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HR entrepreneur Mike Coffey, SPHR, SHRM-SCP engages business thought leaders about the strategic, psychological, legal, and practical implications of bringing people together to create value for shareholders, customers, and the community. As an HR consultant, mentor to first-stage businesses through EO’s Accelerator program, and owner of Imperative—Bulletproof Background Screening, Mike is passionate about helping other professionals improve how they recruit, select, and manage their people. Most thirty-minute episodes of Good Morning, HR will be eligible for half a recertification credit for both HRCI and SHRM-certified professionals. Mike is a member of Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) Fort Worth and active with the Texas Association of Business, the Fort Worth Chamber, and Texas SHRM.
An employer that thinks it needs to count its employees mouse clicks doesn't really know how it wants to measure employee performance or it hasn't come up with a better way of doing it. And so you create this incentive for the employee to spend $50 on an Amazon mouse clicker rather than the employee just becoming better at their job and and providing, you know, better output quality whatever it is they're supposed to be putting together.
Mike Coffey:Good morning, HR. I'm Mike Coffey, president of Imperative, bulletproof background checks with fast and friendly service. And this is the podcast where I talk to business leaders about bringing people together to create value for shareholders, customers, and the community. Today is December 26th, so you have 5 days to lose £25, pay off your debt, and maybe learn a new language or whatever other resolutions you set for 2024, 11 months 26 days ago. It is also the last episode of 2024, which means it's time for our monthly conversation about recent HR related news items.
Mike Coffey:And this month, remote employees have been in the news. We've got North Koreans, employees juggling full time jobs, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and of all things, mouse jigglers. Joining me to make sense of all of this is returning guest, Patrick Richter. Patrick is a partner at Rigby Slack, an Austin based law firm serving businesses across the US. Patrick is board certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization in Labor and Employment Law, and he represents employers nationally in all types of employment disputes, including class and collective actions.
Mike Coffey:He also has considerable experience with matters before the National Labor Relations Board and in assisting clients with union avoidance. Welcome back to Good Morning HR, Patrick.
Patrick Richter:Thanks for having me.
Mike Coffey:So let's start with this crazy stuff that's going on with North Korea. It's been going on all in all year, and it's been unfolding story by story. Some some people were arrested in Arizona for facilitating this, but basically, North Korea has been using the increasing amount of remote work that US companies are doing, especially tech firms, and stealing the identities of American workers by fake posting fake jobs and getting people to apply for them and collecting all their PII, then turning around and going applying for real jobs in the US and then doing the work remotely from North Korea or China and collecting the income, but also in some cases stealing a lot of US companies data and sometimes holding it for ransom. I mean, you know, if I'm hiring a tech guy and he's got control of my server, I'm probably gonna pay whoever demands the money. And so according to the Justice Department, 88 at least $88,000,000 has been transferred to North Korea from US companies through all this fraud, and this week, the Department of Justice put out a $5,000,000 reward for more information about any, alleged this alleged scheme, any kind of stuff going on.
Mike Coffey:This is kind of, you know, this wasn't something you could do when we weren't all remote. Right? This was something that, you know, somebody's physically walking into your office and sitting down every day, but this is one of the things that, you know, we all love remote work, but this is one of those things where you've got to have some systems in place to really catch this.
Patrick Richter:Yeah. $88,000,000 is a lot of ransom for, for some company trade secrets. And, you know, whenever I see a story like this and I see a number like that, my guess is it's a tip of the iceberg because there's probably plenty of companies that that haven't reported it for any number of reasons whether, you know, just to avoid being publicly embarrassed or not wanting to make shareholders or customers mad about it.
Mike Coffey:Well and how many of these companies you know, we know about the ones that were there. 14, 14 people were in diet. 14 of these North Korean, you know, assume they're in North Korea, but they were indicted in the US. They'll never get prosecuted, but that's only 14. I think they've identified about a 130 actual individual situations, but how many are still out there?
Mike Coffey:You know, that's the thing. Talk about the tip of the iceberg, the ones who are still working for employers and you know the employer thinks you know there this you know this part and it's in the US you can't say well you look Asian so I'm not gonna hire you. So I mean Right. So we're on the Zoom call on occasion with this person, and he's competent. He's doing the job.
Mike Coffey:What's the problem? Well, the problem is, you know, he's using somebody else's identity, and you're violating all kinds of sanctions issues by transferring money, you know, through you're sending you're paying somebody to some account, and then that's getting sent over to North Korea. So it's kind of crazy. So you're right. I think it's just the tip of the iceberg.
