Employers find ways to track workers at home

  The clock-watching, quota-setting productivity expert, peering over your shoulder at work, has been out of fashion for decades.

   Now he's back, in electronic form - in the home office.

   In a budding trend some employment experts say is invasive, companies are stepping up electronic monitoring and oversight of tens of thousands of homebased independent contractors.

   Peter Weddle, an author, consultant and researcher on employment Web sites, calls the trend "21st Century Big Brotherism" that risks being "horribly intrusive." Skilled workers "don't need someone looking over their shoulders," he says.

   But while the monitoring can put a damper on home life, many are so eager to avoid commuting hassles that they see the practice as an acceptable trade-off.

   The technology so far affects mainly freelance informationtechnology workers, writers, graphic-designers and call-center agents. But as telecommuting grows, more people will find themselves on an electronic leash. The monitoring itself may speed the growth, because it tears down one of the biggest obstacles to working at home - employers' fear that remote workers will slack off.

   Electronic monitoring is built into freelance transactions at oDesk.com, which links 90,000 computer programmers, network administrators, graphic designers, writers and others with about 10,000 clients world-wide. The system at the Menlo Park, Calif.-based firm takes random snapshots of workers' computer screens six times an hour, records keystrokes and mouse clicks and takes optional Web cam photos of freelancers at work. Clients can log into the system anytime and see whether contractors are working, what they're doing and how long it's taking them; clients' bills are based largely on the data.

   Elance.com, says installing "spyware," as one Elance executive calls it, is going too far. Elance recently unveiled a monitoring system that allows freelancers to document their work electronically.

   "We don't believe in having a camera on your computer, taking pictures and tracing every move," says Elance Chief Executive Fabio Rosati. Several of oDesk's own programmers quit several years ago when the company insisted they submit to monitoring.

   At first, it seems like "Oh, this is Big Brother" watching, acknowledges Russell Tweed, a St. Helens, Ore., computer-network administrator who works on oDesk. Freelancers like that oDesk takes clients' credit cards upfront and, barring a veto from the buyer, pays workers promptly every week.

   One oDesk buyer, Juliana Carroll, a Manhattan financial-services consultant, says she has saved as much as 25 percent using oDesk freelancers because they turn out more work faster than contractors she has found on her own.

   Corporate managers with workat-home employees also worry about potential slackers, and some have tightened ties with home-offce workers by monitoring their use of instant messaging or corporate VPN links. However, employers typically resist Web cam or keystroke monitoring of their own staffers as too invasive, relying instead on screening tele-commuters carefully and setting measurable work objectives.

   In another sector, call-center companies are tightening the electronic leash on homebased agents, who handle calls for retailing, travel and other clients. Call-routing technology at Arise.com in Miramar, Fla., helps keep its 8,000 home agents so tightly tethered to their phones that they have to schedule unpaid time off to go to the bathroom. Calls flow fastest to the most productive workers and top performers also get more flexibility, in the form of first dibs on work shifts.

   Another call-center outsourcer, Working Solutions, which has 4,000 active agents, is applying sophisticated speech-analytics technology to tune an omnipresent electronic ear into numerous home-office conversations at once.

   It's not unusual for call-center companies to record and spot-check agents' calls by listening in now and then. Working Solutions' new system goes beyond that to instantly detect and flag such trouble signals as cancellation threats or angry voices, enabling supervisors to jump in on the conversations right away, says Tim Houlne, chief executive of the Plano, Texas, company.

   Home agents' slipups, such as dogs barking or children crying in the background, are frowned upon. Like most call-center operators, Working Solutions says it has "zero tolerance" for background noise.

   The trend suggests that the home office, long regarded as a calmer place to work, may evolve into just another office, fraught with the same constraints as a corporate cubicle.