When someone manages a work-from-home employee by checking that their
status in a chat application like
Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc., hasn't shifted from a green dot signifying "Present/Available" to an orange, yellow, or red dot signifying "Away", rather than by measuring things like quality and quantity of work output, whether deliverables are met in a timely fashion, customer satisfaction, etc.
With the explosion in employees working from home during the COVID-
19 pandemic of
2020+, many managers who had been accustomed to prowling
cube farms and looking over their employees' shoulders to make sure they were working, resorted to this technique.
"My manager totally does management by green dot. I got yelled at for being 'Away' on
Slack yesterday morning because I had to spend half an hour on the phone with my kid's
school. I'm going to have to get one of those
mouse jigglers."
