About

Fifty notes on employee monitoring software, written for the person being sold it rather than for the person deploying it.

The position

The software measures behaviour in front of a screen. Work is what gets achieved, and the relationship between them is weakest exactly where the work is most valuable.

Once the measure affects people, they manage the measure. Not from dishonesty — because the organisation announced that it matters.

The costs that do not appear on the invoice are larger than the licence.

Who it is for

Executives, owners, HR and managers deciding whether to buy this, and anybody who already has it and is not sure it is working.

What is deliberately absent

Product and vendor names. The field changes and naming would read as advertising or disparagement.

Productivity improvement figures, which measure the vendor's own metric on the vendor's own customers.

And moralising. One note sets out the five cases where monitoring is the right answer.

Nothing here is legal advice

Requirements differ substantially by jurisdiction and are moving.

About this domain

This address previously carried a farm's website, which is no longer here. There is a page about that.