Think WFH means your boss isn’t watching you? Think again
Pandemics, as the historian Yuval Noah Harari observed at the beginning of the current one, tend to accelerate history. If you doubt that then think back to, say, January 2020. If you told people then that by April that year major corporations would be insisting that most of their staff worked from home, they would have given you funny looks and checked for the nearest exit. Nobody then had heard of Zoom and something called “video conferencing” was considered either a geeky affectation or the last resort of organisations that could not afford air fares for senior executives to go to Rotterdam or Las Vegas for a one-hour meeting.
And then, in the blink of an eye, working from home had become not just an acronym – WFH – but a cliche and Zoom, like Google before it, had become a verb as well as a noun. The tiresome daily commute shrank to padding from bedroom to kitchen to a laptop on a desk. For an initial period, utopian visions of better work-life balances blossomed. But then the new reality dawned: instead of us going to the office, the office had come to us and we were working, eating and sleeping in it.
Still, we had a bit more autonomy WFH than we had in the office under the beady-eyed surveillance of managers. Or so we thought. But capitalism – and its servant, technology – never sleeps. Those managers, who had always regarded WFH as some kind of work-avoidance scam, realised that digital technology was just the ticket for keeping an eye on their newly remote subordinates. It would make sure that they weren’t idly browsing Pinterest, or bidding on eBay, or doing private emails, or a thousand other unproductive things, on the company’s dime. And so a swarm of tech companies evolved to service those paranoid
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