Daily Telegraph to withdraw devices monitoring time at desk after criticism | Media | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/j ... -criticism

That paper is run by incompetent, corrupt loons as far as I can tell.

It's run by HSBC, apparently (Private Eye passim)

I can see the idea of monitoring usage of desks to understand occupancy ratio, if there is any ways to reduce number of desks / hot desk, change heating set points etc, we did the same in my previous office.

The staff do not trust the management at all and believe it would be used against them, which is a different matter.

It's the worst sort of 'presenteeism' encouraging management stupidity. It doesn't matter if someone's at their desk, it matters what they're producing.

But what were they measuring exactly? If the company had made clear that all they would get in term of info was % of occupancy of the office per hour,not the desk by desk data, it would have been much better.
I am sure that people have to badge in and out of the office, so it would be very easy to track how many hours a day someone is in if they wanted to.

Communication with this sort of thing is king.

If they'd been up front about what they were doing and engaged with the staff and the union about what data they were capturing and why there needn't have been an issue. If necessary they could have gotten in writing that the data captured would only be used for certain things.
Just installing some sort of monitoring device under someone's desk over a weekend and then telling them about it when they arrive on Monday just comes across as underhand and 'up to no good'.

The stated aims of the project weren't unreasonable, at least at face value but the execution has basically wrecked the idea.

See?

The Tele is utterly toxic in terms of management of staff, that's the short version. As Jon somewhat suggests, see Private Eye.

We did this in our office in December. People were informed that it was happening by email prior to installation and as far as I know it all went smoothly.

Nothing under my desk now so it must have been for about a month.

Lordy. what on earth was it monitoring?

Errr desk usage

We're full