Should Wells Fargo have fired employees who were simulating keyboard activity?

Over the past few days, Wells Fargo has been in the news for another round of questionable behavior. This time, the issue allegedly involves employees faking work by simulating keyboard or mouse activity.

Bloomberg reported that Wells Fargo discovered and fired more than 12 employees for engaging in the “impression of active work.”

First of all, if companies fired people for the "impression of active work," teams with large meeting cultures would have to fire everyone. But in all seriousness, Wells Fargo discovered that employees were using tools like mouse jigglers to attempt to thwart their monitoring systems.

The remote work dilemma

In the era of remote work, companies have become very concerned that employees might be slacking off when not under the watchful eye of a leader. Some companies have gone so far as to install software on their employees' computers to detect keyboard and mouse activity while taking periodic screenshots so they can track their daily work hours.

Naturally, this has led to a new cottage industry of tools that can simulate keyboard and mouse movement. Some software is incredibly sophisticated at simulating activity and claims to be undetectable.

Given this situation, should companies fire these employees who are faking working time? Should we be spending more and more on detection? Do we need to turn managers into spies? Or is there a better way?

Are your remote employees slacking off?

Probably.

But of course, there's more to the story than that. Your employees are very likely performing below their potential (i.e., slacking off) if you have a lousy performance culture, which usually means:

• The work is demotivating.
• You have blame-based accountability systems.
• Work expectations are unclear.

The fundamental question you will face as a company is: would you rather spend on better spyware, or better leadership?

We've studied motivation and performance for decades, some of which has been published in our best-selling book Primed to Perform. We can unequivocally sat that it is now so much easier to get leaders to drive performance well, that the choice for many companies is clear. Focus your time and budget on better leadership instead of better spyware.

To get started, get five things right:

1. Manage work better
2. Manage motivation better
3. Invest in your people
4. Craft better roles
5. Set expectations better

① Manage work better

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea,”  wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, to describe the difference between task management and performance-based leadership.

While this sounds good on paper, it isn't easy to understand what the equivalent is in most organizations. Imagine you lead a team that makes software for hedge funds, or your team stocks groceries in a store. What's their vast and endless sea?

In the old Whole Foods, when they were still founder-led, workers in stores would own their aisles. That ownership meant they could make choices that would impact performance outcomes. For example, a person stocking the dairy aisle could visit local producers to choose what to order. Or they could choose where products would be placed on their shelves. All this led to a deep sense of play (i.e., the ability to experiment and learn), and purpose (i.e., the feeling that your choices matter).

In other words, don't make task management the centerpiece of performance management in your company. Make problem solving the centerpiece.

While this might sound daunting at first, there's a very easy way to get started. Have all your teams conduct quarterly Goal Checks using the Factor platform.

When teams use Factor to help them set their goals, Artificial Intelligence helps them learn how to think and work in problems-to-solve and experiments (versus deliverables and tasks). For example, the goal for that store worker might be: How might we grow our sales of dairy-free goods by running 10 experiments this month? or How might we reduce spoilage in our dairy aisle by running 10 experiments this month?

Then, in between these quarterly goal checks, colleagues share their updates, obstacles, and learnings on a daily or weekly basis. This visibility makes it easier for leaders to coach them and ensures that each colleague has a full workload for each week.

By using Factor to set goals every quarter, every team shifts their focus from demotivating task-management to more motivating problem solving and experimentation.

② Manage motivation better

I once had a manager who paced around our desks to make sure we weren't surfing the web. You'd be amazed by how fast I got at using keyboard shortcuts to change my screen.

Obviously, spying isn't a great motivational strategy. But so few leaders or teams understand what it really means to build a motivated team.

Again, after a decade of research and development, we've found a simple answer. The second quarterly cadence that all teams should have is a quarterly team Health Check, facilitated by Factor AI.

A quarterly Health Check is a 90-minute team discussion where the goal is to make changes for the next quarter that would increase team motivation and performance. By using it every quarter, not only do teams get a measure of their motivation levels, but they get AI-based guidance on how to improve their motivation.

