New cell phone technology to make 'goofing off' a thing of the past

Japanese tech blog Asiajin introduces a new technology from KDDI subsidiary KDDI R&D Laboratories that will let managers know if employees are properly working or, gasp, goofing off. "Acceleration sensors" on special mobile phones will beam back data from the body movements of workers that can be analyzed to determine the nature of their current activity.

How does the computer know what they are doing? Employees will help dig their own career graves by providing the company with a schedule of daily activities, so that managers can know what the data patterns look like for each.

Now the challenge will be for Japanese employees to learn how to beat the system. The trick will be finding ways to goof off that provide the same data as the core daily activity of Japanese businesses: doing meaningless paperwork that should have been abolished with the arrival of the Internet.

With a global reputation of Japanese salarymen being super diligant workers, some may be surprised why managers would need to develop such dystopian surveillance software. Despite extremely long work hours, Japan actually has one of the lowest worker productivity levels among post-industrial nations. In other words, workers do very little productive work even though they stay at the office all day.

The question remains, however, whether Japanese companies actually have enough tasks for their employees if goofing off ceases to exist and daily smoking breaks are paired down to 2-3 from several dozen. The easiest way to kill goofing off may not need technology at all. If everyone was forced to go home at 6:30pm, workers would have to go into productive overdrive to meet the tight deadline of an eight-hour work day.