WORK & FAMILY
By SUE SHELLENBARGER
WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 30, 2008

Work at Home?
Your Employer May Be Watching

The clipboard toting, clock-watching, quota-setting productivity expert,
peering nosily over your shoulder at work, has been out of fashion in
business schools for decades.

Now he’s back, in electronic form — in the home office.

In a budding trend some employment experts say is invasive, companies
are stepping up electronic monitoring and oversight of tens of thousands
of home-based independent contractors. They’re taking photos of workers’
computer screens at random, counting keystrokes and mouse clicks and
snapping photos of them at their computers. They’re plying sophisticated
technology to instantaneously detect anger, raised voices or children
crying in the background on workers’ home-office calls. Others are using
Darwinian routing systems that keep calls coming so fast workers have no
time to go to the bathroom.

In a budding trend some employment experts say is invasive, companies
are stepping up electronic monitoring and oversight of tens of thousands
of home-based workers. WSJ’s Sue Shellenbarger reports.
Peter Weddle, an author, consultant and researcher on employment Web
sites, calls the trend “21st Century Big Brotherism” that risks being
“horribly intrusive.” Skilled workers “don’t need someone looking over
their shoulders,” he says. But while the monitoring can put a damper on
home life, many people are so eager to avoid commuting hassles that they
see the practice as an acceptable tradeoff.

The technology so far affects mainly freelance information-technology
workers, writers, graphic-design artists and call-center agents. But as
telecommuting grows amid soaring fuel costs, more people will find
themselves on an electronic leash. The monitoring itself may speed the
growth, because it tears down one of the biggest obstacles to working at
home — employers’ fear that remote workers will slack off.

Electronic monitoring is built right into freelance transactions at
oDesk.com, which links 90,000 computer programmers, network
administrators, graphic designers, writers and others with about 10,000
clients world-wide. The system takes random snapshots of workers’
computer screens six times an hour, records keystrokes and mouse clicks
and takes optional Web cam photos of freelancers at work. Clients can
log into the system anytime and see whether contractors are working,
what they’re doing and how long it’s taking them; clients’ weekly bills
are based largely on the data. A small computer-screen icon pops up at
the bottom of workers’ screens each time a screen shot is taken.

YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Sue Shellenbarger answers readers’ questions about work-at-home
pitches, finding a trained emotionally- focused therapist, and
explaining résumé gaps during job interviews.ODesk Chief Executive Gary
Swart says a client paying a freelancer likes knowing, “You can’t play
Blackjack. You can’t watch YouTube. Why? Because I’m watching you work.”
When one oDesk client questioned an inflated bill from a freelancer, a
check of the screen shots revealed he’d been watching a cricket game
online. The freelancer reduced his bill.

One big oDesk competitor, Elance.com4, says installing “spyware,” as one
Elance executive calls it, is going too far. Elance recently unveiled a
monitoring system of its own that allows freelancers to document their
work electronically, but leaves control entirely in freelancers’ hands.
“We don’t believe in having a camera on your computer, taking pictures
and tracing every move,” says Elance Chief Executive Fabio Rosati.
Several of oDesk’s own programmers quit several years ago when the
company insisted they submit to monitoring.

At first, it seems like “Oh, this is Big Brother” watching, acknowledges
Russell Tweed, a St. Helens, Ore., computer-network administrator who
works on oDesk. But he says none of his oDesk clients has tried to
micromanage his work. Freelancers like oDesk’s payment system; it takes
clients’ credit cards up front and, barring a veto from the buyer, pays
workers promptly every week, eliminating slow-pay problems.

DOES WORKING AT HOME CREATE GLOOMY HOME LIFE?
How does working from home affect your home life? Do work pressures cast
a pall? Are your spouse or kids stressed by your workaday tensions? Or
have you found a way to keep home-and-hearth the relaxed “safe haven”
most people desire? Join a discussion on The Juggle, WSJ.com’s Work &
Family blog.7One oDesk buyer, Juliana Carroll, a Manhattan
financial-services consultant, says she has saved as much as 25% using
oDesk freelancers because they turn out more work faster than
contractors she has found on her own. Menlo Park, Calif.-based oDesk,
which charges clients 10% on top of freelancers’ fees, says its June
2008 revenue was 2.8 times year-earlier levels.

Corporate managers with work-at-home employees also worry about
potential slackers, and some have tightened ties with home-office
workers by monitoring their use of instant messaging or corporate VPN
links. However, employers typically resist Web cam or keystroke
monitoring of their own staffers as too invasive, relying instead on
screening telecommuters carefully and setting measurable work
objectives.

In another sector, call-center companies are tightening the electronic
leash on home-based agents, who handle calls for retailing, travel and
other clients. Call-routing technology at Arise.com8, Miramar, Fla.,
helps keep its 8,000 home agents so tightly tethered to their phones
that they have to schedule unpaid time off to go to the bathroom. Calls
flow fastest to the most productive workers. Arise home agents, who are
all independent business owners, have incentives to take a lot of calls;
their base pay starts at about $8 an hour, but commissions are added for
selling cruises, computers and the like. Top performers also get more
flexibility, in the form of first dibs on work shifts.

To keep calls flowing, Arise agents are discouraged from leaving their
desks. Instead, Arise recommends they anticipate when they’ll need a
bathroom break and schedule a half-hour off the clock, without pay, at
that time — usually every two to three hours.

Another call-center outsourcer, Working Solutions, which has 4,000
active agents, is applying sophisticated speech-analytics technology to
tune an omnipresent electronic ear into numerous home-office
conversations at once.

It’s not unusual for call-center companies to record and spot-check
agents’ calls by listening in now and then. Working Solutions’ new
system goes beyond that to instantly detect and flag such trouble
signals as cancellation threats or angry voices, enabling supervisors to
jump in on the conversations right away, says Tim Houlne, chief
executive of the Plano, Texas, company.

Home agents’ slipups, such as dogs barking or children crying in the
background, are frowned upon. Like most call-center operators, Working
Solutions says it has “zero tolerance” for background noise.

The trend suggests the home office, long regarded as a calmer place to
work, may evolve into just another office, fraught with the same
constraints as a corporate cubicle. Maggie Torres, a longtime home agent
for Arise in Southwest Ranches, Fla., says her children, 17 and 18, have
learned over the years to “stay out and be quiet” when she works. Even
her little dog stops running and jumping; “when he sees me go to that
seat, he goes to his bed and lies down and that’s it.”

But the rewards, she says, warrant the sacrifices. “If you do good on
all your stats you get to pick your hours early. I usually do — and
thank God, I get to pick the hours I want.”