This seems fine to me. She was paid hourly, which is nonexempt work.
If your boss found out you were getting someone to stamp your timesheet several hours before you actually came into work every day, that would be considered theft as well.
If she were on salary, it would be a different story, because exempt workers get paid for the job getting done, not the hours it takes.
I have no problem with the general idea of needing to pay back your employer if you lie about the number of hours you've worked.
But this pervasive electronic surveillance has to stop. The end result of all that is a lot worse than someone getting away with 50 hours of paid work they didn't actually do.
Not sure how much "AI" this TimeCamp software uses, if any, but it's quite easy to imagine a near-future world where some software says you didn't do the work you said you did, and you have no recourse, and the method the software uses to determine this is proprietary and secret, and no one really can explain how or why its AI draws the conclusions it makes anyway.
I think there’s some nuances that everyone (including the author of the article) is ignoring:
She works as a CPA for an accounting firm—-there are several types of occupations like hers where time tracking isn’t just for her employers payroll, but very likely how the firm bills its clients. Similar professions would include: architects, lawyers, etc. A lot of software tools for these professions automatically log time expressly for the purpose of billing the client. Chief Architect, for example, presents a pop up asking if the time tracker should be paused if you’re idle for too long.
Her timecard fraud isn’t just stealing from her employer, but very likely causing her employer to overcharge (ie steal from) their customers. The firm would almost certainly refund the fraudulent billings to their customers, (lest they lose the customer or worse—-get sued). The money recuperate from the fired employee is most likely being allocated for this.
Amusingly, SHE sued THEM first. They would have gone to great lengths to gather data, pay attorneys, etc to demonstrate that their termination of her was justifiable. Having already invested in their own exoneration, why wouldn’t they counter sue to mitigate their losses?
No offence but I don't believe that any of the times reported by lawyers, accountants etc charged to clients are anywhere close to realistic. In my interactions with lawyers, I was often charged 1-2h of work for writing a single one paragraph letter.
There's a business idea, develop a time tracking software that tracks if lawyers etc. are actually charging the correct time. Funnily enough while they are quite happy for their employees to use software like this, I seriously doubt they would agree to clients using the same software.
Yea, scary how much we're allowing courts to simply rubber-stamp "Computer says you're wrong." If a software is going to act as a witness against me in a civil or criminal case, I would want to be able to at least cross-examine that software. Who knows how crappy and non-functional this automatic, blockchain, AI-based time tracking software is?
This has been an issue in criminal prosecutions. Breath machine: You are over a .08 BAC. Defendant: No I wasn't. Let me see the source code. Courts and companies: NO! It's secret. [1]
"More than 700 Post Office managers were given criminal convictions after a new computer software system, built by the Japanese firm Fujitsu, wrongly showed money was going missing from individual branches between 2000 and 2014."
She admits the wrongdoing of billing for hours on projects she wasn't even involved with. She does dispute some details about how the time is calculated, but those were explored in the proceeding.
What scares me a lot is as we transition into a more automated society. There's a question I ask people a lot: "How do we transition into post scarcity? If 10% of our labor is fully automated, how do we restructure our economy?" One suggestion I've gotten from this is busy work (we also agreed that the cure might be worse than the disease). But I can see as we transition this way these tools can become extremely pervasive. We have to be thinking about these issues _now_ rather than later. (part of the question is how we make this transition while doing as little harm to people as possible, since revolution could be likely).
I don't think enough people are thinking about how small changes like these can cascade over time and become huge issues. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
A tax-supported social safety net staves off a lot of the worst case scenarios. In the meantime, I think there are a lot of jobs that people could do but we don’t value it enough. With more people free from work, why not hire more teachers to have smaller class sizes? Why not have more people employed to support community activities? Clean and manicure the streets, teach classes, check in on elderly people. The last thing that will be automated is humans themselves.
For more ideas, just think about the things that are worth between $0 and minimum wage to do, and pay people to do those things. Picking up trash on the side of the road for example.
Interestingly, one thing I think will not be automated is sports. Be e-sports or physical. Computers could beat humans at chess for decades now yet people would far rather watch people play than computers. Same is true for any sport. I just thought this was kinda interesting, especially as someone that doesn't watch any of this.
