Remote Work and New Cat and Mouse Games

I learned from (once again) the Money Stuff Podcast that Wells Fargo fired a bunch of employees because they were using “mouse jigglers” to make it seem like they were at their keyboards while working remotely. Jack Kelly  has the story in Forbes here. The fired workers were in the bank’s wealth and investment management division. As Matt Levine points out on the Money Stuff Podcast, employees in wealth and investment management do not profitably spend time at their keyboards. They should be out on golf courses or having conversations over martinis in some steakhouse somewhere. Moreover, money invested in time or technology tracking workers’ keyboard use or mouse movement is also not well spent. Nobody at Tesla checks to see whether its CEO is at his desk. Why is that?

I write as that rare law professor who really enjoys coming in to work. I do not understand the desire to be at home all the time. It is not that I am an extrovert, but I need to interact regularly with people in order to scratch certain professional and personal itches. Productivity studies would not provide data to prove it, but I don’t think I can be as good a teacher, colleague, or scholar if I am not regularly interacting with my students and work colleagues. I need to check in regularly with my two work spouses about our common enterprise. My actual spouse and my cats are less helpful in such matters.

But I am, apparently, atypical. A lot of people really hate going in to work, and they can work happily and profitably at home. While businesses and the federal government are convinced that remote work is less efficient than making employees come in to the office, studies show that they are wrong. In October, 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that remote work increased total factor productivity across 61 industries in the private sector studied from 2019-2023. Other studies show that remote work had no effect on productivity, but those other studies did not factor in worker satisfaction and retention. People like being able to work remotely, and businesses that allow them to do so have less turnover. That means that businesses have to invest less in job searches and hiring. Whatever productivity is lost due to people using mouse jigglers to trick their bosses into thinking they are working on spreadsheets when they are in fact walking their dog is more than compensated for by the fact that the workers are happier at their jobs, more focused when they are working, and less inclined to quit.  Unless, of course, you are Wells Fargo and decide to waste resources on playing cat and mouse games in the form of creepily surveilling employees.

But dumb ideas, like opposition to measles vaccines, are infectious, and so, my great state of Oklahoma, imitating DOGE’s anti-remote work initiative, has instituted a sweeping ban on work-from-home. Thinking about my own household, the idea is just preposterous. I suppose there is some recognition that a lot of what professors do is hard to monitor. Lying on a couch reading a book looks like lying on a couch. Going for a walk with a friend to talk through some ideas looks like lying on a couch too, from the perspective of the keyboard-usage police.

My wife, however, is mental health counselor employed by a state institution. Consider the effect of the new obsession with coming in to work on her field. If counselors have some minor illness that they would rather not share with their colleagues, they will now have to take a day off. They cannot meet with her clients using telehealth, despite the fact that their clients might be indifferent or may even prefer to meet with their counselors on telehealth. In fact, some clients insist on meeting through telehealth even if the counselor is in the office, and so it makes absolutely no difference to the clients whether the counselors are in the.office, sharing their infectious illness with colleagues, or at home. It makes a difference to the colleagues though. And now, counselors would have to use paid-time-off days for sick leave, on days when they could otherwise work from home. Each of those days is one less day that the counselors can take for vacation, increasing the likelihood that they will leave their job in the public sector and go into private practice where they can decide for themselves how best to serve your clients.

I can imagine jobs where it matters whether or not the employees come to work. Likely, the employees who need to come to work are already required to come to work. Making people come to work who don’t need to come to work speaks of contempt for the work force, including supervisors, and of an inability to imagine the lives of others.