Morning Coffee: Accountants get grumpy about Big Brother watching them
Senior partners at PwC have apparently “lost count” of the number of staff complaints they’ve been getting about the system that monitors compliance with the work-from-home policy.
Apparently it’s something of a panopticon. As well as monitoring card swipes, the system looks at the internet addresses of remote logins to the system and checks them against client sites which count toward the three-days-a-week requirement.
It's not completely obvious what the nature of the objections might be – accountants have to keep detailed timesheets saying what they are doing anyway, often in increments as short as six minutes. There’s certainly grounds for suspicion that the people who are complaining are not objecting to the surveillance itself, but rather to the fact that they don’t want to comply with the requirement, and the “traffic lights” which light up on managers’ dashboards when attendance drops below 60% make this difficult.
But it might not just be that. As some employees point out, this level of microscopic and automated checking-up is hard to square with the corporate values of trust and empowerment. Accountants are quite proud of their professional status, and surely part of that status is that you can expect to be treated as a professional rather than a naughty student playing truant.
Meanwhile…
Between 2022 and 2024, the UK authorities had 12 employees fired for misconduct, with a further ten “final written warnings” and 16 first warnings. (City AM)
Apparently JD Vance’s trip to the Cotswolds wasn’t just a matter of asking ChatGPT “Where do Vice Presidents go on holiday?”. It was suggested to him by George Osborne of Robey Warshaw. (FT)
Back in April, Fannie Mae terminated 100 employees for alleged abuse of the corporate “charity donation matching” program. Now 41 of them are suing for defamation, claiming they were fired by email and never told what evidence had been raised against them. (Bloomberg)
An analyst’s nightmare – some private equity funds list all their acquisition prices in a single footnote which can span three closely written pages. (WSJ)
The traffic is unspeakable and the cost of housing pretty frightening for junior staff, but the Dubai International Financial Centre is the undisputed financial capital of the Middle East. Or is it? According to one partisan of the fast growing Abu Dhabi Global Market, “DIFC is done, apart from being a nice place to have dinner”. (FT)
In the creative industries, when people find the daily grind unbearable and the money runs out, the thing to do is apparently retraining to become a therapist. Might this be the long term future for all the banking jobs that get replaced by AI? (WSJ)
If the biggest ChatGPT fan on your trading desk is seeming a little forlorn this week, it may be because the latest version of the chatbot just isn’t as friendly as it used to be. Scientists are proposing measures of “emotional intelligence” to go along with the other performance benchmarks. (WIRED)
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