Today I helped one of my superior spy on another colleague’s workspace in the network.  The spying does not involve any hacking or illegal activities.  All you need to know is where his files are stored in the network.  We suspect this guy is lying about his work progress.  In his status report, he claims everything is on-track, but we found out he haven’t touch his files for almost a week.  The network is the only place any work can be done relate to the project, so what has he been doing?

Spying others workspace is probably the worst way of progress tracking.  It violates the trust among colleagues.  In normal situations, I would rather have the objectives stated clearly, ask him to make a release of his work and assign someone to do the audit.  Yet, sometimes spying unavoidable and it is the last resort to get things under control.

The guy whom we spied on works in a remote office and is already laid off a few months ago.  His last day of work is the end of this month.  Somehow the managers high up think they can squeeze productivity out of him for whatever reason.  When we ask for more body, we got this guy suppose to worth two man months of human resources.  This guy is already fired, so we can’t threaten to fire him again for their poor job.  His termination package is not tied to his performance, so we cannot give any incentive for him to work hard.  Before he walk out of the door, he already got job offers with huge pay raise lining up.  Only idiots would think zombies can get any real work done.