Maybe refereeing can be automated. No one likes imperfect refs (except maybe someone who pays them to be that way).
Even though the best chess players in the world are computers, sports is more than just the pursuit of perfection. Imperfections are what make it interesting. Sports is about the story you can tell.
I'll preface this by saying that I largely agree with you. But just for shits and giggles, what kind of recourse, if any, should an employer of remote-working employees have here? If you're required to come into the office, it's pretty easy for your employer to tell when you lie about the number of hours worked. With remote work, that becomes quite the challenge. What's an acceptable stopgap?
> If you're required to come into the office, it's pretty easy for your employer to tell when you lie about the number of hours worked.
No, it's easy to tell when you lie about the number of hours spent in the office.
If the remote-working employees are not performing to the level you require (and it seems that this woman was not, which is why they turned on the tracking in the first place) you can tell them to improve or they're out.
I interpreted it as "this is the amount of work that should be accomplished in a week" rather than a piecework system. Basically figure out what 40 hours worth of work looks like and if that's getting done, it shouldn't be a big deal if documents aren't being opened and closed often enough.
Sounds like she should have set something up to open and close documents automatically if none have been accessed for a certain period of time.
The point you're missing is that the companies that already do that set the standards based on a 60- or 80-hour week, then say that anyone who can't do that in 40 hours is an underperformer who needs to try harder.
In my imaginary scenario, it would be based on the average output of current workers during a 40-hour workweek.
The existing companies that pull that crap ought to be reprimanded themselves. I worked for Gallup for a very short, very miserable tenure. When they casually mentioned that they had increased the number of completed surveys for a particular client required to meet quota simply because employees were meeting the quotas too easily, I got the heck out of there. The company was getting paid the same per survey by the client independent of how many surveys were completed per hour. They saw an opportunity to increase profits by decreasing bonus pay and away they went. It wasn't a one-off situation, it was SOP. I feel like I say this daily anymore, but there ought to be a law.
In doing so, I broke the half-sheet "contract" I had to sign requiring me to work for the company for at least 6 months under threat of lawsuit. Which is 110% unenforceable in my state and most others in the US. Didn't have to break the non-compete specifically, but it strongly reminds me of the way companies all over the country try to intimidate employees into staying in a crappy employment situation by making them sign scary, but completely unactionable contracts that the average employee is intended to mistake for a legitimate threat to their ability to provide for themselves and their families.
Maybe this is a life pro tip for anyone entering a situation like this. Keep your own logs, and if they come after you because the AI said you slacked off, just point out all the times you answered a question from on-call during dinnertime or were pressured into commuting to an office so you could sit alone all day and talk on the telephone.
I think it really depends heavily on the job in question. If you are making physical widgets it is easy to track and prove you did things, but with less 'quantifiable' contributions, it just varies. I personally started a habit of documenting each meeting and interaction ( which also actually helped me to organize my rather messy approach to everything ) to make sure people know things are happening.
Seems like the crux of this ruling isn't the time tracking software per se, but the fact that she charged against files (i.e. clients) that she didn't work on.
FTA:
"I've plugged time to files that I didn't touch and that wasn't right or appropriate in any way or fashion, and I recognize that and so for that I'm really sorry," Besse said in a meeting with her company, according to video cited in the ruling.
It’s not pervasive - they got her permission to install the tracking software after it became clear she wasn’t working the hours she claimed. Then she continued to falsify her time sheets.
At least we’ll also have software which can pretend that you’re working over usb keyboard, mouse and webcam simulator. I think this startup will have a lot of monetary potential.
exempt means you are exempt from the 1938 FLSA rules, which is when you earn above a certain salary or perform certain duties - manager vs. sales, etc. you are not guaranteed overtime pay (time-and-a-half, double on sundays), etc. non-exempt means subject to all the FLSA rules.
typically white color salaried jobs are exempt and hourly jobs are not but not always. due to the salary limits, there are jobs that are salaried that are non-exempt.
and salaried jobs are not always paid for getting the job done vs. hours. engineering firms (apparently accounting) and other firms that charge clients by the hour still require timekeeping by their salaried employees. mis-charging is worse than wage theft in this case it causes the firm to perpetrate fraud on the client.
many salaried firms have requirements for 40 hour minimum as well with or without timekeeping. if you're exempt you have less, not more, labor laws that apply. you can agree to a job that requires you to be in the office or online or whatever for 47 1/8 hours a week, and then if you don't do it, you can be fired just for that regardless of whether you got the job done.
the only point is to clarify that she may or may not be exempt, and may or may not have been hourly or salaried - any combination of these can still be required to work certain hours and keep time records.
