IAG insurer uses keystroke logging to terminate underperforming employee who worked remotely

Insurer IAG recently utilised keystroke logging to determine that a remote employee, who had a flawless 18-year tenure with the company, was not meeting productivity standards and should be terminated. 

This case sheds light on the uncommon practice of monitoring employee productivity through application and VPN logs,  a concern that has been raised but remained unknown until now. 

The employee was fired after it was discovered that they had zero keystrokes recorded on their device for a significant number of hours, accounting for up to 85% of their work hours in a month.

The review also revealed that the employee consistently failed to meet their designated working hours for almost all of the monitored working days.

The use of keystroke logging was part of a "cyber review" conducted on the employee's IAG-owned laptop.

 A ruling by the Fair Work Commission revealed that this review examined three categories of logs: daily activity, hourly activity, and VPN activity. The effectiveness of VPN usage data remains unclear, as it is mentioned that many employees at IAG only use VPN when necessary. 

Unfortunately, detailed information about the system logs and tools used for tracking daily and hourly activity was not provided in the ruling, and further clarification from an IAG spokesperson was not possible. 

According to the ruling, a manager outlined the expected minimum productivity level for an employee in that department, which entails a minimum of 500 keystrokes per hour.

- CyberBeat