An Australian boss, who wishes to remain anonymous, suspected that some of his staff weren't pulling their weight while working from home.
He noticed that the work group chat had grown quieter, email response times had slowed down, and calls were going unanswered.
"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," he said.
"We did have some tracking in place through our CRM (Customer relationship management) Pipedrive," he explained.
Pipedrive is a cloud-based software company that essentially acts as a calendar in which staff enter tasks, reminders, and scheduled or completed calls.
He found that not only were calls not being logged, but many were 'ghost calls' - or fake entries.
After 18 months of monitoring his workers, he decided that three of them had to go due to 'insufficient work'. He conceded that it may be necessary to introduce keyboard tracking if a boss felt they were being taken advantage of.
"Many of us have that friend a couple of degrees of separation away who’s boasting about taking their employer for a ride, in some way or another, especially during the pandemic," he said. "Staff knew their businesses had vulnerabilities. It was hard to recruit, operating was difficult. And they leveraged that to be a bit more mischievous."
In a related case, Suzie Cheiko, a former Insurance Australia Group (IAG) employee for 18 years.
She has spoken out about her recent dismissal and the challenges she faces in finding new employment.
Cheiko was placed on a performance improvement plan in November 2022 due to concerns regarding her output. This plan included monitoring her keyboard activity for 49 days between October and December.
It was reported that she did not work her full allocated hours on 44 days, started work late on 47 days, and left early on 29 days.
Furthermore, there were four days where she logged no work hours at all.
Following a review of her work, IAG terminated Cheiko's employment in February 2023 due to missed deadlines, absences, and an uncompleted task resulting in a fine for the company.
