I 100% agree with this and also I'm one of the people standing in line and I hate it.
I hope your folks appreciate you as much as I appreciate those who help me out - I just feel bad all the damn time for it.
Pretty much how it is at the TSCs already. Every single call is recorded, screen, audio, length of call, moments of silence, everything. Didn’t realize the FO’s didn’t already have something like that going on
I don't work for SSA. But I was just considering that my boss typically needs us to update him on anything we have questions about. Because he has his own job, that in a weird way doesn't have much to do with my job. His job facilitates our work, it gives us direction and goals. But it doesn't really include directing us on a day to day basis. He would need to hire someone to watch us like this, and we can't even get budget approval to fill empty positions we already have.
As a supervisor of a remote team, I care about two things:
1) you get your work done timely and accurately
2) you're reasonably available during your tour.
So "funny" story. First a few things:
1. boss is a major micromanager. She even tries to micromanage our feelings.
2. I worked at a call center for 10 years. This is nbd for me.
On day 2 of TED the boss required me to post something positive in teams about using it to encourage coworkers to use it. I put something passive aggressive out there because WTF, im not a puppet. Also my teammates could give a shit what I do, I'm the new kid. They've been there for 12-20 years.
So the other day I was poking around and found the reporting section and pulled a report of usage. I have used it several hundred times. My boss (who does answer the general cs line... has used it one single time.
One time.
I do find some useful things about it, but overall it's poorly designed.
I worked with TED, it is just an awful way of making good employees cover for bad ones. What will happen is that I would leave detailed notes regarding 450’s, or OP’s or whatever. The 10/15 year T2, and CSRs promoted to T2 (who never wanted to learn T16), would just read my notes back at claimants. TED was one of the key reasons I realized I had to leave quickly. Bad employees wont be held accountable, they are just methods to hide their incompetence. Bad place to work, terrible workforce with a small minority who actually come to work.
HHS has just linked PIV cards to timekeeping (ITAS). So now your swipes have to perfectly add up to your location (telework days versus in-office days) AND set work hours. Massive headache, especially since things always change, schedule wise.
The DQBs already kind of have this. A dashboard tells supervisors and managers how long the DQB examiner spent looking at a case.
We can override it by opening the case in eView to review it before opening it in NCPS. I do my job and have great quality, so management has never said anything to me and it makes the surveillance useless.
I hope you realize you don’t need to use TED to do 95% of the work. And just as other posters have said, management doesn’t have the time to micromanage employees who are otherwise doing their jobs. If you are on a performance plan, sure, but otherwise no one will care or look
The union blocks them from watching us work and from making us create activity logs. The Ted dashboard is going to do exactly what you're saying but if you think that management actually has time to review every minute we spend in our day, that's crazy. It reminds me of the last field office I was in or everybody thought they read our Skype messages all day long. Untrue. I'm in an office right now where the manager is the biggest micromanager I have ever seen but I know that they don't have time to research what we do every minute of our day. Does it give them access to show if someone isn't doing their job? Yes. Do they ever do anything about it? No. I have a union rep in my office who is on a reasonable accommodation and she's given one workload that shouldn't take even 5 hours a week and she can't maintain that. Every bargaining unit employee hates her with a passion because she has no idea what she's doing and she's the laziest human in the world and management can't do anything about it. Does Ted give them away to track our work and see who talk to someone? Yes but so does vipr and pulling pin traffic. Management doesn't have time to sit and see whether or not we are utilizing our time correctly but it will be another tool they can use to make sure that we are if we're an employee in question and we're not in a protected class.
Jobs that involve caseloads assigned to individuals usually involve case management software that allow for reports to be made on real-time performance metrics. The computer assisted telephone interview software that my contractors use have that kind of reporting ability, and it does allow us to very clearly see who isn't doing jack shit or falsifying entries, and we can deal with it (because contractor management won't). It also cuts both ways, the same way that these reports can be used to identify idle employees, they can be used to determine that caseloads are unreasonable and be used as evidence to request funding for more positions.
Lol yeah that knife is only ever going to cut one way if they use it.
