#culture_entreprise

Employees at home are being photographed every 5 minutes by an always-on video service to ensure they’re actually working — and the service is seeing a rapid expansion since the coronavirus outbreak
►https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/work-from-home-sneek-webcam-picture-5-minutes-monitor-video-2020-3

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The software automatically photographs employees every few minutes. The company said it’s a way to keep coworkers connected.

As coronavirus spreads, companies are increasingly being forced to work from home — and some are using online conference tools to try to prevent a dip in productivity.
Some are turning to tools like Sneek, a group video conference software that’s always on by default.
Sneek features a “wall of faces” of employees at a company, automatically taking a photo of employees through their webcam every one to five minutes.
“Sneek was never designed to spy on anyone,” cofounder Del Currie told Business Insider. “We’d be the worst spy company ever considering we named our app ’Sneek.’”
Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Working from home can make it feel like managers have less direct supervision over workers. But an always-on video-conference tool changes that by automatically snapping webcam pictures of employees every few minutes.

Companies across the world have been forced to abandon offices in favor of working from home in recent weeks to try to slow the spread of coronavirus, which has sickened more than 39,000 people in the US alone.

In order to keep productivity high while working remotely, some companies are turning to tools like Sneek. The software features a “wall of faces” for each office, which stays on throughout the workday and features constantly-updating photos of workers taken through their laptop camera every one to five minutes.

Sneek’s user base has rapidly expanded in recent weeks as companies transition en masse to work-from home — signups have increased tenfold in in the past few weeks, cofounder Del Currie told Business Insider. It has over 10,000 users and boasts clients including Lego, Fred Perry, and GoFish digital.

The software’s interface lets people set their webcam to automatically photograph them every one or five minutes, depending on how frequently they want their image to update (or how frequently their boss requires it).

If a coworker clicks on their face, Sneek’s default settings will instantly connect the two workers in a live video call, even if the recipient hasn’t clicked “accept.” However, people can also configure their settings to only accept calls manually — and only take webcam photos manually — if their employer allows it.

Currie told Business Insider that, while some may be put off by the software’s interface, it’s meant to build a connected office dynamic.

“Sneek was never designed to spy on anyone, we’d be the worst spy company ever considering we named our app ’Sneek,’” Currie said. “We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it’s not the solution for those folks, but there’s also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they’re working together.”

After Sneek’s interface was reported by The Information’s Priya Anand last week, some were turned off by the workplace surveillance tool. David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO and cofounder of the development firm Basecamp, tweeted that the idea “makes my skin crawl.”

—DHH (@dhh) March 19, 2020

Currie acknowledged that the company “did indeed get some Twitter fame last week” after The Information story was published. Sneek was inspired in part by a book on remote work that Hansson co-authored, Currie said, but now the company has received messages from Hansson’s followers “abusing our staff and calling us pieces of s—.”

The purpose of Sneek isn’t surveillance, Currie said, but office culture.

“We’ve worked from home for 10+ years and one of the biggest things that starts to creep in is that sense of isolation, it does really affect people’s mental health,” he said. “Just having that ability to look up and see your teammates there can make all the difference.”

#Surveillance #Télétravail #Droit_travail #Culture_entreprise

Boeing Pilot Complained of ‘Egregious’ Issue With 737 Max in 2016 - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/business/boeing-flight-simulator-text-message.html

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Il y a deux choses fascinantes dans cet article :
– l’usage du mot « culture » pour définir l’ensemble des pressions qui s’exercent sur une entreprise dans son ensemble... mais qui évite d’élargir la question à la « culture » de la société en général, qui fait de la concurrence, de l’innovation et du lancement de produit sans véritable certification son modèle de la réussite (i.e. la Silicon valley).

– la pratique de la « complicité » par des acteurs d’un marché, qui vont jusqu’à mentir sciemment à des autorités pour cacher ou minimiser des problèmes. Une question majeure : il n’y a pas de domination sans complicités internes. Comment un réseau d’influence peut-il pousser les gens à mentir et se mentir pour répondre à des injonctions extérieures à leur propre métier/compétences/pratiques ?