> if she were on salary, it would be a different story
not really. you can still mis-charge on salary, which is extremely serious which is fraud and time-theft. and she clearly wasn't "getting the job done" either.
karma. i absolutely love this story because the company didn't even go after her for the lost time until in a genius move she sued them. it's pretty obvious she was a poor employee on a pip within less that a year of starting. and then, knowingly on a pip, still mis-charges, etc.?
Yep, not only that, she sued the company for firing her due to time theft. Then the Tribunal not only found that she had no case, they ordered her to give the company restitution. Some people have gall and don't know when to --uhhm, quit.
> exempt workers get paid for the job getting done, not the hours it takes
A recent full-time contract of mine stated (slight paraphrase) "as a fulltime employee, you are required to devote all working hours to your position. Your working hours will typically be 9:30am-5pm, and you will be required to be reachable and ready to work during this time."
> The dispute began last year when Besse claimed she was fired without "just cause."
Not entirely clear, but it sounds like she sued first, and then they dug into the time accounting more precisely, and calculated the exact discrepancy. Would have been better to walk away.
1. She got fired by company, company did not sue her for stealing time.
2. She tried to sue the company that fired her. It failed. She was ordered to repay $2k in court fees or because of the stolen time?
> Now, a civil tribunal, which is part of Canada's judicial system, has ruled that Besse owes her former company $2,756 after the software installed on her laptop revealed she misrepresented over 50 hours at work.
Ah... did she bill by the hour or something? Not salary?
It's a small accounting firm in a city with around 25,000 people. Given the time frame (March 2022) for the termination and dispute, it's likely the employee was a contract employee hired on the basis of billable hours to assist with extra workload during tax season.
Have you seen a more detailed article on this? I feel like a lot of details are missing here. Most important to my mind is the time period this occured in. Are we talking 50 hours in 2 weeks or over the course of a year? One seems like a reasonable reason for dismissal and the other seems like nickel-and-diming a low-level employee.
> Most important to my mind is the time period this occured in.
“Karlee Besse, was employed as an accountant by the respondent and applicant by counterclaim, Reach CPA Inc. (Reach), from October 12, 2021 to March 29, 2022”
> One seems like a reasonable reason for dismissal and the other seems like nickel-and-diming a low-level employee.
It is important to note that the company didn’t start nickel-and-diming her. She was underperforming. They suspected the hours she was reporting thus they installed the time tracking software. She kept underpeforming and they let her go. She sued the company. If she just have left she would not have had to pay them anything. Based on the article.
If employers are going to start suing employees for "stealing" an hour a week over the course of a year then this is going to be a very ugly world we live in.
I've since read the case summary that's been linked and I've lost all my sympathy for her. The excess hours were over the course of 6 weeks or so and she also owed the company an additional $1100 on an advance to pay for her CPA courses. The advance was set to be forgiven at the rate of 1/24th of the total per month, which I interpreted as a sort of "we'll pay for your training and certification if you stay with us for 2 years" agreement. From the information I've seen, it didn't seem like they intended to pursue her for the rest of the advance until she brought the suit against them for dismissal and withholding her last paycheck to repay a portion of the advance.
Her employer fired her for underperforming and falsifying her time sheets.
She sued her employer saying that that was not a valid cause.
The court said that it clearly was and that she now had to pay back some of the costs.
She would have gotten away with falsifying her timesheets if she hadn't decided to sue them.
Also: The monitoring software was not installed until after she had been underperforming and presumably had suspicious billing, and it was installed with her permission.
But that is not what happened if you read the article, or the case linked by the article.
She was fired. She sued the company, claiming unfair dismissal. The company managed to prove that she was fired for a cause and the civil resolution tribunal deemed she owed her employer that much.
With the additional information, that appears to be the case. From the article, though, that wasn't clear to me at all. They left out a ton of details.
