Your remote work struggles aren't a secret

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us //link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/click/20280526.91581/aHR0cHM6Ly90d2l0dGVyLmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5/582c8673566a94262a8b49bdBb4b0d812 [Get the newsletter]( Hey, it’s Josh. Working in a call center has always been a difficult job, and doing it from your kitchen table while you homeschool your children is even harder. That’s the conclusion reached by Cogito Corp., which makes software used by hundreds of thousands call center agents in the U.S. It’s one of several tech companies helping bosses keep digital tabs on out-of-sight employees. Cogito’s software monitors every call agents make, analyzing metrics like tones of voice to see how the conversation is going. It’s found that since the start of the pandemic, average customer experience scores have fallen by 4%. It can respond by giving agents prompts to, say, be more empathetic to a raging caller. As virtually all call center agents shifted to work from home, Cogito’s prompts for them to show more energy at a work increased by more than 30%. This kind of technology, which Cogito calls “emotion recognition,” is controversial. The AI Now Institute, a research center at New York University focused on ethical issues related to artificial intelligence, questions its validity as science, and has [urged governments to make sure the tech won't "play a role in important decisions about human lives.”]( Joshua Feast, Cogito’s president and chief executive officer, says he understands the trepidation, but frames the tool as a way to give employers insight into how to improve people’s jobs. “How are my people doing? I want to know. But I don’t want to surveil them,” he told me in an interview last week. When I responded that it seemed hard to argue that Cogito wasn't a surveillance tool, Feast offered a more nuanced take. “There’s a difference between surveilling the work and surveilling the human,” he says. “It’s fine to monitor the call—that’s what we do. That’s the work.” Few of Cogito’s clients allowed people to work from home before the pandemic, but Feast thinks that’ll change. This is a big opening for a tool like Cogito, which can be a stand-in of sorts for human management. As workers' stress levels increased, says Feast, Cogito changed the mix of automated feedback it provided to include more positive reinforcement. It also designed new alerts for managers, directing them to give workers attaboys when the tech determines they’ve done a good job on a call. Cogito is effectively directing both the rank and file and management. Get ready for more of this. It’s technically feasible to monitor the every move of remote workers who spend all day immersed in company software, and tech companies are dying to prove they can squeeze insights from any data set. It’s also tempting to turn to tech when managers have fewer in-person chances to interact with workers. With unemployment reaching levels not seen in generations, workers will likely have less power to object. Companies are [stocking up on software that monitors emails and logs keystrokes](, and some employees and students are being required to enable their web cameras at times to prove they’re paying attention. There's even technology to watch the other technology. Brian Berns, CEO of Knoa Software, says his systems determine which tasks cause people to slow down. “If you see a trend that everyone seemed to have a break there, you can investigate,” he says, saying such an incident could show where a company's software is particularly clunky. “But let’s say this idle time isn’t consistent,” Berns adds. “Managers want to know which employees are struggling.” Many proponents of this kind of monitoring insist it serves mostly to help workers who need it, rather than to provide new avenues for discipline. Whether you’re convinced by those arguments relies largely on whether you trust your boss. Either way, employers have been tempted by these systems for decades, and the debate about technological surveillance in workplaces was heating up before the pandemic. Now, it looks like many workers will be home for months if not longer. They won’t be alone. — [Joshua Brustein](mailto:jbrustein@bloomberg.net) If you read one thing It's been a big month for Elon Musk. His girlfriend had a baby named X Æ A-12, he's said he's selling most of his possessions and he's taken to loudly lambasting the government response to the coronavirus pandemic. On Saturday, the billionaire threatened to [relocate operations from California]( in response to the state blocking Tesla from reopening its only U.S. car plant. Sponsored Content by Darktrace We’ve entered a new era of geopolitical cyber-threat, where machine-speed attacks threaten to take down entire data centers in a matter of minutes. From municipalities to global banks, thousands of organizations around the world are turning to Cyber AI to fight back. [Learn how Darktrace’s Autonomous Response takes intelligent, instant action to contain fast-moving threats – before they can do any damage.](  And here’s what you need to know in global technology news Google and Facebook are telling employees to get ready to work from home for [all of 2020](. Ex-Google engineer James Damore—famous for penning a memo that credited "innate dispositional differences" for women's underrepresentation in tech leadership—asked the court to [dismiss his lawsuit against Google](. Remember HQ Trivia? The embattled live-quiz startup is trying to [make a comeback](.   A special offer for Fully Charged readers | [For just $3.99 a month](, get unlimited access to Bloomberg.com, where you'll find trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters.  You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Fully Charged newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022