Wells Fargo fires a dozen employees pretending to work: Rpts.

Wells Fargo (Wordfast) fired more than a dozen employees for allegedly faking keyboard strokes and “mouse shaking” to appear like they were working, according to reports. Yahoo Finance’s Morning Brief team discusses employee sentiment toward working from home and hybrid setups as more companies push for a return-to-office mandate.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video transcript

The vibe on the street today.

What are the problems with hybrid work environments?

You may ask, well, sometimes employees may not actually be working.

More than a dozen employees were fired from Wells Fargo for allegedly using fake keyboard movements to make it appear they were working on devices sometimes known as mice. Jiggs have taken off during the work-from-home pandemic and people are exchanging tips on how to use them on social media, Shana, we can’t do this at our jobs.

You have to be on camera and in person there is no mouse movement for that.

But I think, actually, there’s nothing about it, we have to be here.

But for people who work from home and just need to make sure that green dot on the instant messaging platform they use internally or for leisure just makes it look like they’re in front of their computer.

It appears there was more than one Wells Fargo person doing this.

Yeah, I mean, you have to think it’s been four years since the pandemic started.

If you really haven’t done much work, I don’t think it’s that hard for your boss to figure out if you’re just moving the keyboard.

If you’re just pressing numbers on the keyboard, if you’re just trying to move the mouse every now and then throughout the day instead of doing the actual work.

So I think maybe that was used as support if we were going to fire some of these employees.

But I, and I think just to highlight some of the difficulties that these companies are having in monitoring their workers from home, there is this push pull with some employees.

They don’t want to go back to the office and not just in banking across the board, they don’t want to go back to the office.

They love the new flexibility they have become accustomed to because of the pandemic.

But we have seen more and more managers taking on the role and executives ordering this return to office.

And I think a lot of it, one obviously has to do with culture, but two just making sure people are doing their jobs and making good use of their time.

The story continues

So I think that’s why this has been so controversial.

But again, if you’re not doing your job and maybe you’re ordering one of those things from Amazon, it’s going to move your mouse every two minutes.

Luckily, your bosses are figuring this out quickly, because it doesn’t seem too difficult to do.

I mean, they’re going to find out very quickly that this is perhaps an expendable role.

If you can have a mouse juggler, it will just make it look like you continue online without actually turning in any tasks or contributing to any projects or things of that nature.

So this, you know, makes it seem like this function isn’t necessarily necessary for the operation.

Certainly not these roles.

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