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I wasn't working on the computer because I printed it, your honour

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    I wasn't working on the computer because I printed it, your honour

    https://metro.co.uk/2023/01/13/remot...time-18095896/

    Karlee Besse, an accountant who worked remotely has been ordered by a civil tribunal to pay $2,459 (£2,020) to her former employer for ‘time theft’.

    Time theft is when an employee claims wages for the time they did not work. In this case, Besse was caught misrepresenting hours worked by a controversial tracking software called TimeCamp.

    The software tracks how long a document is open, how the employee uses the document and logs the time as work.

    Besse’s employer, Reach CPA said it had installed an employee-tracking software called TimeCamp on her work laptop after it found her assigned files were over budget and behind schedule.

    According to the software, Beese had logged more than 50 hours that ‘did not appear to have been spent on work-related tasks’.

    Weeks later, the company said an analysis ‘identified irregularities between her timesheets and the software usage logs’.

    Besse told the tribunal she found the program ‘difficult’ and worried it didn’t differentiate between work and personal use. She also said that she had printed documents to work on but did not tell her employer as she was afraid of repercussions.

    The company demonstrated how TimeCamp automatically distinguishes time logs for work from activities such as using streaming movies and TV shows.

    The software does track printing but any work done on the printed documents needed to be input into the company’s software, which Besse skipped.

    Besse had initially taken Reach CPA to court for wrongful termination and sought $5,000 (£3,066) in compensation for unpaid wages and severance.

    However, the judge tossed out her claim and ordered her to pay for the ‘time theft’ in returned wages and part of a previous advance she had received from the company.

    Many businesses are turning to workplace surveillance to keep an eye on how their staff perform.

    Half of all large corporations use monitoring techniques including analysing emails and social media messages alongside looking at genetic data, research firm Gartner found. It expects that figure to rise to 80% by 2020, up from 30% back in 2015.

    In the UK, employers are legally allowed to monitor which websites you look at while at work and using devices provided by the workplace, meaning they are legally able to know if you’re spending time on sites that aren’t deemed productive, such as Facebook.


    #2
    Why would you do anything non work-related on a work device at home? Bizarre. But I do agree with printing stuff out - I much prefer to go through a requirements doc or whatever as a hard copy and scribble in the margins, read on the train etc. Maybe I'm showing my age.

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      #3

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        #4
        Originally posted by mattster View Post
        Why would you do anything non work-related on a work device at home? Bizarre. But I do agree with printing stuff out - I much prefer to go through a requirements doc or whatever as a hard copy and scribble in the margins, read on the train etc. Maybe I'm showing my age.
        Some people are dim.

        I worked somewhere decades ago where someone senior let their child use their work laptop to surf the web. They got a virus on it. It led to lots of amusement amongst us technical folk as the company was always trying to find ways to stop us visiting legit websites.
        "You’re just a bad memory who doesn’t know when to go away" JR

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          #5
          Many businesses are turning to workplace surveillance to keep an eye on how their staff perform.
          This is where the money is at IMO. WFH has a load of benefits but there are many many people that need to be eyeballed to work. Not everyone is a dedicated professional. I can't begin to imagine how little work some people working in the civil service do when WFH. Many of them are just winding down to retirement so to expect them to work 8 hours at home when they don't really need to. Once we've stabalised in to the new hybrid system, firms have been able to decide what to do with their offices and everything normalises I reckon the next big problem will the management of work from WFH and people slacking.
          'CUK forum personality of 2011 - Winner - Yes really!!!!

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            #6
            Originally posted by northernladuk View Post

            This is where the money is at IMO. WFH has a load of benefits but there are many many people that need to be eyeballed to work. Not everyone is a dedicated professional. I can't begin to imagine how little work some people working in the civil service do when WFH. Many of them are just winding down to retirement so to expect them to work 8 hours at home when they don't really need to. Once we've stabalised in to the new hybrid system, firms have been able to decide what to do with their offices and everything normalises I reckon the next big problem will the management of work from WFH and people slacking.
            What, like the people who post pages of crap on here Mon-Fri 9 - 5 while billing their clientco for the time??

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              #7
              Originally posted by sadkingbilly View Post

              What, like the people who post pages of crap on here Mon-Fri 9 - 5 while billing their clientco for the time??
              I deliver a service, not a bum on seat. I'm working right now because I've got some spare and something to get done. They are getting what they need, when they need and whilst delivering that I can more or less do what I want, when I want
              'CUK forum personality of 2011 - Winner - Yes really!!!!

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                #8
                Originally posted by northernladuk View Post

                I deliver a service, not a bum on seat. I'm working right now because I've got some spare and something to get done. They are getting what they need, when they need and whilst delivering that I can more or less do what I want, when I want
                of course. nothing to see here, move along

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                  #9
                  Originally posted by mattster View Post
                  Why would you do anything non work-related on a work device at home?
                  I don't want two laptops. I do have a desktop in my office, but mainly use that for video editing.

                  If I'd been this woman, I'd have cited Horizon as a prime example of why it's not reasonable to assume that TimeCamp is reliable.
                  Down with racism. Long live miscegenation!

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                    #10
                    Time != Value

                    Pondering how and what to do then spending a short period achieving the right result is better than spending oodles of time producing crap. How do these AI monitors measure quality or are employers not interested in quality

                    If I spend hours thinking a requirement through whilst listening quietly to music or walking the dog or reading CUK then produce perfect code in minutes have I worked hours or minutes?

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