You Can Work From Home. We’ll Just Watch You Do It.

Remote work has always involved an implicit bargain.

You do the work. The company gets the result. Nobody needs to know whether you were sitting under fluorescent lights when it happened.

Morgan & Morgan founder John Morgan has described a slightly more literal arrangement.

Appearing on The Iced Coffee Hour on August 27, Morgan said employees who wanted to continue working from home were told the firm would monitor them through their computers.

According to Morgan, that included cameras, keystroke tracking and a productivity score. He also said remote employees would be monitored more closely than employees working in the office.

Morgan says 23 people quit during the first week.

His conclusion was straightforward: the employees didn’t really want to work from home. They didn’t want to work.

There is another possible conclusion.

If an employee is meeting expectations, the company presumably already has a fairly useful surveillance device.

It is called their work.

This is one of the stranger turns in the return-to-office debate. Companies spent years arguing that remote work made it too difficult to know whether people were working.

The technological solution, apparently, is to recreate the office by putting the manager inside the laptop.

And in the process, remote work becomes something slightly different.

You still get to skip the commute.

You still get to work from home.

You just have to prove, continuously, that you are doing it.