Morgan Stanley has begun monitoring employees, but it's ok
If you’re working from home for Morgan Stanley, have no fear: rumors that the bank is starting to remotely monitor employee activity are true, but it’s not as bad as it sounds.
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It’s understood that, starting around two weeks ago, the bank began to roll out a new initiative. The plan is to monitor employees, analyze which of their processes are most inefficient, and to develop internal tools to make inefficient processes more efficient.
The premise makes sense. 1,000 workhours a week wasted by the front office as a whole can cost Morgan Stanley millions of dollars per year. If it can be fixed, why not? It’s the sort of productivity improvement that ties into how AI will change junior M&A jobs in the next few years.
For what it’s worth, it’s not exactly a dystopian system. Morgan Stanley is not counting keystrokes, unlike others. Users are made fully aware that they are being monitored, trained on the tool, and have the ability to opt out. Data is not personal, but rather anonymized and aggregated. And productivity improvements tend to impact the most boring and repetitive parts of a job like banking anyway. The bank did not respond to a request for comment.
Morgan Stanley is far from the first company to monitor its staff. The most notable example is probably JPMorgan, which has its infamous Workplace Activity Data Utility system, also known as WADU. Wells Fargo also operates its own version of WADU, which is perhaps more consequential – its standard work-from-home arrangement is three days in, two days out, compared to JPMorgan’s five days in.
Both JPMorgan and Wells Fargo’s systems are susceptible to mouse jiggling, a technique by which a computer mouse is placed on a treadmill of sorts to simulate (productive) activity. At least a dozen people have been fired for jiggling from Wells Fargo alone, however.
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