Barclays managers were inundated with WTFs when investment banking staff in London discovered little black boxes underneath their desks, according to several surprised employees.
The monitors, installed by OccupEye, use heat and motion sensors to log employee ‘chair time’ at the bank. Barclays joins Lloyds Banking Group in using the monitors, which were introduced in stages.
Via Bloomberg
There was a “phased roll-out” of the devices, and Barclays staff and the Unite union were notified before they were installed, although the bank did not send out a specific memo about them, according to spokesman Tom Hoskin. The Barclays employees said they don’t remember being informed about the boxes, but spokespeople for the bank said there have been no official human-resources complaints.
The bank says that the boxes aren’t monitoring ‘people or their productivity; they are assessing office space usage,’ Barclays said in a statement. ‘This sort of analysis helps us to reduce costs, for example, managing energy consumption, or identifying opportunities to further adopt flexible work environments.’
Ok…
Apparently this is all part of a push to shift to ‘hot-desking’ – or using a temporary desk on an as-needed basis, which supposedly allows companies to maximize office space efficiency and reduce overhead.
Barclays joins Lloyds Banking Group Plc in the use of the technology, however JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Credit Suisse haven’t done so. That said, I’m sure they’re using the finest in surveillance technology to monitor lazy bankers.
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Everyone in those Barclays offices should grab their laptops and find another space to work. Render this investment useless and hopefully get the genius who came up with the idea fired.
I’d like to see criminal ankle bracelets put on Yellen and all other central bankers. Not that it would help anything but it has a nice ring to it.