Cette affaire Boeing mérite plus encore de réfléchir à la société qu’a construite le néolibéralisme. Une société toxique au plus fort sens du terme.

For months, Boeing has said it had no idea that a new automated system in the 737 Max jet, which played a role in two fatal crashes, was unsafe.

But on Friday, the company gave lawmakers a transcript revealing that a top pilot working on the plane had raised concerns about the system in messages to a colleague in 2016, more than two years before the Max was grounded because of the accidents, which left 346 people dead.

In the messages, the pilot, Mark Forkner, who played a central role in the development of the plane, complained that the system, known as MCAS, was acting unpredictably in a flight simulator: “It’s running rampant.”

The messages are from November 2016, months before the Max was certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. “Granted, I suck at flying, but even this was egregious,” he said sardonically to a colleague, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed on Friday by The New York Times.

The Max crisis has consumed Boeing, and the revelation of the messages from Mr. Forkner comes at a particularly sensitive time. The company’s chief executive, Dennis A. Muilenburg, is scheduled to testify before two congressional committees, on Oct. 29 and Oct. 30, the first time a Boeing executive has appeared at a hearing related to the crashes. Boeing’s stock lost 7 percent of its value on Friday, adding to the financial fallout.

The existence of the messages strike at Boeing’s defense that it had done nothing wrong regarding the Max because regulators had cleared the plane to fly, and potentially increases the company’s legal exposure as it faces civil and criminal investigations and multiple lawsuits related to both crashes. Facing competition from Airbus, Boeing worked to produce the Max as quickly as possible, striving to minimize costly training for pilots. Last week, a task force of 10 international regulators released a report that found that Boeing had not fully explained MCAS to the F.A.A.

Mr. Forkner was the chief technical pilot for the Max and was in charge of communicating with the F.A.A. group that determined how pilots would be trained before flying it. He helped Boeing convince international regulators that the Max was safe to fly.

In the messages, he said that during tests in 2016, the simulator showed the plane making unexpected movements through a process called trimming.

“The plane is trimming itself like craxy,” he wrote to Patrik Gustavsson, a fellow 737 technical pilot at Boeing. “I’m like WHAT?”

Mr. Forkner went on to say that he had lied to the F.A.A.

“I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” Mr. Forkner says in the messages, though it was not clear what he was specifically referring to.

Lawmakers, regulators and pilots responded with swift condemnation on Friday.

“This is the smoking gun,” Representative Peter DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview. “This is no longer just a regulatory failure and a culture failure. It’s starting to look like criminal misconduct.”

The Times, which was the first to disclose Mr. Forkner’s involvement in the plane, previously reported that he had failed to tell the F.A.A. that the original version of MCAS was being overhauled, leaving regulators with the impression that the system was relatively benign and would be used only in rare cases.

Eight months before the messages were exchanged, Mr. Forkner had asked the F.A.A. if it would be O.K. to remove mention of MCAS from the pilot’s manual. The F.A.A., which at the time believed the system would activate only in rare cases and wasn’t dangerous, approved Mr. Forkner’s request.

[The New York Times was the first to report on Mr. Forkner’s role in the development of the 737 Max and his request to the F.A.A.]

Another exchange, in a batch of emails among Mr. Forkner, Boeing colleagues and F.A.A. officials, was also reviewed by The Times on Friday. In one email from November 2016, Mr. Forkner wrote that he was “jedi-mind tricking regulators into accepting the training that I got accepted by F.A.A.”

A lawyer for Mr. Forkner downplayed the importance of the messages, suggesting Mr. Forkner was talking about issues with the simulator.

Mr. DeFazio, who as chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is overseeing the investigation into the crashes, said he had reviewed other internal Boeing documents and emails that suggested employees were under pressure to produce planes as fast as possible and avoid additional pilot training.

“Boeing cannot say this is about one person,” Mr. DeFazio said. “This is about a cultural failure at Boeing under pressure from Wall Street to just get this thing out there and make sure that you don’t open the door to further pilot training.”

#Boeing #Culture_entreprise #Concurrence #Mensonge #Autorité_régulation