Not all work is done on a computer even when you're an IC. Time tracking programs like this misrepresent the actual time spent in favor of the employer. It is wage theft.
I mean, a) she admitted she lied, b) the software tracked printed documents, and the (relatively small) amount she printed could not have accounted for the extra time. In this particular line of work, pretty much all billable hours should have been on the computer, or should have been accounted for in printed documents.
I am right with you on the general theme of employer abuses and wage theft, but it doesn't seem like this was one of those cases.
I'm more concerned about the normalization of electronic surveillance.
It can be, except here she literally admitted she was lying.
It's also important to realize the monitoring software was installed after she was already underperforming for an extended period. It was also not the sole evidence. If you actually read the case:
* She admitted to falsifying her time sheet
* She was already on some kind of PIP
* The monitoring software recorded that she was not doing work on her machine, but also recorded whether she printed out documents, as she claimed, but she had not.
* The file access logs also showed she was not opening them.
* And again: she admitted she falsified her reporting
Finally: The company did not sue her for this time. After she was fired for the above she sued them claiming they weren't justified in firing her after she falsified her time sheets and demonstrably lied about the work she did. In response the court ordered her to pay back at least some costs.
and time spent on her work laptop for personal use — which, both parties agree, her employer allowed during staff's off-hours.
A lot of companies "allow" this, but IMHO it's playing with fire. I strongly recommend that people don't use company-owned equipment for personal activities, and vice-versa.
Yup I refuse to even log into personal accounts on my work computer. I've never had any issues with companies prying into my life that I'm aware of but I don't even want them to have the avenue. I even keep my work laptop on a separate vlan because I'm paranoid, and my network setup made it trivial.
Never cross the streams when it comes to personal and work devices. Don't log into personal accounts from work computer/phone, and vice versa: Don't log into work from your personal devices. Keep a strong wall between them.
Wasn't there an article a while back where someone was complaining that her employer demanded to examine the contents of her work phone but she didn't want to because she had nudes on it? Like what on earth would possess you to put personal information on a device that is owned and remotely managed by your work, let alone nudes?
Wasn't there an article a while back where someone was complaining that her employer demanded to examine the contents of her work phone but she didn't want to because she had nudes on it?
I believe that was this, unless there was more than once documented instance of such a thing happening (which is definitely plausible): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28241753
In addition, it seems prudent to make your own time log to deal with the possibility that any time tracking surveillance agents are mistaken.
If this woman's claims do have any merit, I wouldn't be surprised if it's due to something like having some entertainment playing while working, and the software wrongly attributing that as not working when it's actually solid work time.
The biggest user of bandwidth in our office is youtube. It's not even close. People use it for music, I hope. But it's not my problem so I haven't looked into it.
When I worked in a bank it was fairly common for contractors to have a non-bank laptop with 3G/4G internet on it that never touched the bank network. I don't know the fine print but it seemed like a security issue to me.
Goes the other way too, there was a story on HN some time ago, where the company's Google things were on the employee's private Gmail. Only for them to realize, when the employee left the company.
"TimeCamp is able to record when and how long employees access work-related documents, and to differentiate – based on electronic pathway – from when they're on non-work sites"
Electronic pathway you say? Well, guess you've gotta be an industry person to know what the hell that is...
I think this is indicative of a larger systemic problem. Outside a few jobs, most jobs are fairly meaningless in that it's hard to see the value in your work in the company. So a lot of jobs are starting to turn into a perverse form of universal basic income.
I'm not trying to validate it. I'm just saying that we are in a transitory stage towards UBI and that is supported by the surge of "quiet quitting" that we are seeing.
I assume ReachCPA was billing clients for the hours that the employee recorded. That could be justification for tracking/auditing actual time worked. From the ruling, though, the employee sued ReachCPA first, which triggered the counterclaim for repayment. Maybe they wouldn't have checked if not for the wrongful dismissal claim.
I live in US and I can absolutely see the same happen here. That said, cursory view of the story suggests that the company went after her in this manner as retaliatory measure.
I have to admit.. up until now, I let my company run on my general wifi at home, but now.. I think I will create a separate tunnel just for them. The less they know the better.
I did. I believe word 'retaliatory' captures this.
