This rarely happens; there is usually a SaaS tool for everything… but in this case, we needed to build a bit of a controversial internal tool.
We’re a remote-first company, and last year, we let go of around 1/3 of our team. Honestly, we did it too late.
It wasn’t due to budget issues or AI rendering them redundant.
They didn’t output enough… We had a conundrum. Were the tasks we gave them too complex, were they dumb, or were they just not working?
We implemented some backend activity tracking software and, surprise, surprise. These underperformers were not putting in the hours.
One actually had two jobs.
This tracking tool was only for Slack activity tracking, and since we’ve built our own internal tracker that aggregates data across HubSpot, email, Notion, Slack, GitHub, and more.
So I thought I’d see if you think it’s as controversial before we launch it.
odinsees.ai
theGeatZhopa•40m ago
Generally, it's up to you to trust your employees or to use such or other methods of control. The most easy and legal way: count finished tasks. If there are not enough tasks done, get rid of. No need to think whether the employee is to dumb, lazy, cheating.. But aggregation across all tools and services is kind of control that an employer should be ashamed of. No trust, bad employer.
Europe is not the center of the world. It may be different in other countries. Would also like to hear what guys from such countries say about such levels of control :)
lucamz•6m ago
https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/10/25/microsoft...
The problem is when you go over the line, read messages and start controlling the employees. But on the other hand if you go work in a warehouse you still need to clock in and and out, and if you are late they deduct the hours from the paycheck.
In my opinion tools like this are okay if they act as that "clocking in/out" device, rather than allowing employers to spy conversations happening privately (which I would not tolerate). But if an employee is averaging 5h of work and they are contractually paid for 8h, that is also an abuse in a way, https://www.reddit.com/r/overemployed/ just saying there are 500k+ people here :)