> Am I being cynical in thinking there are probably plenty of enterprise suppliers out there providing similar creepy "user insights" information to dodgy managers, but just aren't in the spotlight like Microsoft?

I would be highly surprised if there weren't. However, it'd far worse if Microsoft provided such features, because that would mean there'd be much less friction for an enterprise to adopt them (since pretty much all of then already license Office). At least with those other suppliers, a company would have to have decided it wanted worker surveillance and seek it out, rather than getting it out-of-the-box by default.

You aren't.

Especially with remote work on the rise.

This is one thing I hope all of us continue opposing vehemently.

It's a huge privacy concern and companies have too much incentive to want to monitor this kind of data.

I’ve worked at a workplace before that had one of these software packages. It had a taskbar icon so everyone knew it was there. Still a bad show installing it, but at least less subtle than Microsoft’s efforts.

Nope. My work hasn't ever mentioned explicitly that they monitor us but they're also tracking productivity somehow. Interestingly, they had to tell people to stop working so much once we transitioned to work-from-home. They found that people were working way longer hours and not taking lunches.

If you work in Europe this is illegal. You would have to sign an agreement to allow your employer to collect this type of data on you.

The difference is in the transparency and purpose of the metrics. Salesforce’s entire purpose is to measure and publicize performance metrics across the business, down to the individual.

In Sales, this means meetings, calls, deals, etc. In Service, this means satisfaction scores, handle times, etc.

All of those are well understood employee productivity scores.

I think this scares people because no one is sure how it’ll be measured and used. At first blush, it just looks like a proxy for identifying luddites and/or people who hate chat — regardless of their actual job performance.

Yes there are, but its nice and siloed and normal applied to minimum wage blue collar workers, not salaried professionals.

And given the nearly 100% penetration of office its much more serious.

It's worth noting it probably should not be applied to blue-collar workers as well.