Mike Coffey:And we've seen a couple instances with similar, not necessarily North Korea, but we had a situation earlier this year with one of our tech clients where one of my employees, Spidey Sense, just kinda went off and and, this is somebody who had a lot of tech experience and, seemed to know an interview apparently what they were talking about, but when we started checking their references, all of their employers for these they named these big employers they worked for, but when we started digging in, the employers have never heard of them through HR, Then he said, oh, well, I worked for these contracting agencies. I never worked directly for the employer. Then you start checking those contracting agencies websites and like some of the links don't work and, you start looking at when the domains were registered and it was just like days before they even started the background check?
Patrick Richter:You know, it's so many of those tech companies use those contractors in some ways to avoid taking on the liability of having employees in the first place, and then like you said, you know you go to try to check references or check up on did this person really work for, you know, Apple or or Oracle, and you you instead find that they say they worked for a through a subcontractor, that subcontractor might look shady even if they were legit.
Mike Coffey:Right. And a lot of them are you're right. Yeah.
Patrick Richter:Yeah. And they weren't, you know, a North Korean shell. And then in the situation you're talking about with the North Koreans, the the harder problem there is you stole a real person's identity. So if they, like, they if they stole your identity and I went to check on you, I'd see a a guy who's real, who's in Texas, who does what he does. I would have no reason to know that that somebody was, you know, pretending to be you until it's too late.
Mike Coffey:Right. And and that that I think that's the the the big problem is if it's a physical world and I was walking in the office, I couldn't, you know, I couldn't steal this guy, you know. You look at my LinkedIn picture and say, oh, this guy I'm interviewing in person is not nearly as ugly as I got in that LinkedIn picture, so it's not the same dude. But, you know, when you don't have all of that, how do you how do you figure that out? And some of this, you know and I know of one situation where somebody, a company that I'm familiar with was almost infiltrated by this North Korean thing.
Mike Coffey:And what what happened is they sent the laptop to the new employee, and the new employee had an address in Arizona, I think it was, and that's where a lot of these were going. And basically, there's a this the North Koreans are paying this woman in North Korea. All these laptops are coming in and she's basically running like a server farm with these laptops and then the North Koreans were remoting in, but everything was a US IP address. All the laptops were here in the US And so as far as that one employer goes, it looked like that employee was working in Arizona. And so, you know, that but as soon the the the one employer that's a tech company that I know of that with got involved with the North Korea thing, as soon as that employee log started the first time they logged in, a whole bunch of malware started getting downloaded to the computer.
Mike Coffey:They're a tech company with good security and so alarms went off everywhere and they're like, okay so you know, what's going on here? And they they blocked this person's access and started digging in and ultimately got involved with the FBI and some other stuff. So it's it you know, if you've got good cybersecurity, but yeah.
Patrick Richter:A similar thing happened to one of my clients and and they they'd gone so far as to send the guy the laptop and then they started having, you know, questions about whether this person was the person they'd interviewed or not. They didn't get so far as to worrying about where he was and they didn't really try to track it down. They just locked him out. Once they decided that it was fishy, and they couldn't they couldn't convince themselves that it wasn't, they just fired him and then wrote off the cost of the laptop and didn't worry about it anymore, locked him out of all their systems and and just moved on.
Mike Coffey:Well, and that's the other thing that's happening is people who aren't competent for certain roles, who know it a little bit about it, but they're not, you know, they're gonna be the best candidate, are getting other people to attend the Zoom interviews for them. So the subject matter expert who's really good is on the Zoom interview and especially if they're, you know, let's just say it non white, like most of the tech industry is, you know, is, you know, is largely white or or South Asian, I guess. But you get somebody who's, you know, they're on a Zoom call during the interview and maybe you do group interviews and everybody's looking. That's okay. It's great.
Mike Coffey:He's got the job. Then 2 weeks in, this guy's showing up for Zoom meetings with his camera off or when he does turn his camera on, you're like, is that is that the guy we interviewed? You know? And how do you remember how you know? And if you do, you know, 5, 6, 7 interviews in the way tech companies drag interviews out sometimes over 5, 6 weeks, maybe that's them, maybe it's not, and and you're not sure, but they're not competent.
Mike Coffey:And so, you know, you're gonna put them through your performance management process or something. It's it's it's kind of a a really challenging situation. And now that, you know, so so many companies are doing I9 verifications remotely, so you're not really holding, you know, looking at an original document. In fact, we're we're about to implement a biometric process where the the actual ID is is shown to the, you know, the individual shows the ID to the camera and it and the AI on the back end can read the machine readable code on the back of this driver's license or passport, even foreign IDs, and compare it to the picture and give you a probability of whether it's the same person and all of that stuff because, you know, how else are you gonna, you know, replicate that, you know, if if they say that. So we're we're looking at a couple solutions for that for some of our clients who are just need a better you know, need more security, you know, more confidence.
