Setting up the PC on the company VPN and monitoring the company data is legal in most places. Distributed call centres have call monitoring.
Peter wrote:
Distributed call centres have call monitoring.
I’m sure all call centres have call monitoring already, if nothing else to assess the load of incoming calls, average response time etc. etc.
Of course they have; the point here is that calls you make from your home are also probably monitored if WFH.
And unless you limit WFH to a tiny section of very motivated (and somewhat antisocial 
) people, you do have to have some level of monitoring if they are hourly paid.
Call centres are super easy to monitor. I don’t think working in one is at all easy to skive, whether you are sitting at a desk in a giant hangar or working from home in the Shetlands or Cambodia.
Just to put a counter to all the gloom about WFH… my daughter works in local government, probably about the archetype of desk-bound skiving. She and her whole organization have been mostly WFH since she started there over a year ago. She runs a small team. Everything seems to be working fine.
johnh wrote:
Just to put a counter to all the gloom about WFH
Not sure I detected any actual doom and gloom on WFH. Personally I think it a great idea and my wife has been WFH for over a year now. Works very well. She is however monitored for every millisecond therefore not much chance to skive. I was actually more concerned with all those who are office or field based, whose main cry is that I have tested positive. So……
Just one point on the ferries. A new CEO, they last slightly less time in role than football managers when questioned this week about the disaster of not providing ferry services. Any time anyone tests positive who works or has been on the ferry, they have to deep clean the ferry. These are large RO-RO vessels, takes about 5 hours to clean them. Hence the majority of them stay in port all day..My thought was how can you actually clean a huge ferry from Covid?
Of course you don’t need to deep clean a ferry. That is just some anally retarded compliance dick insisting on that. He probably wears a yellow jacket in bed. The world is full of these types, and only the strongest management will have the balls to clip their wings. In most companies, “compliance” is almost as powerful as the department which checks all communications for LGBTQ+
The interesting thing about WFH (work from home) is that quite a few local firms close to me have realised they can now outsource the jobs to cheaper parts of the world. I know it’s not a panacea but Europe is a very expensive place to do business with high employment/ social security and pension costs. Covid has pushed firms into investing in IT etc to allow this to happen far more easily than in the past.
If you really can WFH all of the time and you never need to go into the office, perhaps you should be slightly worried about job security? Your job might not move to India but there might be a highly qualified person, twice as productive as yourself out there somewhere!
That’s true in that it could happen, but it’s been forecast for years. It’s a gradual process.
However, moving any “serious” stuff (like writing code; in fact anything less trivial that a simple PHP form for a database) to India has been an unmitigated disaster everywhere, except where the European management takes the hard-headed view that no matter what sh1tty job they do, and have to re-do 5 times before it works, it is still cheaper than doing it back home. That’s the view of a colleague at Deutsche Bank, another one at Amex, etc…
CV19 will accelerate a move away from everyone travelling to work in an office in [insert your capital city]. Those places are universally horrible places to travel to, although people who work there generally like it – the younger ones especially. I always found it hard to understand why they are based there, but if you get more into it you realise that most of the talent is found there. One girl from a temp agency here (Brighton) tried to authorise a credit card by stuffing it into a fax machine. And I’d say 99% of the temps here are just looking for a husband ASAP so they can stop working ASAP. You would never get that in say London; that has an army of very competent temps. Lots of businesses could not even exist outside of the city – start with advertising and marketing, which use people and services that exist only in London. And that is what makes it hard to shift that work out.
to India has been an unmitigated disaster everywhere
I have at least one exception: me. Sure we got lucky, but the team I have in India is every bit as good as the people I had in California, for 1/6th the price. Admittedly the scale is a bit different than say BA – I have 6 people there, not 6000. But still, it can be done. It worked out pretty well for my former employer, Cisco, as well. Not sure what proportion of their software is done in India these days, but somewhere in 25-50%.
But you have to manage it carefully and work through the right partners. The typical large non-IT company approach, of throwing money vaguely in the right direction and not even bothering to cross your fingers, is indeed a recipe for disaster. But you don’t have to go to India – I could tell some tales of the project my son is currently working on, which is all in the UK.
johnh wrote:
I could tell some tales of the project my son is currently working on, which is all in the UK.
Do not get me started.
One, of many, is my really truly favourite one. The deal signed in our Scottish capital. Original budget overrun by 75%. Government contract. Runs into tens and tens of millions. However, sting in the tail is a ‘’maintenance contract’’ slipped in at last gasp of £76million, per annum, over the next 15 years. A minister, now gone, signed it. And needless to say, not well publicised.
Could have funded Covid Cult Knights for centuries. It’s where your hard earned taxes go..
