Mouse movers and shirkers

Stop creating systems people want to game.

It was revealed last week that Wells Fargo, a major US bank, had fired “more than a dozen” employees. What for? For being caught using devices (both physical and apps) to pretend they were hard at work on their computers. Think mouse movers (bits of tech you can buy to manually jiggle a computer mouse to keep statuses appearing as ‘active’) or apps that will essentially do some sporadic clicking so your screen doesn’t go to sleep.

These tools have been around for yonks, but they inevitably exploded in popularity in the pandemic, when workers had a double whammy of both means and motive: as working from home (and thus away from observing eyes of our bosses) became more common, Covid prompted a lot of us to question what we were doing with our lives and our time, leading many of us to want to work less or not at all.

Of course, once the cat’s out of the bag, it’s tricky to get it back in. Disengagement and even resentment at work continued to simmer, even as the world attempted to get back to normal. The lack of genuine change in the way we work, coupled with the knowledge that you could get away with quiet quitting or doing the bare minimum or half-assing multiple jobs, meant that for many of us, this is just what work became: a negative time-suck that we’ll do anything to avoid. Mouse movers kept selling, shirkers kept shirking.

Rather than tackling the deeper issues in our jobs and really trying to get people engaged in how they spend their hours, a bunch of workplaces reacted to these shifts with strict smackdowns. They issued return-to-office orders and developed their own tech to detect the use of mouse jigglers, so they could catch people in the act and sack them. They upped employee tracking under the guise of assessing productivity, monitoring time spent idling online and checking Slack messages for any signs of rebellion. And when workplaces found someone was taking the piss, they could use them as an example to scare others straight.

Wells Fargo had to reveal that they’d fired people for productivity-gaming because of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, but I do wonder if they saw a silver lining in the news getting out: that perhaps this could show any other quiet quitters that the bosses were watching and that anyone else shirking would be caught… and punished. In case that silver lining is being chatted about internally, or even by other workplaces desperate to make their workforce get more done, I’m keen to dull any shine.

The Wells Fargo news raises a lot of questions. For one thing: just how many people have been fired for this? ‘More than a dozen’ could be anything from 13 to 130. Next, how did Wells Fargo catch them out? How were the workers getting away with it until last month? How long were they getting away with it?

The lack of answers - a Wells Fargo spokesperson has simply said “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior” - leaves space for embarrassing assumptions. But even if the details were the most flattering, say with 13 employees having faked productivity for a brief window of time before being spotted by Wells Fargo’s advanced detection system, what’s still clear is that the bank is a workplace where multiple people didn’t want to work in the ‘proper’ way. We’re left to question why that might be. Is the work boring? Unfulfilling? Is productivity measured by metrics as easily gamed as a mouse mover? Are the bosses so mean that employees want to spite them? Have back-to-office mandates pissed people off? Is the pay not enough to balance out the culture?

None of us know the answers to these questions, but the questioning doesn’t exactly paint Wells Fargo as an ideal place to work. That’ll make recruitment tricky, and for existing workers I doubt any of this will act as a deterrent for productivity-faking. Firing people for pretending to work, rather than looking deeper into why and then making changes in response, doesn’t send the message that a business cares - about making work better, about the quality of work done rather than the quantity, about retention. This is likely to piss off existing workers, leading to even more disengagement. And for people who like to push back against authority, it provides a fun new challenge: how can you get away with doing fuck all without getting sacked?

For people to be able to game the system for any length of time, even if they do eventually get fired, there has to be a system that’s gameable. Workplaces can respond to this game-playing by bringing out a rulebook and slamming it down on people’s desks, but the system keeps on having space to play about… now with the added bonus of a particularly resentable ‘the man’ to defeat. The better solution is, of course, to change the system. Make work less about presenteeism and mouse movements and more about interesting, human (ie, not better done by AI), meaningful thoughts and actions. Acknowledge that people are not by nature lazy sneaks, and most do want enjoyable, meaningful work. Either provide that meaning and enjoyment, or make sure you’re providing sufficient funds and time for workers to find both outside of their working hours. Otherwise, the mouse will keep moving, the players will play, the shirkers will shirk.

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Work-related reading recs:

• I am endlessly fascinated by the question of whether you should have a ‘work persona’ and how this plays into conversations about authenticity. I’ve worked with people previously who are radically different outside of the office vs in it. I’m very much a ‘just the same person everywhere’ type, but I do have to modulate certain behaviours to be ‘professional’, especially in a more senior position… so where does that leave me on the authenticity scale? Anyway, here’s an interesting Stylist article on this topic.

• I really loved The Guardian’s supplement about neurodiversity, especially this guide to how we can make work better for autistic people and those with ADHD.

• On the phasing out of Fridays

• And another excellent Stylist article about the ‘ladder method’ and how it might help you tackle procrastination

• What’s it like to be paid to be a fan?

• If staff don’t want to work anymore, leaders should step up. Spot on.