One of the big perks of being in Sales has trad- itionally been the freedom to manage your own time. The un- written agreement between sales and management has been that as long as you’re making quota, you can pretty much do what you want. But that gentleman’s agreement about to become history, because technology-enabled micromanagement is set to create a work environment that makes “Big Brother” look like “Sound of Music.”
For just about every sales rep I’ve ever known, the freedom of being in sales was a top reason that they got into that line of work. For example, my mother was a wholesale rep for Bristol Myers for two decades; what she liked best about the job was that nobody was staring over her shoulder and telling her when she could take a break. The Best Man at my wedding, a sales rep in the media business, sees the ability to take an afternoon off (without asking) as his best productivity booster. “There’s a rhythm to selling,” he told me once, “And I can tell when it’s worth my while to sell and when it’s a better use of my time to sit and read the newspaper.” My uncle, who made a small fortune buying and selling investments, had long defined success as “being able to take a nap whenever you want.”
Well, all of that freedom is about to grind to a halt in the face of technology that makes it possible for management to track your every move — and I mean EVERY move.
For example, cell phones used to be items that sales reps purchased on their own and then struggled to get the company to pay some of the expense. Today, however, cell phones are increasingly corporate-issued. That’s less money out of the rep’s pocket, but it also means that the company can do anything it wants with that particular device, including using its built-in GPS function to track exactly where you are every minute of every day. Suppose you decide to stop at Starbucks mid-afternoon to have a tall coffee and read the paper. If the big boss thinks you should be doing something else, you could find yourself pounding the pavement looking for another job — without all the contacts you stored on your cell phone.
Of course, if you’re making your quota, your sales manager might let you off the hook, but some of the stuff that’s coming down the pike may end up becoming corporate policy with no exceptions for Sales. For example, some companies, concerned with rising insurance costs, are looking into requiring employees to wear armbands that monitor a wide range of body functions. They’d be able to know whether you were eating sugary or fatty foods, or whether you’d taken a puff on a cigarette — and either raise your insurance premiums or hand you your walking papers. And yes, they can do that. The right of companies to demand drug testing as a condition of ongoing employment is long established.
Other companies want to require employees to have RFID chips implanted under their skin, so the company can track that person virtually anywhere, even if they leave the cell phone at home. The interest among the business community is so serious that a handful of states have actually passed laws limiting the ability of companies to require such implants. In this case, the government is willing to draw the line, but the sad truth is that there are very few laws covering privacy in the workplace. Quite the contrary. The legal trend is to grant companies even greater control over employee behavior.
So if you got into Sales because you like the freedom, enjoy it while you can, because it’s only a matter of time before the corporate obsession with controlling employee behavior combines with GPS/RFID/medical monitoring to turn your work life into the real life equivalent of a depressing scifi film. I’m not saying that it will happen inside every firm, but the trend is real and there’s no recourse for employees who feel that their privacy is being violated, other than quitting and finding another job.
But what if all the companies in your industry are moving in lockstep on this issue? Companies certainly jumped on the “let’s monitor everyone’s email” bandwagon pretty damn quick; you’d be hard press to find a company today that isn’t reading everything you write. I recently saw a press release for a software program that sends an email to your manager any time you type any word that the manager thinks is suspicious.
Does any of this worry you? If so, spread the word. The only way that this trend can be stopped is if enough professionals become aware of it, and take actions, like lobbying legislators, to stop the insanity. If you want to do something right now that can help, click the “Digg it” button at the bottom of this post. If enough people see this post, maybe it can do some good.