Mike Coffey:But that whole due diligence on the front end has gotta happen. And I mean, of course, the background check guy is gonna say that. But if all your applicants were honest, I'd be out of work. And so the fact is is, you know and if they were all honest, your life had, you know, you you know, you wouldn't have 3 yachts and, and 2 2 mansions, you know, as an employment law attorney.
Patrick Richter:Yeah. You know, and this is all stems from the the boom in remote work and and even to the point of remote interviews. Like, you may you may never be in the same room as somebody you're hiring for a very sensitive position. It just it opens the door for that kind of mischief.
Mike Coffey:And employers are hiring people internationally too. I mean, you know, you know, through contractors. I talked to a lot of employers who say, yeah, we, you know, we're hiring, you know, programmers or accountants and people like that on Upwork, and there's no due diligence on Upwork. Upwork is not saying we know who this person is, you know, who's who says they're in Europe or South Asia or wherever, Mexico. But, hey, they seem to have competency, so we'll hire them, and let's give them the key, you know, access to our network and everything at the same time.
Mike Coffey:Those are the, you know, the issues. And so
Patrick Richter:In general, though, that, you know, network access and and information security is is is a lot slippery slipperier. That's hard to say. The more difficult, when employees are working remote even if everything else is legit. Right. I do a lot of trade secret and and non compete litigation and you know you used to always just go and check the employee's work computer and see how to how much stuff did they send to their gmail or you know get a printout of how many times was a thumb thumb drive plugged into their their laptop and with with people able to work remote and people just generally being a little more tech savvy, you know, with VPN access and other things, like the the the number of ways employees who wanna do mischief and take sensitive information, that that there are a lot more avenues to do it than there used to be.
Mike Coffey:Well and, you know, my employees are remote. We went remote in 2020. I never dreamed we would, and it worked really well for us in our environment, but all my employees are working on company equipment. All the USB ports are dead. We've got a remote access system, so they're working on a server in Dallas.
Mike Coffey:Each instance of their desktop is a server in Dallas, and we're using the Internet as a cable monitor, basically. And those local machines get wiped as soon as they turn them off, so there's no data store locally. But most income a lot of companies I'm still hearing from employers who say, yeah. You can use your personal computer to to do work and, yeah, connect to our network with your personal computer and things like that. And I'm like, I just can't imagine that.
Patrick Richter:My my best pandemic stealing information story, I I didn't it was a friend of mine was involved in this, but the guy completely went anti technology. Because no one was at the office, he went to work. He went into the office during normal hours so he didn't have to badge in or badge out and print it out like a banker's box full of information. So when they first went to when he left and they first went to look for an electronic paper trail, they didn't find one. They they eventually found a paper paper trail
Mike Coffey:Wow.
Patrick Richter:And figured out this guy had printed out thousands of pages of information and just took it with him.
Mike Coffey:Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, so and even if the the fraud isn't coming from North Korea or, you know, fake IDs and stuff, the other big issue that's going on, and there's a whole subreddit on it, and I talked to Steve Pegler about it last month, overemployment. There's this whole trend in the tech area, but it's expanding beyond that now where people have 2 or even 3 full time jobs, and they're supposed to be working from 8 to 5 and they're doing all 3 jobs and they're all remote. And so managers sometimes have a problem getting somebody scheduled for a meeting or things like that and and maybe sometimes the antenna go up, but if you go to the overemployment subreddit, there are story after story about how to pull this off and how to lie to your boss, how to hide employment number 2 and number 3, make sure don't put it on your LinkedIn or make your LinkedIn private so that employer number 1 doesn't see the other one.
Mike Coffey:All these different things that people have and and they've also got technology because employers are monitoring their employees for, you know, trying to make sure people are actually working when they're supposed to. And, one of the things they're looking for is activity on the computer is the mouse. You know, if if the mouse doesn't move, the computer will, you know, go to sleep and keep that from happening, which might set off an alarm if somebody's monitoring behavior. There's you can buy on Amazon and in fact, I will I'm gonna post in the show notes a link to this and because people will not believe me that this is really a thing. You can buy a thing called a mouse jiggler and what it does is physically just micro move your mouse back and forth a little bit, so it looks like you're working, you know, to that as far as the computer goes.
Patrick Richter:Just enough to trick your employers monitoring software into thinking that you're sitting at your desk, clicking, and doing your job. Yep. Yep.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And so, you know, that goes down. And I think over employment is a problem. And in it, I think it's fraud. You know, if you're if you're, you know, their argument, people who are doing it, and when you read the the subreddit arguments about it, They they say I'm getting the job done.
