware on his employee’s computers. He pays $700 a year for it. He is a very small property manager that only does about $1mm a year in revenue. I told him it was a waste of money, but he said he needs it to make sure his employees aren’t slacking.
I guess I just don’t get this attitude and find it counterproductive. You either have people you can trust, thus you don’t need to monitor them, or you have people you don’t and they should be fired. I’m interested in hearing other entrepreneur’s perspectives.
The transition to WFH has a huge impact on this. Everyone got used to working one way and now so much has changed and people are still adapting.
Managers used to be able to peer over cubicles on their way to get a coffee and see at a glance who is working, who is sleeping, who is chit chatting, who is watching Youtube videos, etc. Now, without them policing the workplace, they are paranoid that these behaviors are occurring unchecked during working hours and they aren’t getting the best bang for their buck.
While some studies I’ve seen showed that over-monitoring employees leads to lower trust which actually negatively impacts employees’ motivation, there is no shortage of articles written about how some people are holding down multiple jobs because they are getting by doing a fraction of what they can for each one and their management hasn’t adapted their methods quickly enough to catch them.
Some jobs are easy to monitor, but some are more subjective. If you pay someone and expect them to design 3 web pages in a week, that’s pretty easy to track. However, there are other jobs that can be harder to track and it becomes easier for employees to “fake it” saying they hit snags or had a string of bad luck. For example, if someone is architecting software or doing research to solve a problem, it’s not easy to track their progress day-over-day as you could with some other lines of work. This leaves some managers who can’t look over their shoulders like they used to scrambling to find tools and measures to fill the void.