How do you measure productivity of remote workers? For one company, productivity is measure by having more than 500 keystrokes on the computers every hour. In a rare case for Australia, an employee had been terminated for not meeting the required productivity levels. The employee had an otherwise-unblemished 18 year career and was recently unsuccessful in getting the dismissal overturned. The company tracked three categories of activities on the employee’s workstation. The first was their daily activity, and this is based on the recorded first and last event on the person’s computer. The second was their hourly activity and the third was their VPN activity. Keystroke logging was also used, and the manager said that in the area of business the employee was in, the activity requires a minimum keystroke of 500 an hour. The ruling did not state what system logs or tools were used but this is a rare public example of the use of application and VPN logs to keep tabs on an employee’s productivity. It’s something that has been raised as a concern for several year, but actual levels of usage are unknown.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/FWC/2023/1792.html
This segment was created for the It’s 5:05 podcast