I am not arguing she is right. Frankly, case suggests she is in the wrong for several different reasons. But then, she is accountant, does management really think she is making widgets on an per hour basis?
I think her biggest mistake is using work PC for personal use. That is just not a good idea.
edit:
<< She went after the company.
She argued she was not fired for cause. That is hardly going after the company.
<< Besse argued that she found the program difficult to use and she could not get the software to differentiate between work and time spent on her work laptop for personal use — which, both parties agree, her employer allowed during staff's off-hours.
<< When Canadian accountant Karlee Besse was fired for being unproductive at her job, she found herself up against not only her former employer, but its time-tracking software, too.
<< Besse worked remotely for Reach CPA, an accounting firm based in British Columbia, Canada. The dispute began last year when Besse claimed she was fired without "just cause."
<< Her employer argued that Besse was rightfully let go because she engaged in time theft. Reach CPA said it gathered evidence using TimeCamp
<< Besse also argued that she spent a significant amount of time working with paper documents, but didn't tell her company because "they wouldn't want to hear that."
I wonder how software like that registers say working in app with video playing on second screen.
There are cases for both "they are clearly slacking and watching some show instead of working" and "it just acts like background noise, no different from running a TV in same room"
If my employees are spending a lot of their time goofing off, that’s an indication that I’m doing a poor job keeping them motivated and is an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re doing and how.
The idea of weaponizing “time theft” as a first recourse is just sickening to me. Your employees are not slaves nor drones, they are human beings and you have an obligation to treat them as such.
Also it seems it may be (although not clear from the information given) that originally she was simply fired for cause and not made to pay anything back.
Then she sued for wrongful termination and got that result.
Because the first thing I thought was: What kind of petty employer sues for $2000 instead of just letting them go.
Reading the details of the civil suit completely changes the tone of this story. So she also owed ~$3k on the unforgiven portion of an advance from the company for her CPA course, which would have been fully forgiven after 24 months. They withheld her final ~$1800 paycheck due to that. So she was actually ~$1100 ahead and then decided to sue. It also looks like the 50 hours she billed that couldn't be accounted for occurred over 6 weeks or so.
I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot.
> I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot.
Both of these things can be valid at the same time. She was certainly technically in the wrong and made some questionable choices (with the huge caveat that it’s possible context we don’t have may change the story entirely), but I still think the company is overbearing to the point of absurdity.
If she slacked off for 50 hours over 6 weeks, that’s like an hour and a half a day (which may not have been contiguous). I can’t think of a job I’ve ever had where I didn’t have an hour of down time a day on average. Even working crappy manual labor jobs I’m sure I dicked around with my coworkers for like an hour a day.
She may be a bit on the high end there, but not so much that I wouldn’t have worked with her to correct it before firing her.
Slacking off, as you call it, is part of working. What she did was claim to have worked on clients' files without having opened them. She didn't claim that a job had taken her six hours when it took her 5.5 plus some downtime. She claimed to have worked on accounts that she had barely perused the data for.
Law firms know this, and get around it by delegating everything they possibly can to paralegals and junior staff while representing much more hands-on involvement by senior, experienced staff.
I hired an attorney once. I reviewed the invoices, the hours looked reasonable. Cue 4 months later with him saying he had forgotten to generate an invoice from a second record in his billing system - it had around 70% of additional hours. Between this and that he had been apparently ignoring one of my main concerns the whole time, only to wring his hands of responsibility when it ran aground, that relationship went south real fast.
Yeah. It is called an article. Typically provides the context for the title.
The article is beautifully written and links to the actual small claims decision. Which is honestly so rare that I don’t even know when have I seen in non-specialist media.
What the headline needs is people reading beyond it, and not reacting from first instinct. Grumble grumble :)
Genuine question: what makes you sure I didn’t read the article (because I did).
Nothing in the article contradicts my post. The lady was almost certainly billing time she didn’t work, but I would still ask myself what I’ve done to enable that before I just fired her.
I’m disinclined to assume the good faith and intention of a company using invasive software to monitor every minute of the day.
> Genuine question: what makes you sure I didn’t read the article (because I did).
I was not sure that you didn’t read the article. I was just suspecting it.
> Nothing in the article contradicts my post.
