TD now stands for Time Detective, apparently.
Driving the news: In a bid to boost productivity, TD Bank will start tracking some of its employees’ work with a software tool that monitors how much time they spend in meetings, browsing the internet, and using internal applications. According to Reuters, the lender will initially roll out the tool, called WorkiQ, in its financial crimes and risk management team.
A TD exec told employees on a call that WorkiQ can, for example, see that they're working in an Excel sheet, but doesn’t track what exactly they are doing in the application.
In an FAQ section about the new tool, TD said it will help managers regain the transparency lost in a remote work environment.
Why it matters: From major banks to fast food chains, worker surveillance has become increasingly common. With tech that now monitors every minute of the workday, employees are under pressure to justify each click, brief pause, and interaction in their day.
Burger King announced a pilot in February for a new AI assistant called Patty that lives in employees’ headsets, monitoring their work, answering meal prep questions, and evaluating whether they are being friendly enough in their customer interactions.
Meta recently rolled back plans to track its U.S. employees’ digital activity as part of an initiative to build out AI agents that can perform workers’ jobs autonomously (they essentially asked their workers to help train their AI replacements).
Bottom line: We’re certainly a long way from the days of the no-questions-asked three-martini lunch. Roughly a third of Canadians who work remotely have reported some level of workplace surveillance, whether it's keystroke monitoring, location tracking, or screen grabs. Some workers say they’ve been asked to explain 10-minute absences from their computers.—LA
