Watching bees with Bill

Ever since the time and motion studies of the early 1900s bosses have monitored workers in the name of productivity. This could now be taken a step further with the discovery that Microsoft has developed office spy software to monitor workers' productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

It is perhaps a little surprising that it is Microsoft that has filed the patent given that just three years ago The Times reported that "When it comes to monitoring employees on performance, Microsoft UK thinks that the perception of the employee as a ticking time bomb has gone too far. Recent research by Dr Carsten Sorensen at the London School of Economics, sponsored by the software giant, says that excessive monitoring is affecting productivity as employees react to guidelines rather than customers. In short, it’s time to return to trust."

But then we all change our minds. I'm not panicking though. In particular I'm not worried by claims that all this will make middle management redundant. No, no, quite the opposite - this will create jobs. Anyone who has read Dr Seuss's Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? will know what I mean.

"Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west, near Hawtch-Hawtch, there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher. His job is to ...keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee. A bee that is watched will work harder, you see. Well he watched and he watched. But, in spite of his watch, that bee didn't work any harder. Not mawtch. So then somebody said, 'Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee-watching as hard as he can. He ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher. The thing that we need is a Bee-Watcher-Watcher.' WELL…" and so on, and so on until everyone is watching someone.

My point is who is going to read and interpret all this data? And will it be worth their while? BusinessWeek reported only last week that some companies have already realised that employing people to watch workers to see when they use Facebook and eBay and the like is quite literally a waste of time.

People perform best when they aren't being micromanaged. We want to be measured on our output, not our facial expressions or the number of hours spent chained to the desk. If companies really want to ensure that we don't waste time, get unduly stressed or bunk off work, a better approach would be to make sure we have interesting jobs, work in stimulating environments and are lead by switched-on enthusiastic managers.

And the occasional free coffee and doughnut wouldn't go amiss either.