Au contraire. You wrote: “The idea of weaponizing ‘time theft’ as a first recourse is just sickening to me.”
That is not what happened in this case at all.
The company was unhappy with her performance and they let her go. She sued them. Does that sound like the company weaponised anything?
So why are you talking about “weaponising” and “first recourse”? How can it be “weaponised” when she was the one who was suing the company What is first recourse about this?
In fact if you read the small claims court case (linked from the article), you can see that she started working in October 12, 2021. They first talked about performance problems with her manager in February the next year. That is when they installed the time tracking software! She was put on a PIP in March 16. And she was dismissed on March 29th.
So clearly they were not weaponizing time theft, nor was it their first recourse.
Maybe you were just commenting in general how sickening it is to weaponise time theft as a first recourse. In which case I would have expected some mention that you are just speaking in general, noting that in this specific case that did not happen. Since you didn’t say that I suspected that you either didn’t read the article carefull enough to understand the case, or didn’t read it at all.
- The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee.
- The manager should have initiated them, not the employee.
- When the employee asked for help, the response was to install time monitoring software on her computer
From my perspective, the time software was absolutely weaponized against the employee. I call this a “first recourse” because it precluded an improvement plan. I’m reading this as “oh, you’re not getting enough work done huh? Well let me just stand over your desk and scrutinize your minute to minute work for a month to make sure you’re not slacking off”. Sure, it’s legal and a court didn’t find issue with it, but that doesn’t make it ethical, and it has zero chance of helping a struggling employee.
If I had one of my direct reports reach out to me and say they felt unproductive I can simply not fathom responding to that by treating them like a delinquent.
Edit because I clearly don’t know how HN formatting works
> The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee.
I agree with you on this here. On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not. If they hadn’t that is a serious mistake. (If you see this somewhere mentioned I’ happy to see a reference. But do not worry either way, no pressure.)
> The manager should have initiated them, not the employee.
I agree with that too! Again I don’t know if that happened or not. The court case suggest that it was the employee who initiated the chat. I can also imagine that if I am an employer and I am being sued I would stick to the hard facts. The things I can prove. And if there are enough of these hard facts to show that I did not commit what I am accused of (unfair dismissal) the I wouldn’t bring up all the informal and thus undocumented instances where we talked about performance.
It is possible in my mind either way, and I can’t say for sure. Maybe it is an instance of bad management, paird with over reliance on a time traking software. Maybe it is good management paired with a regetably underpeforming employee. Maybe something in between!
But here is the thing: This is not the reason why this case was thrust into the public spotlight.
It is in the public spotlight because the outcome has the appearance as if she got sued by the company to extract money from her. I certainly started reading with that assumption! But then reading the article I have noticed that this is not the case. I have also noticed that many commenters, not necessarily you, seems to have fallen into the same idea and did not read the article carefull enough to see that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Which perhaps is the fault of the article. (But of course we all understand that “woman sues company, company vindicated” is not such a catchy title, so I even understand why they went for the angle they did.)
Truth to be told on the general managerial advice and recommendations I agree very much with you. Cheers
> On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not.
From the court findings: “In February 2022, Miss Besse began having weekly meetings with her manager to help her better manage her files. She says she initiated the meetings because she felt unproductive and that she was not performing as well as she should have been. On February 21, 2022, Reach installed a time-tracking program called TimeCamp on Miss Besse’s work laptop.”
This is actually the point where I got angry and felt that I needed to comment. Usually these articles are filled with one-sides opinions, but here we have a formal accounting of events from the court. According to the court, Besse went to her manager because she was struggling and the response could be called intimidation.
I’ve been managing for long enough that this, to me, calls into question the cause of the events here. It’s possible this lady was just lazy and is entirely at fault; but when I see a paper trail indicating a failure of management to engage I wonder if the whole thing could have been avoided with some empathy and servant leadership.
Yes, but that is not in opposition to what I said above.
Hours were certainly logged fraudulently, I’m not debating that. I’m saying that rather than firing her, I would have asked a lot of questions about the situation and if I pushed her to feel like she needed to.
The software they were using sounds like what I have seen myself in the past, and it is a huge burden to try and justify every moment of every day the way they want you to. It’s basically a guarantee for burnout and lack of loyalty.
