Employees are not prisoners. Surveillance is not justified.

Posted on 03 Mar 2021 12:20 in Personal
by Siddharth Deshmukh

Employee surveillance is inhuman. Employees are not prisoners. War upon them is not peace. Obedience is not productivity. Surveillance is not justified.

After reading a blog by David Heinemeier Hansson, Cofounder, Basecamp, I posted the following message on Shimbi Labs' internal Skype group yesterday.

 

Good Morning! How are you today?
Here again, the temperature is 11 degrees (-10 degrees from yesterday!) and rainy. 

Do take out 10 min to read this interesting yet important blog.
Remote-work surveillance software is vile

Let me know your opinion.

 

Surprisingly I did not get any response. 
I thought, why is it so? Why no opinions? 
Is it because my message sounds indirect warning?
Are people thinking I am indirectly saying we must adopt this?

 

But for me, it was obvious that everyone believes we will never take any such step. We at Shimbi Labs, since the beginning, we are a very open company; we built our culture that way.

 

Or perhaps was our messaging became week during a covid pandemic? Or is everyone surrounded by such toxic corporate culture around? With their friends and families facing it daily, that shakes their confidence?

 

So I decided to write a message to ensure everyone about our beliefs and core values around trust-based relation culture.

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My message

I am not sure why no one expresses an opinion on such an interesting topic. Maybe your too busy, perhaps just ignored. Whatever may be the reason, I am ok with it.

 

Here is my opinion

1. Such surveillance is complete against personal privacy. 
2. It's entirely against our core values of building a trust-based relationship.

 

We will never use any such software surveillance or any other kind of surveillance for tracking activities. We will always respect and protect individual privacy at Shimbi Labs for employees, associates, customers, and even our website visitors. We take the privacy of our users very seriously.

 

We will always work on a trust-based relationship. Building trust is a continuous process, and trust is built together between individuals and groups.

 

Every employee of Shimbi Labs must understand and follow an output-based work culture than a surveillance-based time tracking work culture.

 

Everyone is expected to show output than worry about logging the time. One can outsmart the software systems, but one can not outsmart people's trust. It is tough to build trust, but once it is created, it's liberating. 

 

Our clients trust us for our output; their business depends on us. We are, in turn, responsible for thousands of people for their livelihoods. 

 

Keep promise, so we never need to use any surveillance software.

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Employee surveillance is inhuman. 
Employees are not prisoners. War upon them is not peace. Obedience is not productivity. Surveillance is not justified.

    



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