Barclays Puts in Sensors to See Which Bankers Are at Their Desks (2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-18/barclays-puts-in-sensors-to-see-which-bankers-are-at-their-desks

by cwwc • 4 years ago

29 14 4 years ago

LeonB• 4 years ago

I worked at a company that was taken over by another company.

Soon after, they began this creepy process of monitoring “utilisation” where minimum wage strangers with clipboards would walk around every fifteen minutes recording how many desks and meeting rooms were being used.

j00pY• 4 years ago

My company did this but for the purpose of working out how to make the most of our shrinking office space. Then the pandemic came along and solved the issue for the business as we work from home 4 days a week now.

imranq• 4 years ago

Using a websearch on this title shows this is from 2017. Feels like clickbait at this point when people are transitioning to work from the office, where technology like this would enforce RTO

kumarvvr• 4 years ago

What a way to motivate. A short term fix for what will eventually birth a long term culture issue and image issues.

ontoillogical• 4 years ago

article is from 2017, can the title be edited to reflect that?

harha2• 4 years ago

wasn't the point of being in the office to meet people?

hulitu• 4 years ago

No, the point is to work. Meeting people is so last century /s. I'm really waiting to see the impact of this WFH when you cannot contact people and projects are delayed because there is noone there to talk to and take a decision.

harha2• 4 years ago

If they use devices like this, it makes me wonder how they're monitoring how I'm not working too much while I'm logged in.

r00f• 4 years ago

I fail to understand what this type of statistic would give to bank. If your employee is sitting at the desk and watching cat videos whole day, you are happy employer? And if you can also monitor if he is watching videos or doing work, why do you even need to know if he is sitting there?

Seems like just one another project whose sole purpose is to spend money so involved parties from both sides can get more rich.

Bancakes• 4 years ago

Psychological suppression. I guess management didn't get the memo that insecure people underperform.

Closi• 4 years ago

It’s not about worker productivity - they are hotdesking and this system doesn’t know who is sitting down.

When I lived in London and worked in the city recently, the (ftse 100) company I worked for would do daily pen-and-paper surveys of desk usage and use this to identify:

- if people were ‘desk squatting’ and not freeing up their desk when they went to a meeting for someone else to use (particularly people who were only in a few days a week but set their desk up permenantly and left a jacket and bag there to squat).

- If there were enough unutilised desks to sublease a portion of the building (we had 3 subleasers who were totally separated with security barriers)

- If there were total peaks of desk usage where they ran out of desks where they could try to smooth demand (for instance by asking people to WFH on Wednesday rather than the more popular Friday). If this was possible, it would let them sublease space.

- Once they have statistics, they can distribute space between departments more evenly rather than who shouts loudest.

So I’m guessing it’s to replace that pen and paper survey with better data, probably tied into the building management system.

When the ftse 100 company I was at was doing this - it was using the data to ask people to home work at strategic times to save them space - it was not some sort of individual productivity measuring thing.

A single desk in London can easily cost >£10k per year in a good area, and better space efficiency can also mean that you don’t have to take on that new building at a huge cost.

sofixa• 4 years ago

I highly doubt a computer on a bank's internal network has access to anything besides the bank's internal services - so no cat videos, unless they're on the employee's phone

mrblampo• 4 years ago

What makes you assume this?

dervjd• 4 years ago

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170820005439/https://www.bloom...

Barclays Puts in Sensors to See Which Bankers Are at Their Desks (2017)

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