The pandemic redefined what “working hard” looks like. For one employee, though, it wasn’t output or results that mattered; it was how often their chat bubble turned yellow. After proving themselves more efficient from home, this worker was told they couldn’t continue remote work because they went idle too often in the company’s internal messaging app.
Their response? A six-line PowerShell script that hit the period key every four minutes, keeping their status “active” all day long. The result was deliciously ironic: their manager praised the “improvement” in their engagement and approved full-time remote work. All it took was a single fake keystroke.
A worker denied WFH status for going “idle” on chat despite top KPIs
OP edited the post
According to organizational psychologist Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, many companies “mistake visibility for productivity,” prioritizing performative busyness over measurable output.
In his Harvard Business Review article on productivity myths, he writes that “leaders too often conflate activity with effectiveness; it’s easier to count keystrokes than results.”
Similarly, Psychology Today notes that excessive digital monitoring breeds “learned compliance,” where employees mimic productivity behaviors to avoid punishment, eroding trust and creativity in the long term.
Remote-work researcher Dr. Nicholas Bloom at Stanford University found that employees working from home are, on average, 13% more productive and significantly happier when measured by real performance, not by online presence.
Yet, as this story shows, many organizations still cling to old-school control methods, green dots instead of genuine metrics.
Check out how the community responded:
Reddit users slammed the company’s chat-based productivity measure as “pure corporate stupidity”
Another shared a similar F13-key hack
This commenter noted bypassing idle settings in Teams
Some also shared their hacks
This employee didn’t just outsmart his manager; he exposed how outdated our metrics for “hard work” have become. Maybe it’s time companies realized that trust, not time-tracking, keeps people truly productive.
So, what would you do if your job measured success by your chat bubble? Would you build a script, buy a mouse jiggler, or just let that little dot fade to yellow in peaceful protest?