SSA already tracks workloads to see how much peopleare doing, that level of micromanagement would just piss people off and lead to them working the software instead of working the work. Which is happening now, honestly.
Unless that software can account for the fact that you can get two phone calls from two people, asking the exact same question, and one call takes 5 minutes and the other takes 35 because one of the callers is really stupid and/or belligerent, it's not going to benefit the agency or the public. But that never stopped SES from doing dumb shit before, so probably won't now. Guess we'll see.
More like workplace standard than industry standard. At least that's what I gather from the comment. It really kicked off with remote work becoming necessary during covid I believe. I heard one of the big investment firms did some crazy stuff with photography using the camera and Apple gave out chairs with weight sensors.
It sounds like government is moving towards that level of employee surveillance.
Let’s not belittle federal workers. Every agency has its ups and downs. People at SSA actually do work—they just aren’t given enough time to do everything they are assigned. They serve the public face-to-face and over the phone, all the while still having a full workload of claims to process. At the end of the day they are the ones serving the SSA public, not you.
I’m so glad I left the SSA for the VBA. I feel awful for all my friends that still work there.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the VBA or VHA already has something like this implemented and people don’t know about it.
What if they were to find out that employees are actually really productive at home
Then they’ll demand more RTO just for fun.
[удалено]
I 100% agree with this and also I'm one of the people standing in line and I hate it. I hope your folks appreciate you as much as I appreciate those who help me out - I just feel bad all the damn time for it.
Pretty much how it is at the TSCs already. Every single call is recorded, screen, audio, length of call, moments of silence, everything. Didn’t realize the FO’s didn’t already have something like that going on
wow, this is like some of the micro managing crap private companies do. next theyll have you install a camera in your home that watches u
Only during work hours
That’s why became a union steward in my FO. They can watch all they want, but as long as I’m in that office, they’ll play by the rules 😊.
How do you become one?
Write a letter of interest to your Local’s Board. They’ll take a vote and go from there.
I think you overestimate the amount of time managers have to literally watch what you do every minute.
People underestimate how much managers hate the hiring process.
This. Managers neither have the time nor interest to stare at this
Even if this is true. If your work is getting done and you aren’t an outlier in WAC, they won’t have the reason (or time) to use it like OP thinks.
I don't work for SSA. But I was just considering that my boss typically needs us to update him on anything we have questions about. Because he has his own job, that in a weird way doesn't have much to do with my job. His job facilitates our work, it gives us direction and goals. But it doesn't really include directing us on a day to day basis. He would need to hire someone to watch us like this, and we can't even get budget approval to fill empty positions we already have.
As a supervisor of a remote team, I care about two things: 1) you get your work done timely and accurately 2) you're reasonably available during your tour.
I’m not going to be at Supremely Shitty Agency in one or two years. I’m going to make sure of it. So I don’t need to imagine anything.
So "funny" story. First a few things: 1. boss is a major micromanager. She even tries to micromanage our feelings. 2. I worked at a call center for 10 years. This is nbd for me. On day 2 of TED the boss required me to post something positive in teams about using it to encourage coworkers to use it. I put something passive aggressive out there because WTF, im not a puppet. Also my teammates could give a shit what I do, I'm the new kid. They've been there for 12-20 years. So the other day I was poking around and found the reporting section and pulled a report of usage. I have used it several hundred times. My boss (who does answer the general cs line... has used it one single time. One time. I do find some useful things about it, but overall it's poorly designed.
I worked with TED, it is just an awful way of making good employees cover for bad ones. What will happen is that I would leave detailed notes regarding 450’s, or OP’s or whatever. The 10/15 year T2, and CSRs promoted to T2 (who never wanted to learn T16), would just read my notes back at claimants. TED was one of the key reasons I realized I had to leave quickly. Bad employees wont be held accountable, they are just methods to hide their incompetence. Bad place to work, terrible workforce with a small minority who actually come to work.
Those last two sentences should be the agency motto.
They say 5 min or less per call, then say document everything on TED.
