Call me old fashioned but I had little difficulty siding with the Fair Work Commissioner who rejected an unfair dismissal case of a work-from-home employee of insurer IAG, who was exposed via keystroke tracking technology that showed she wasn’t doing much work.

On one hand, it’s worrying that big brother-like technology is being used by employers, but business owners and managers are worried about how unions are currently trying to enshrine work-from-home clauses in employees’ contracts. And worse still, they’re concerned about the productivity and profitability of their operations, with the pandemic created WFH trend becoming a part of the employment ‘furniture’.

The Daily Mail Australia reports that the woman in question is now on Centrelink benefits and complains that this public exposure of her plight will mean she’ll never get a job. However, she seems destined to use the ‘bad’ publicity to build up her profile as a micro-influencer on Tik Tok and Instagram!

What we’re seeing in many aspects of modern society is a lack of leadership for young people. In so many cases, the adults (parents, employers, politicians and even the legal system) are simply not in charge.

We saw this when politicians tolerated the lawbreaking behaviour of Uber because they couldn’t make taxis lift their game, so they let Uber drivers provide a taxi service without a licence. The same applied to Airbnb, which was able to operate without the controls on other hospitality businesses.

Why? Well, a big part of it was because young people/voters wanted it. The adults weren’t in charge. However, Fair Worker Commissioner Thomas Roberts in this case is an old-fashioned adult.

This is what the Commissioner found, so you be the judge:

1. She received a formal warning in November 2022 about her work output.
2. She was put on a performance improvement plan.
3. She became uncontactable.
4. She failed to lodge a Product Disclosure Statement and IAG was fined.
5. After that, her work on the computer was tracked for 49 days and her keystroke activity was embarrassingly low.
6. Her average strokes over the tracking period was 54 per hour!

While the employee offered excuses for the low keystroke activity, such as she used other devices, the Commissioner wasn’t going to cop her explanations and found she had been involved in serious misconduct in the ‘workplace’. “I have little doubt that the factors underlying the applicant's disconnection from work were serious and real,” the Daily Mail reported he said.

Interestingly, the former employee is using this bad publicity to build up her profile, which shows she has potential to be entrepreneurial. Maybe this kick in the pants from the Fair Work Commissioner will be seen one day as the kick she had to have.

Of course, you have to hope that other people don’t see this notoriety as a useful way to get publicity to build up their online profile, but it does show that if employees win the right to work from home, they will need to be tracked and monitored.

The former employee said she had mental health issues but that failed to influence the Fair Work Commission.

Unless governments want business owners to become proxy charities, making the social lives of their employees more acceptable, then politicians need to help employers assume the role of being the adults in employees’ new age workplaces and more significantly, in their lives!