It’s true that if you evaluate people based on “10-minute mouse-movements” and “productive looking screenshots”, you will see more mice moving and productive looking screenshots. That percentage acts as a productivity score. Broken down in 10-minute increments, the system tallies what percentage of time the worker has been typing or moving the computer mouse. One main feature of Hubstaff is an activity monitor that gives managers a snapshot of what an employee is doing. From my phone, it mapped where I went, including a two-hour bike ride that I took around Battersea Park with my kids in the middle of one workday. Every few minutes, it snapped a screenshot of the websites I browsed, the documents I was writing and the social media sites I visited. Last month, I downloaded employee-monitoring software made by Hubstaff, an Indianapolis company. How does this play out with Screenshot Tracking? Grossly violating employee autonomy is a quick way to turn them against your cause. Nothing good comes from treating people like robots.So, just because a metric improves, doesn’t mean underlying behavior has changed for the better. There’s always distance between the measure and the underlying phenomenon. “Getting what you ask for” != “getting what you want.” This is a fundamental challenge with any metric.This is well-documented and generally a good thing. If you track something, you’ll see it improve.So what’s the difference? First, consider 3 principles: But, the former fails in ways the latter handles quite well.

The takeaway: “ick.”Ĭoincidentally, on the same day, Github announced Github Insights, for tracking engineering team performance.ĭespite consternation on Hacker News, this is a much saner way to get a pulse on team performance.īoth tools attempt to accomplish the same goal (“team performance visibility,” especially for management).Īnd both are a little creepy. He describes a 3-week experiment with HubStaff, an employee surveillance tool. This week, Adam Satariano published an article called “How My Boss Monitors Me While I Work From Home.”

Just because employee spyware exists, doesn’t mean you should use it.

Hubstaff time tracking