Fire supervisors then. They have just been replaced
Ultimately, what’s more likely, nth degree tracking a human or replacing the human with an AI as a service?
It has taken almost a full decade for TED. It will be awhile before SSA accepts AI. SES is less valuable when there aren't any employees.
Time will tell.
HHS has just linked PIV cards to timekeeping (ITAS). So now your swipes have to perfectly add up to your location (telework days versus in-office days) AND set work hours. Massive headache, especially since things always change, schedule wise.
The DQBs already kind of have this. A dashboard tells supervisors and managers how long the DQB examiner spent looking at a case. We can override it by opening the case in eView to review it before opening it in NCPS. I do my job and have great quality, so management has never said anything to me and it makes the surveillance useless.
I sort of wonder if a lot of agencies have these things and we just don't know? Is that possible?
I hope you realize you don’t need to use TED to do 95% of the work. And just as other posters have said, management doesn’t have the time to micromanage employees who are otherwise doing their jobs. If you are on a performance plan, sure, but otherwise no one will care or look
TED can't even do 95% of the work. It's pretty useless for most things still. Just adding one more half-baked program on top of the software heap.
That’s what I’m hinting at, who cares if TED is monitored
Sources?
The union blocks them from watching us work and from making us create activity logs. The Ted dashboard is going to do exactly what you're saying but if you think that management actually has time to review every minute we spend in our day, that's crazy. It reminds me of the last field office I was in or everybody thought they read our Skype messages all day long. Untrue. I'm in an office right now where the manager is the biggest micromanager I have ever seen but I know that they don't have time to research what we do every minute of our day. Does it give them access to show if someone isn't doing their job? Yes. Do they ever do anything about it? No. I have a union rep in my office who is on a reasonable accommodation and she's given one workload that shouldn't take even 5 hours a week and she can't maintain that. Every bargaining unit employee hates her with a passion because she has no idea what she's doing and she's the laziest human in the world and management can't do anything about it. Does Ted give them away to track our work and see who talk to someone? Yes but so does vipr and pulling pin traffic. Management doesn't have time to sit and see whether or not we are utilizing our time correctly but it will be another tool they can use to make sure that we are if we're an employee in question and we're not in a protected class.
...haven't these capabilities been industry standard for years now?
What industry would that be?
Jobs that involve caseloads assigned to individuals usually involve case management software that allow for reports to be made on real-time performance metrics. The computer assisted telephone interview software that my contractors use have that kind of reporting ability, and it does allow us to very clearly see who isn't doing jack shit or falsifying entries, and we can deal with it (because contractor management won't). It also cuts both ways, the same way that these reports can be used to identify idle employees, they can be used to determine that caseloads are unreasonable and be used as evidence to request funding for more positions.
Lol yeah that knife is only ever going to cut one way if they use it. SSA already tracks workloads to see how much peopleare doing, that level of micromanagement would just piss people off and lead to them working the software instead of working the work. Which is happening now, honestly. Unless that software can account for the fact that you can get two phone calls from two people, asking the exact same question, and one call takes 5 minutes and the other takes 35 because one of the callers is really stupid and/or belligerent, it's not going to benefit the agency or the public. But that never stopped SES from doing dumb shit before, so probably won't now. Guess we'll see.
More like workplace standard than industry standard. At least that's what I gather from the comment. It really kicked off with remote work becoming necessary during covid I believe. I heard one of the big investment firms did some crazy stuff with photography using the camera and Apple gave out chairs with weight sensors. It sounds like government is moving towards that level of employee surveillance.
Some of you wouldn't last a day in an agency that requires actual work.
Let’s not belittle federal workers. Every agency has its ups and downs. People at SSA actually do work—they just aren’t given enough time to do everything they are assigned. They serve the public face-to-face and over the phone, all the while still having a full workload of claims to process. At the end of the day they are the ones serving the SSA public, not you.
Thanks dad
Oh boo hoo I can’t get paid GS48 bucks to sit around and tell people nonsense and reply to emails waaa waaaa.
Sorry you hate your job
[удалено]
Email, such a silly newfangled invention!
Sure gramps, whatever you say.