She was an accountant. I am not sure whether she was hourly or not, the issue is that accounting firms often bill clients by the hour, so internally they need correct records of the time employees are spending on jobs.
So even if she were not being paid hourly (though the court ordered repayment implies she was?), the company would have required accurate recording for billing clients.
The company also didn't just arbitrarily install the monitoring software. She was already underperforming, and on some PIP-equivalent setup when they got her consent to add monitoring software - I would guess that they were already thinking she was falsifying her time sheets at this point.
I worked as a VP in a company that tracked everyone in 10-minute intervals. Just having this tracking led to some managers inhumanely squeezing devs and almost all devs ended up burned out after a few years. They went to great lengths to reject any time slots where devs showed insufficient intensity on their keyboard/mouse or if they spotted anything non-work-related on dev desktop screenshots. However, when it came to manipulating metrics to look good (even down to a fraud where they lowered metrics of their devs they didn't like), it was all fine. This culture was enforced by the CEO/COO so there was not much I could do about it outside shielding my people and then leaving when my bosses went even more insane.
Wow, I've heard of ridiculous job performance metrics like "hours in chair" and "lines of code" but "sufficient keyboard/mouse intensity" is a new one to me! So I need to wiggle the mouse frantically and mash the keyboard all day and I'm "working"? Holy cow, that's wild!
I almost had a team fired for "too many lines of code" when I was there :D A billionaire CEO went berserk and it took considerable amount of effort to cool him down.
No, that was because that team did a rewrite of an existing product and one of the "optimistic" reasons for the rewrite was to make the code smaller...
Isn't this just a more advanced form of punch clock? We can quibble about the specifics, but employers tracking their employees time is not a new practice.
Not proud of this fact, but my father got caught punching in the time clock at the Heinz ketchup factory, and then going back home to sleep a few times every week. They were faster to catch him because of the clock.
Who is saying that anyone should be required to do that, though?
Some professions require employees to track time in smaller increments than 10 minutes (IIRC most lawyers at firms in the US bill in six-minute increments), but that's for the purpose of billing that time to the correct client, not as a way of micromanaging the employee.
I don’t think this is analogous to a punch clock. The clock just says when you’re in the building, where the kind of software they’re using here is more like just having someone stand at your desk and ask you what you’re doing every couple of minutes.
There’s a mental cost to being tracked so rigidly, and the burnout it leads to may be -why- hours get logged fraudulently.
> If my employees are spending a lot of their time goofing off, that’s an indication that I’m doing a poor job keeping them motivated and is an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re doing and how.
Sounds like a good soundbite from a management book or something. You don't think there's a possibility that someone, idk, doesn't want to work and prefers doing something else? I've been guilty of playing video games during the workday and its not due to lack of motivation or the manager doing something wrong ... I simply want to do something thats not work. Not the managers fault.
> doesn't want to work and prefers doing something else
It's possible, but that's really what the interview process is supposed to be for. In programming, this is kind of a necessity, because from the outside, deep work looks exactly like "loafing". You can't threaten, harass, cajole or otherwise motivate somebody to actually mentally focus on something the way you could, say, threaten to chop off their hands if they stop digging for diamonds. You might want to, but even you would eventually have to conclude that it didn't work. Ultimately, you have to trust the people responsible for doing the work.
> {programming} from the outside, deep work looks exactly like "loafing".
Worse, from the outside causing major problems that will only show up later looks exactly like typing really intently.
I remember one horrible problem I had dumped on me where I spent a week reading stuff online and doodling. Once I had a doodle I liked I threw together a multithreaded user authentication system in a week then spent a week making sure it actually worked. CIO was very impressed but afterwards admitted the first week drove him quietly insane. Luckily my team leader kept saying "that's what thinking looks like". Some managers completely miss point of thinking, and not just when other people are doing it /s
There is indeed a chance that someone doesn’t want to work and doesn’t have a place on the team. I have let people go for this, but only after extensively attempting to remediate.
That’s why it’s an “indication” and not a “guarantee”.
This!
A pet-peeve of mine is when a vendor refers to someone as a "Resource". "One of our team members can help you with X" at least refers to a person than a person as an object or a thing...
