- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
‘Don’t Mess With Us’: WebMD Parent Company Demands Return to Office in Bizarre Video::“I’ve seen better acting by hostages in direct to DVD movies,” one anonymous worker wrote about the video.
They don’t care. It’s about control and real estate.
More about real estate than anything else, to be honest. You have far more control over remote work than in the office. I know how many minutes each member of my team spends on any and all websites, can log keyboards, to the point I don’t recommend to anyone working remotely to access bank accounts on their work computers.
I don’t see how working from home changes anything. If you can do that kind of logging on their work computers at home, you can do it at the office too. Besides (in the EU at least) you have to inform employees about the extent of the monitoring beforehand. Can’t imagine how they expect to attract competent employees that way though.
You’d be surprised how much people actually just don’t care how their work computers are monitored nowadays. We disclose everything, even showed our monitoring tool to employees, and they just don’t care. I guess people know by now that personal stuff should be handled on personal devices, such as phones, tablets and computers. And the things they use their work computers for, they don’t care if we’re looking at it or not,
Funny enough, we never used those tools working in the office, even though they would work. But the fact that people are inside a controlled environment makes companies more lenient about IT security, funny enough. Having a badge seems to make computer monitoring tools redundant (even though they aren’t, of course).
But again, I do think this “back to work” movement has more to do with financial losses in real estate than real team work or control over the team. To some degree, banks, insurers and funds own us all.
Even when we were in office, I never logged into anything or browsed for anything personal on my work device. I also never connected my phone to company WiFi on principle. We have tiny pocket computers. No reason to jeopardize my job going on then reddit, now lemmy on the company device.