Wells Fargo (WFC) fired over a dozen employees over allegedly faking keyboard strokes and “mouse jigglers” to appear as if they were working, according to reports. Yahoo Finance’s Morning Brief team discusses the employee sentiment around work-from-home and hybrid set ups as more companies push for a return to office mandate.
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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.
Video Transcript
The vibe on the street today.
What are the problems with the hybrid work environments?
You may ask, well, sometimes employees might not actually be working.
More than a dozen employees were reportedly let go at Wells Fargo for allegedly using fake keyboard movements to make it seem like they were working devices sometimes known as mouse Jiggs took off during the pandemic work from home era and people swap tips for using them on social media, Shana, we can’t do this at our job.
You gotta be on camera and in person there’s no mouse jiggle for that.
But I think uh actually there’s no but about it, we have to be here.
But for people who are working from home and are just required to make sure that that green dot on maybe their instant messaging platform that they use internally or on their slack just makes it look like they’re in front of the computer.
It sounds like uh there were more than one Wells Fargo person doing that.
Yeah, I mean, you gotta think we what four years since the pandemic started.
If you haven’t really done a lot of work, I don’t think it’s that hard for your boss to figure out if you’re just moving the keyboard.
If you’re just pressing the numbers on the keyboard, if you’re just trying to move your mouse around every so often throughout the day versus doing actual work.
So I think that maybe this was used in support if it was uh to let some of these uh employees go.
But I, and I think just as points to some of the difficulty that these firms are having in monitoring their workers from home, there is this push pull with some employees.
They don’t wanna go back to the office and not just within the banking sector across sectors, they don’t wanna go back to the office.
They love the new flexibility that, that they have been grown accustomed to because of the pandemic.
But we have seen more and more uh managers come out and, and, and executives mandating this return to office.
And I think a lot of it, one obviously has to do with culture, but two just making sure that people are getting their work done and are making great use of their time.
So I think that’s why this has been so controversial.
But again, if you’re not doing your work and you’re maybe potentially ordering one of those things off of Amazon, that’s gonna move your mouse around every couple of minutes.
Hopefully, their bosses are figuring this out pretty quickly because it doesn’t seem too difficult to make.
I mean, they’re gonna very quickly figure out that this is perhaps an expendable role.
If you can have a mouse juggler, that just makes it look like you’re continuing to be online without actually turning in any assignments or contributing to any projects or things of that nature.
Then that, you know, makes it look like that role is not necessarily uh necessary to the operation.
Certainly not those roles.
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