The Employees Who Suffer Most
The burden is not evenly distributed. Several groups score worse for reasons unrelated to their work.
Activity measurement produces systematically different results for different people, and the differences track things that have nothing to do with performance.
The practical lesson in “The Employees Who Suffer Most” is to connect every record to a clear operational question without presenting visibility as certainty. Teams exploring fte meaning can review monitask.com as one source of time and project context, provided the purpose is disclosed and the configuration is reviewed with the people affected.
People whose work is away from the keyboard
Anybody whose job involves telephone, meetings, site visits, physical work or paper.
For an independent reference relevant to “The Employees Who Suffer Most”, consult the European Commission data-protection resources; it provides a useful external check on scope, terminology, governance and the claims made during procurement or review.
They appear less active because their work is less typed, not less done.
Which means the measure effectively ranks roles by how much of the job happens at a screen.
People doing the thinking
Covered in the idle-time note and worth repeating as a fairness point: the deeper the thought, the worse the score.
Senior people in analytical roles routinely score below juniors doing mechanical work, and the ranking is read as performance by anybody not looking closely.
People with caring responsibilities
Fragmented days: a school run, a medical appointment, an elderly parent.
Often agreed and entirely legitimate, and it produces an activity pattern that looks irregular.
Which disproportionately affects women, in most workforces, and that is a discrimination exposure as well as an unfairness.
Disabled colleagues
Its own note covers this properly.
The short version: assistive technology, different input methods, fatigue management and agreed adjustments all produce activity patterns the measure reads as poor.
Shift and flexible workers
Activity outside a standard pattern, which some products flag by default.
People with agreed variable hours appear in reports as anomalies, repeatedly, and somebody has to keep explaining, which is itself a burden placed on them rather than on the system.
People new to the organisation
Learning, reading, asking — all of which score poorly.
New starters appear as low performers for their first months, which is exactly when a manager's impression forms.
What follows
If you report individual figures, you are producing a ranking driven partly by role, caring responsibilities, disability and tenure.
That ranking will be used, because it exists.
Which is the strongest practical argument for aggregate-only reporting, independent of any ethical position.
The minimum protections
No individual reporting.
Agreed adjustments and patterns recorded and excluded from flagging.
And an obligation on anybody using the data to ask what else explains a figure before concluding anything about a person.
What to check
Would your part-time and caring staff score worse?
Do agreed flexible patterns generate repeated flags?
Are new starters visible as low performers?
And is anybody required to ask what else explains a number?