Photo: NTT East Japan
lifestyle

Companies can monitor employees working overtime using in-office flying drones

9 Comments
By Casey Baseel, SoraNews24

While massive amounts of overtime remains a prominent aspect of many jobs in Japan, recently there’s been a slight shift in attitudes. Compared to the past at least, more companies today are willing to say, “You know, if so many of our employees are still at their desks long after the workday is supposed to be done, maybe they’re dangerously overworked.”

So for organizations looking to reduce the amount of overtime being done in their offices, telecommunications giant NTT has helped to create a new service in which companies can have flying drones patrol their offices and see if anyone is still working after quitting time.

The T-Frend system was developed in cooperation with Tokyo-based drone manufacturer Blue Innovation and Taisei, a building management provider headquartered in Nagoya. Users select a flight course and time for the drones, which are fully automated, requiring neither an operator nor GPS data, as they navigate using their onboard cameras. As the drones make their rounds, they record what they see and upload it to the user’s cloud, utilizing NTT’s technical know-how.

T-Frend is scheduled to begin testing in the spring, and to officially launch next October. It’s touted as a way to both curb overtime for the improvement of employee health and boost information security by having fewer people in the office late at night.

In its press release, NTT says the service was created as an answer to a dilemma in which companies want their employees to work less overtime, but having to monitor employees and implement overtime-reduction strategies was creating excess work for the employees tasked with those responsibilities.

However, it’s unclear how exactly having monitoring drones flying overhead is going to prevent excessive overtime work, except maybe by giving the office a dystopian man-versus-machine vibe that has all the humans wanting to get out of there as quickly as possible. Yes the drones will be able to see workers because of their cameras, but will they interact with them? Will they give out friendly, sage advice to help the staff wrap up their projects quickly and efficiently?

The apparent absence of any way for the drones to actually help overtime-working employees seems like a pretty major oversight. Generally speaking, people who’re doing overtime in Japan aren’t doing it because they want to, but because they feel like they have to. Unleashing drones at a certain time each day, like they’re a time-limit enforcer in a video game, doesn’t seem like it’ll do anything except ratchet up pressure on workers to finish their assignments by the standard quitting time…but if that’s something they could do so easily, they wouldn’t be doing overtime in the first place.

So while T-Frend might indeed be a viable office security system, it doesn’t seem like it’s really going to help with the problem of overworked employees, since it sounds like it’ll reduce their options to either working twice as hard during their already too-busy day, or having to hide under their desks as they do overtime.

Source: NTT East Japan

Read more stories from SoraNews24.

-- Tokyo company plays Rocky theme for workers every day to cut overtime, boost productivity

-- Japan’s better farming through precision drone strikes

-- Is Japan overworking its teachers? One exhausted educator says, “YES!”

© SoraNews24

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

9 Comments
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Seriously, who on Earth come up with these ideas?

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Is the real purpose to make sure they ARE working or are NOT working?

I'm sure the person who monitors the overtime drone, will have to work overtime to operate it too..

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Yes it’s definitely NOT to make sure people people aren’t working at 10pm but rather to make sure they are. That’s an easy one

0 ( +0 / -0 )

Alternatively, companies could set up gates at their entrances like they have at stations and require employees to use a pass card when they go in and out. Overtime payments can then automatically be paid based on time spent on the premises, instead of pretending that people worked far fewer hours than they actually did.

Of course, that will never happen as it would reveal the true extent of hours worked in Japan and would land companies with huge overtime bills. Instead, they pretend they are doing something, but they don't really care.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

You mean like magnetic ID-Cards that been used for decades to control access.

Don"t matter what form of I'd you use they can all be used, like login

verification, we used that 35yrs ago to restrict unauthorized after-hours access.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Haha, what a joke of a world we now live in. This is the future ladies and gents. Get used to it if you're into city living. I prefer open spaces and being one with the natural world, not this spy-net, matrix bs that's being pushed on everyone.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Aren't those operating the drones working overtime?

0 ( +0 / -0 )

The simplest thing would be to install CCTV, the last thing you need is a drone falling on your head! I can see the law suits piling up already!

1 ( +1 / -0 )

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