Barclays, one of the UK’s largest banks, has incurred the wrath of some of its staff in recent days after it installed software on their computers to assess their time spent working and their productivity. As reported in the evening of 19 February, by free business-focused newspaper City AM, this method of monitoring staff performance was trialled in a single department at the bank’s London headquarters. However it has provoked such a media storm that Barclays decided to abandon the trial after only a week.
“Not enough time in the Zone yesterday!” It is precisely this kind of message that employees in the product control department of Barclays’ investment banking business may have received this week, after a special software was installed on computers. This programme, developed by US tech firm Sapience, monitors workers’ activity and measures the time they spend not working, counting toilet breaks as idle time and keeping tabs on the length of their lunch breaks. The software would then send messa
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