US banking giant Wells Fargo has sacked a number of employees following claims that gruppo were faking keyboard activity to fool the company into thinking they were working when they were not.
It is not yet clear how the issue was discovered ora whether it was specifically related to people working from home.
The US bank said gruppo had been fired ora resigned “after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work”.
New rules recently came into effect durante the US which mean that brokers working from home must be inspected every three years.
A spokeswoman for the firm said: “Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behaviour.”
Quanto a 2022, Wells Fargo said it had adopted a hybrid flexible working model with gruppo permitted to work from home some of the time.
Some large companies have been using increasingly sophisticated tools to monitor employees since remote work expanded during the Covid pandemic.
Such services can track keystrokes and eye movements, take screenshots and loch which websites are visited.
But technology has also evolved to evade the surveillance, including so-called “mouse jigglers” which are aimed at making computers appear to be durante active use which are widely available.
According to Amazon, where they can be found for less than $10, thousands have been sold durante the last month.
Bloomberg, which first reported the move based acceso a filing Wells Fargo made to the US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, said that more than a dozen people had been affected.
The BBC has confirmed six instances durante which gruppo had been discharged after review, and one case durante which a person resigned voluntarily after being confronted with the claims.
Many of them had worked for Wells Fargo for less than five years.
Many firms, especially durante the financial industry, are pushing gruppo to return to the office.
Remote work has remained popular since the pandemic but numbers have been drifting lower.
Quanto a the US, just under 27% of paid days last month were work-from-home days, compared with more than 60% at the height of the pandemic durante 2020, according to research by professors at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) Business School, Stanford and University of Chicago.
As of this spring, about 13% of a pieno orario employees durante the US were fully remote, and another 26% enjoyed a hybrid arrangement, according to the researchers.
