The overcrowding of the home office during the pandemic has remained forever in many places. Even in jobs that seemed impossible to do remotely, telecommuting has become the norm rather than the exception.
The problem with the home office format for resource managers is the way in which you can control that employees are actually working remotely.
For this, there are numerous and varied programs that detect the activity of PCs and workers in the home office according to the mobility of the mouse, keyboard and other variables.
However, technology also offers ways to circumvent these controls.
That’s right, at Amazon.com the sale of “mouse jigglers” or “mouse jiggler” is all the rage, devices that “move” simulate the movements of a mouse randomly.
In this way, the employee software reports activity that the employee is not actually performing.
Monitoring the use of the mouse is simple: if it remains idle too long, it is suspected that the worker is not performing their tasks. What jiggler mice do is “wiggle” the mouse randomly, fooling the system.
Home office: control and lack of control
The methods for monitoring the performance and productivity of teleworkers are varied. There is the Time Doctor, an application that has been highly criticized on social networks for its invasive nature. The app takes screenshots while the employee works and records keyboard and mouse activities to allow the company to be certain that its employees are using the computers when they say they are.
Microsoft, for example, already includes some control tools in its Microsoft 365 suite. One of those applications is Sneek, which obtains photos of the employee through his webcam.
So do big companies. Amazon, for example, installs cameras in delivery vans, and there are reports that Walmart “listens” to its employees.
Some of the “mouse jiggler” models sold on Amazon are a simple device that plugs into the mouse port and simulates movement. They are programmable and also allow simulations of clicks and keystrokes on the keyboard. However, for these cases, there are programs that the employee can install to detect them.
Other devices are directly undetectable, because they are bases on which the mouse rests. The devices are mechanical and move randomly thanks to a rotating disk.
These devices already existed before the pandemic, but they were only purchased by those who needed the PC not to go into sleep mode when users were away for a long time. It is usually useful in the case of some video games or for long processes such as rendering of designs.
However, the phenomenon is the multiplication of the sales of the “mouse jiggler” by the exponential increase of the home office and teleworking.