New Ways of Cheating in the Workplace

A company selling sports nutrition hired a new content manager Lucy. She presented an impressive portfolio and effortlessly excelled over other candidates for that position. Her new responsibilities included collaborating with the company's SMM manager to create engaging posts for social media and writing the content plan and articles for the company's blog.

The company became our client in 2020 when they installed CleverControl to monitor the remote staff during the pandemic. Two years later, the management still used CleverControl, although they usually checked the reports once in a few weeks. The employees were used to being monitored and maintained a stable performance level. There were no serious problems with discipline or productivity - neither was there a need for constant tracking.

Lucy did not avoid monitoring. On the contrary, as she was a new employee, the manager paid special attention to logs gathered from her computer. She showed great results and was focused on work, and in a few weeks, the monitoring slackened. After four months, Lucy's work quality decreased drastically and became unacceptable. Her colleague complained that Lucy's texts were often meaningless and shallow as if written by a robot or automatically translated from Chinese. The colleague was not far from the truth.

When the manager began studying reports gathered by CleverControl from Lucy's computer, the first thing he noticed were social networks. Lucy spent a striking amount of her time on social networks, scrolling through timelines for three hours a day. Her website history also showed extensive usage of Amazon and other shopping sites. Digging deeper, the manager found something unexpected - multiple visits to the websites generating texts with the help of AI.

Screen recordings, keystroke logs and clipboard records helped to create the whole picture of how Lucy worked. She just typed in the prompt in the generator, copied the text she got and published it in the company's blog or social media. Studying previous logs revealed that Lucy started using AI about a month after she got the job. At first, she edited the auto-generated text but soon abandoned even that much effort. Surprisingly, monitoring logs from her computer also showed that Lucy worked on her freelance orders during the workday. Although, she did not put much more effort into those orders than she did in her full-time job.

Lucy was fired.

• Social networks tracking

  Extensive usage of social media signalled that the employee was not productive.
• Visited website monitoring

  Studying website history, the manager found that the employee used modern technologies to do the work for her.
• Screen recording

  Screen recording provided proof that the employee did not work responsibly.