Workplace Productivity: Are You Being Tracked?

In lower-paying jobs, monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where second-by-second measurements have become notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others. Eight of the 10 largest U.S. private employers track each worker's productivity metrics, often in real time, according to a New York Times review.

Today, digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require advanced degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, "idle" buttons, or simply silent check-ins that constantly accumulate. Breaks can lead to penalties, ranging from loss of wages to loss of jobs.

Some radiologists see dashboards showing their "idle" time and how their productivity compares to that of their colleagues. At companies like J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from phone calls to writing emails, has become standard practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank removed messages prompting workers, such as "Not enough time in the zone yesterday", after causing an outcry. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect pay and sap bonuses. Civil servants are also being tracked: In June, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring.

Architects, university administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers have described electronic surveillance growing every minute of their working day. They echoed the complaints that employees in many lower-paying positions have voiced for years: that their work is relentless, that they don't have control - and in some cases, that they don't even have enough time to go to the toilet. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers have described being hounded as "demoralizing", "humiliating" and "toxic". Micromanagement is becoming the norm, they said.

But the most pressing complaint, spanning industries and income, is that the new world of work clocks are just plain wrong: unsuitable for capturing offline activity, unreliable for gauging hard-to-quantify tasks, and likely to undermine the work itself.

According to a former supervisor, UnitedHealth social workers were marked as inactive due to lack of keyboard activity while counseling patients in drug treatment facilities. Grocery store cashiers said the pressure to quickly scan items was degrading customer service, making it harder to be patient with slow-moving elderly shoppers. Ms. Kraemer, the leader, said she sometimes resorts to "hard work that's insane" to rack up clicks.

"We're in this age of measurement, but we don't know what we should be measuring," said Ryan Fuller, former vice president of workplace intelligence at Microsoft.

The measures are even applied to spiritual care for the dying. The Reverend Margo Richardson of Minneapolis became a hospice chaplain to help patients grapple with deep and probing questions. "This is the big test for everyone: how am I going to deal with my own death?" she says.