make sure your monitor camera is off
I keep my laptop closed at all times. Have a real monitor and real keyboard and a real mouse. No, not a âreal mouse.â
That could help with the jiggling
A Tungsten cube holding the ctrl key down works well at keeping the Teams status green.
What part of the policy is oppressive?
They fired 12 out of 220,000 employees. Iâm guessing they had plenty of reasons to fire them, this was the easiest to document.
Iâm aware that, pre-pandemic, there was a major American insurer that had a team monitor the computer activity of its remote workers, down to silently connecting to do screen-share sessions, to ensure that they seemed to be working.
Iâm aware that there were a few folks with particularly lousy managers that received a bit of grief from that monitoring, despite good work performance, and plausible reasons for inactivity (phone calls, customer meetings, having a geographic assignment that required more travelâŚ)
You are actually on board with this type of remote monitoring?
We would revolt if they tried this in the UK.
What should matter is your work product. As long as you get it done you should not have to be chained to your desk because âreasonsâ.
There is a very Taylorâesque vibe to the entire thing.
I suspect our desktop support group has all sorts of tools to do things that employees have no clue about. I recently was issued a new laptop that wasnât working quite right, and they diagnosed some things on it without my knowledge. It was a bit creepy.
This one doesnât bother me too much. If they start using wfh laptops to actively spy on employees non work habits, Iâd be pretty upset.
We have no idea what the real reason the employees were fired. Little chance a valuable productive employee is fired for this. HR exists for reasons as well, and that includes preventing bad decisions to fire someone.
Note: if you are efficient and find a way to get all your responsibilities done in 30% of your workweek while it took the prior guy 85% of his workweek to do the same, this is not an open invitation to twiddle your thumbs the rest of the time. It might be the end result, but your manager has a responsibility to make sure you have a proper amount of work, so doing things to prevent them from doing their job (pretending to be active when you arenât) is just giving them âreasons.â
I was once offered a position by a not-so-major insurer. They disclosed in the work policies included with their offer that they did this stuff, on top of saying âwe have the right to search your personal belongings at any timeâ and âwe have the right to search your personal vehicle while on company propertyâ and other intrusive stuff.
Iâm guessing this insurer knows it can do this because (1) it has a very sizeable impact to its community so people are dependent on its presence, (2) there are a lot of people there who, if you told them âyour job today is the exact same thing youâll be doing 10 years from nowâ theyâd be thrilled because it means theyâd still have a job and the vast majority of them have no desire to move up to a higher position anywhere, and (3) those people have no desire to move anywhere else, if they can stay there forever theyâll be perfectly content.
No, I did not accept the offer.
Why did you not accept the offer?
Post-Covid, our office decided to require that we work two days of the week in the office building. Then the parent organization decided that if an employee is in the office less than 60% of the time, that personâs office could be given to someone else. Iâm being moved to a cubicle, with my (small) office split in half for two actuarial analysts (who will also be expected in their cubicles only two days a week).
Wtf is ted Hoffman bringing into work?!
Iâd be down for anything short of a cavity search
I have nothing to hide and I know better than to bring anything suspect to work
Maybe written offers from other companies?
This sounds like a security area rule. I would expect that such a search is very rare if it happens at all. Some CYA language.
This. Old employer asked us to check our guns at security desk. Not everyone did.
My companyâs policy is âno weapons on company property except to the extent that state law preempts that ruleâ.
(Some US states require that employers tolerate employees keeping firearms in secure storage in their cars.)
Makes me think of Dwight Schrute⌠Dwight's Hidden Weapons | Dunderpedia: The Office Wiki | Fandom
I would feel very uncomfortable with people being armed in the office.
At my first job, we had a couple of company rifles.
Rattlesnakes liked to sun themselves out in the parking lot.
(This was also the company where, while the building was posted âno smokingâ, the smoking area was right next to the main air intake for the buildingâs ventilation systemâŚand thatâs where the gas-powered landscaping equipment tended to be started upâŚ)
Did you work atâŚ'Merican General?