Boss fires three employees after tracking their work from home activity

The working-from-home revolution has been a complicated one - after countless millions of people were forced to WFH during the pandemic, things are now a bit less clear.

With hybrid working now extremely common and some firms still happy to let people work from home full-time if they want, some bosses have never had it harder when it comes to cracking the whip on their workers.

After all, if you can't take a stroll around your office to remind people that they're not meant to be scrolling social media apps or chatting for hours on end, what can you do?

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One anonymous boss in Australia told UNILAD this week that he'd been growing suspicious of some of his employees taking it too easy, and that it took well over a year for him to get enough evidence to let some of them go.

Running a sales company, the boss explained that the working day revolves around sales calls, and that this was how he first noticed something was up.

"The time between calls started to get longer. Instead of a call every 15 minutes, it was every 20 minutes and then every half an hour. And then there’s like two-hour gaps of nothing happening … it showed staff being absent; starting small, but the absence would get longer and longer."

So, with his ears pricked up by the downturn in productivity, this boss started to pay more attention to the logs being generated by Pipedrive, his company's CRM (customer relationship management) software.

"So typically, a salesperson is probably going to get between four and 10 calls an hour. Someone might ring and they’re busy, they might say call me back in half an hour. So that’s logged as a one-minute call.

"And then they might have another conversation for say five-to-ten minutes. And for each call you put a note - but those things started to not happen. No notes were being left."

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After some 18 months of monitoring, he eventually decided that enough was enough and axed three employees for their lack of productivity, doubtless giving the rest of the team a bit of a fright in the process.

It's a reminder that even if you feel secure taking it a bit slower at home, you might want to consider how your boss might manage to figure out you're not being stretched.

With keyboard-trackers now used by quite a number of big firms, it's getting harder and harder to skive off.

There are many out there, though, who would point out that you might not want to work for a boss who doesn't trust you - after all, if you're getting through the work they ask for each day, it perhaps shouldn't matter how long it takes you to do it.