“Essentially, bosses trust workers who are right there, in front of them. Even though more work is being done now than ever before - Microsoft data shows that weekly meetings have increased 153% since 2020, and that multitasking and long hours are the new norm - there is a growing sense that only employees who are under constant surveillance can be considered truly productive. This disconnect between the perceptions of managers and the perceptions of their subordinate workers is precisely what gave rise to the concept of productivity paranoia. When the Covid-19 pandemic imposed remote work on companies around the world, many bosses had to ditch their old visual practices for measuring productivity - a stroll between cubicles to glance at computer screens, say - for compulsive e-mailing and constant video calls with no purpose other than to keep tabs on their team. But when Microsoft asked the managers, only 12% believed their teams were more productive when working remotely. Richard Baker (Getty Images) (In Pictures via Getty Images)įor its fall 2022 survey, Microsoft interviewed 20,000 workers in 11 countries: 87% thought they worked just as efficiently from home as they had from the office. Office workers in London attend a Zoom meeting on September 21, 2021. It doesn’t need to correspond to reality. It doesn’t matter what their productivity reports say: paranoia is a perception, a feeling. companies have installed employee surveillance software) and bosses paranoid that their work-from-home subordinates are doing everything they can to do as little as possible. She doesn’t perform workplace rituals with the charisma and grace her boss expectation of a person truly “committed to the company family.” So every so often, her overseer needs to check her performance vitals as if she were a terminally ill patient, or a recently captured escaped servant, or simply put, what she is: a worker under constant suspicion and surveillance.Īccording to The Economist, 2023 will be the year of “productivity paranoia” - one of two dozen “items of vital vocabulary you’ll need to know in 2023″ - with employees paranoid of being watched (they often are: a recent Microsoft survey reported that 9 out of 10 large U.S. But even though she meets most of her goals, she fails to stand out as a star in the virtual theater of productivity. Is Alexia the laziest worker in the virtual office? She knows she’s not. Alexia works from home in Madrid, Spain, and says she’s convinced that her computer has been infected with “bossware” - spy programs that surreptitiously surveil and measure an employee’s work performance. This is how she avoids constant messages from her boss. She’s even installed an automated motor on her mouse - a device that simulates constant cursor movements to trick Slack into reporting her status as active.
Work making paranoid professional#
If she does, she will again be logged absent, this time by Slack (an internal messaging system for professional environments), and her boss will immediately shoot her an email: “Everything okay, Alexia?”Īlexia has tried it all.
After the meeting, Alexia’s main occupation is to never stop moving her mouse. “Good morning” is not a polite convention - it is the new time card. If she does, the team leader will log her as absent, even if 10 minutes later she is on the screen with her work completed and a smile on her face, ready to review project updates.
It’s nine in the morning, and Alexia D., a graphic designer, types the final “Good morning.” No one dares skip the greeting. … And so on, until the 36th person types “Good morning,” and the work day can begin.
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