By using Factor to manage Health Checks, not only will every team learn how to drive their own motivation, but also, leaders will see where there are motivational hot spots that they may need to support better.

③ Invest in your people

A few times in my life, I had leaders who believed enough in me to actually invest their time making me better. And of course, I ran through walls for those leaders. Apprenticeship is an incredibly powerful motivator, and when done well, is more performance motivating than even having a great work-life balance.

However, in reality, very few leaders are investing in their people to that extent, and not because they don't agree it's the right thing to do. The reasons why there are so few apprenticeship cultures include:

1. Leaders are too busy.
2. Leaders feel too insecure to see themselves as mentors.
3. Leaders don't know how to grow their people's skills without making their people feel judged.

The last quarterly experience we recommend for each person is a quarterly Skill Check. In a Skill Check, each colleague has a 90-minute one-on-one with their leader, again facilitated by Factor AI, that helps them choose skills and make development plans.

When organizations use Factor for Skill Checks, they see a marked increase in motivation as employees feel invested in. Moreover, skill gaps close, giving these companies a significant talent advantage.

④ Craft better roles

Read most job descriptions and they sound narrow and demotivating. As we've worked with thousands of leaders to improve how their jobs are crafted, the biggest root cause we've seen is that leaders don't know how to conceive of the deeper job-to-be-done versus the surface-level tasks.

To craft better roles, we recommend starting with the job description.

• First, share guidance with your organization on what good job descriptions look like. This article should help.
• Second, make it a requirement that any open job posting requires these kinds of motivating job descriptions. At first, you'll see leaders complain, but often this is because either they don't know how to write them, or they feel pressured to just fill the seat with a warm body. Either way, it is in the organization's best interest to coach the leader. When organizations use Factor to manage their performance holistically, leaders can use Factor's artificial intelligence to help them craft these kinds of motivating job descriptions.
• Third, make all your job descriptions internally transparent in one place. It should be easy for senior HR leaders to see and coach leaders on lousy JDs. We recommend creating a stack in Factor for all your organization's job descriptions. This way, leaders can learn from each other and from HR experts.

⑤ Set expectations better

Lastly, throughout your employee life-cycle, it is important that you set the right expectations.

For example, if possible, throughout the recruiting process, describe the expectations that come with remote work and having more agency about when you work. These should include:

1. Organizing work as problems-to-solve with ideas (not tasks)
2. Continuously sharing drafts of early thinking for feedback
3. Being proactive when idle to either help other colleagues or partner with leaders to find better use of time
4. Video on in team interactions with rare exception
5. Being a company ambassador on social media, especially LinkedIn
6. Not having additional full-time jobs!

Often as recruiting, job descriptions, and onboarding become fragmented in organizations, these expectations get poorly set. Companies rely on static employee handbooks that feel like check-the-box bureaucracy rather than real expectation setting.

Instead, we recommend using Factor to manage these expectations. Use the General workspace that includes all employees are to house a dynamic, discussion-oriented handbook. Each principle should be its own card, with an owner of that principle. Employees should feel free to ask questions or share tips right in that card.

Slacking off is a real problem

Slacking at scale is a real problem. It would be naive to believe that everyone is putting their 100% in every day.

One deeply mission-centric not-for-profit recently found an employee who was taking advantage of generous work-life balance policies by having a second full-time job at another company. Time theft like this isn't rare. There are even online support groups for people who have multiple full-time jobs.

So, we get it. If we found employees in our own organization behaving this way, we would react emotionally to say the least. When you feel like your own employees are lying to you and stealing time, it is very tempting to try to solve the symptom.

However, inevitably, this cat and mouse (bad pun intended) game of detection and thwarting will continue until detection is not economically viable. It's only a matter of time when someone makes a Bluetooth device that simulates a keyboard (so it doesn't require installed software), that can conduct hours of "research" and even check email using large language model AI.

The endgame of slacking isn't better spyware, it's better leadership.

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