Employers must forget the 40 hour week as a measure of someone's productivity and instead set goals to be achieved.
Manage/Treat people like people,be kind, but firm, if you can't trust someone in your team, you hired wrong or you have trust issues yourself. Its not rocket science, no matter how much BS the Simon Sinek`s of the world spout out.
I was SA'd by the VP of HR at a previous company. I asked around, and apparently there is no one that can report that to except for HR, so in several companies HR can do anything they want.
I don’t have a set of clear goals and objectives. I have a very broad problem area and my job is “make this better.” And I’m salaried so I spend about 40-60 hours per week in this area. I think my employer trusts me quite a bit.
For task based jobs by all means figure out a cost and bill by the item. Some professionals do this. I paid my accountant $600 and didn’t care how long it took her.
Software houses need to bill client for something and usually that is just number_of_hours * rate, where is the push for "accurate" reporting comes from.
For US-style exempt/salaried employees, I agree with you. But when you're being paid to do a job where you're required to record the hours you work (which then go toward billing a client for time spent), then it's absolutely not ok to lie about the hours you work.
The company in question is an accounting firm; imagine if you hired that firm to do your personal taxes, and the person who was doing them inflated the number of hours it took, and then the firm billed you more than it actually cost them to do the work. I know I'd be outraged if that happened. I'd sue them, never use them again, and tell everyone I know not to use them.
Or a more apt example, considering your profession: imagine you're a software engineering manager at a software consulting firm. Your reports do work for a variety of your company's clients, and they have to record how much time they spend working on each client's work so that the client can be billed appropriately. Let's say that your reports are even paid a salary, and aren't paid hourly, even though they have to track their time. I personally don't think it's ok to bill a client for the time someone is doomscrolling Twitter or replying to personal email. But I agree with you that it should be fine that your people aren't generating billable hours every minute of every day. But they have to be honest about that on their timesheets.
Sure, they need to be honest about it and lying about it is wrong. I would definitely tell one of my direct reports not to do it again. If they persisted I’d put them on a PIP and if they failed to correct I’d fire them. I have let people go for this.
The issue that I have here is that it sounds like the company is set up for failure. Rigidly monitoring your employees is a great way to burn them out and kills loyalty. If you want people to work hard, offering a little trust goes a long way.
It’s always worth asking what you could have done better as a leader and starting with an assumption that they’re not just criminals.
Paying hourly for personal taxes or most things are easy to game. I prefer single price. I do my own taxes.. I could not imagine giving that responsibility away
If an employee is not contributing, yet is retained, that is bad management. If nothing else, it makes the productive workers annoyed to see someone coasting.
> If an employee is not contributing, yet is retained, that is bad management.
I think I agree but it isn’t that simple in many countries/legal jurisdictions. You can’t always just fire someone and performance managing an employee is utterly gruelling if the individual wants to make it so.
My point was that low productivity is fault of manager sometimes, but other times it is fully fault of the low producing person. Especially when you a single low producing person in otherwise normally effective team.
You can only do so much as a manager/leader. Some people don't want to work and are incredibly lazy.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Also, it wasn't their first recourse. They fired her, but then she sued and they took their documentation to court and counter-sued. It was factually their last recourse.
It must be a much more straight forward process in Canada for small business. In the US, I have worked for a company sued twice for people claiming unpaid wages. I personally knew both to be fraudulent, and retaliatory for letting the person go. The company I was with always just settled for the claimed amount if it was a couple thousand dollars because it was easier and cheaper than fighting it in court.
Two people at my old company got fired for time theft. though in that case the story was it was one person using the others badge to make it look like they both went in for overtime when only one showed up. They'd alternate doing this.
Timecards where serious business where I worked as they billed based on them. Though to be fair they never monitored us once we were at work. I don't think they even checked our badge in/out times vs our timecards, which we manually entered. I remember the "we have a gym, we want you healthy, but you use the gym on your own time" email.
Well it didnt, I just assumed that an accountant working at an accounting firm probably would be working on client accounts. Not much else to do really.
If your boss found out you were getting someone to stamp your timesheet several hours before you actually came into work every day, that would be considered theft as well.
If she were on salary, it would be a different story, because exempt workers get paid for the job getting done, not the hours it takes.