Niamh Shackleton
If you thought that working from home meant you could slack off, think again.
In recent months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its annual survey findings, where it asks US citizens how much time they spend doing various activities - work included.
Published in June, it was found that the same percentage of employed people who did at least some remote work in 2023 is the same percentage as those who did remote work in 2022, seemingly proving that work from home culture is here to stay.
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With this in mind, Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom has hailed remote work as 'the new normal', The Guardian reported.
While it's increasingly common, one employer feared some of his staff were taking him 'for a ride' and taking advantage of working from home in the wrong way.
Speaking to news.au.com last year, the employer - who couldn't be named for legal reasons - explained: "We worked at home very successfully before Covid, but I think it was a bit of a cultural shift where people’s attitudes changed and they started testing what they could get away with."
This is when he took it upon himself to install software to keep track of what his staffers were up to.
He already knew something was wrong when the work group chat had grown quieter, email response times had slowed down and calls were going unanswered.
The boss - who can't be named - said: "The time between calls started to get longer. Instead of a call every 15 minutes, it was every 20 minutes and then every half an hour.
"And then there’s like two hour gaps of nothing happening … it showed staff being absent; starting small, but the absence would get longer and longer."
He then had Pipedrive installed - a cloud-based software company which essentially acts as a calendar in which staff enter tasks, reminders, and scheduled or completed calls.
The guy continued: "So typically, a salesperson is probably going to get between four and 10 calls an hour. Someone might ring and they’re busy, they might say call me back in half an hour. So that’s logged as a one-minute call.
"And then they might have another conversation for say five-to-ten minutes. And for each call you put a note - but those things started to not happen. No notes were being left."
Not only were calls not being logged, many were 'ghost calls' - or fake entries.
After 18 months of monitoring his workers, he decided that three of them had to go due to 'insufficient work'.
As well as the evidence against the three in question, the boss defended his decision to let them go.
"Sometimes employers are made out to be the bad guys," he said, "but some of us are just small companies doing our best."