Mike Coffey:You know what? You know, my job as an employee is to do the minimum amount of work that I can get away with it without getting fired and the employers job is to pay me as little as they possibly have to. I mean you hear that a lot, but I think both of those are wrong, and those are the wrong assumptions. But
Patrick Richter:It's certainly the wrong way to run your run your business if you're trying to, you know, hire good employees and then have employee do employees do good work, and I agree with you. To me, that's just flat out fraud.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. But at the same time, you know, and it is a good morning HR drinking game here when we you know, because it comes up so often. It's a performance issue, though. It's a performance management issue, and and it's a leadership and and supervisory problem.
Patrick Richter:Because Anytime anytime anytime you can blame management for the problem.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. It's probably true. Right? Yeah. It's probably true.
Mike Coffey:Yeah.
Patrick Richter:You know, you said at the beginning about the union avoidance stuff. My conclusion over 30 years of doing employment work and doing union work is if a company gets a union voted in it's probably because their managers were not listening to their employees.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Patrick Richter:And this is the same thing. I think a lot of this comes down to an employer that thinks it needs to count its employees' mouse clicks doesn't really know how it wants to measure employee performance or it hasn't come up with a better way of doing it. And so you create this incentive for the employee to spend $50 on an Amazon mouse clicker rather than the employee just becoming better at their job and and providing, you know, better output quality, whatever it is they're supposed to be putting together, which is usually a failure of the of the manager. And then, like you said, you know, your your drinking game is always somebody's really good at their job, at the substance of it, so then let's make them a manager, but let's not train them how to handle the people who report to them.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Patrick Richter:You know? It's like it's like the the great baseball player never makes the great manager.
Mike Coffey:Right.
Patrick Richter:Right? It's the guy who was like the scrappy backup catcher is always a better dugout manager than the guy who was really good because the guy who was really good just is like, well, go be good.
Mike Coffey:Right. Yeah. Do do do what I do. Right? Yeah.
Mike Coffey:And and we I was I, you know, I cut my HR teeth and health care 30 years ago, and even then, we would always talk about just because somebody's not is a good nurse doesn't mean they're gonna be a good nurse manager. And and we'd see it over and over, and you get somebody in there who and it was it's always on the employer. I think you most people, you can train them to be a good manager, a good supervisor, a good leader, but you've got to invest money and time. You can't say, okay. You're promoted on Friday, so be here Monday to be the manager.
Mike Coffey:I mean, that's just not a way to do it.
Patrick Richter:Agreed. A 100%.
Mike Coffey:And that's where most of your employee relations issues come from, managers who are, you know, just not not doing you know, letting situations fester, not being responsive, you know, like you say, most most of the companies that end up with unions in my experience are the ones that deserve them, You know? And Right. You know, the problem is is the sad part is the unions rarely deliver for the employees what they promise either. And so, you know, it's, so the employees are getting screwed both ways. But with this stuff with you know, I understand why employers, even if you've got good management, you know, wanna use the technology for security, cybersecurity, and all that, and to measure productivity and making sure people aren't seeing data and all that.
Mike Coffey:But every employee should have some objective performance management. You know, there should be some standard to say, this is how you know, if it's piece work of some sort, this is how much you've got to produce, you know, you're we expect you to generally produce this much per hour, per day, whatever, Or these are the milestones on your technical project if you're a coder, and we expect you to be able to generate, you know, you know, meet your deadlines. But, you know, we've got too many I think there's too many people whose job is to be a working manager. And so they've got their own deadlines. They've got their own things to worry about, and they're not their their primary job is not motivating, incentivizing, and improving the performance of of their team.
Patrick Richter:Right. And I I think of the also besides the, you know, companies not knowing how to measure the employees productivity or performance, I think a lot of it becomes the trust issue. You know? I I know we've talked about this before. For for how many years until 2020 was remote work when someone proposed it as a reasonable accommodation?
Patrick Richter:The answer was not no, but hell no. We can't ever do it. I know the pandemic forced it on a lot of us, but it it does work and people do generally, you know, perform better and and are more productive given that that is an option at least in some cases. But I think the the reluctance was, you know, if I let my employee work from home, he's gonna be eating Cheetos and watching Jeopardy at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. He's not gonna be doing his job.
Patrick Richter:And I think this mouse monitoring and other stuff is just an extension of that lack of trust in the employee to to be doing the job that they need to do.
Mike Coffey:And, you know, we've got pretty tight performance management stuff and our stuff, you know, we can see on a daily basis how much work gets done. Are we meeting our client expectations and our service level agreements and stuff? So we know. I think if companies haven't taken taken the time to set that up and, you know, and again, management's not doing it, then they're gonna rely on, you know, looking busy. And it used to be, here comes the boss, look busy, and, you know, there's you know, the
Patrick Richter:The boss button on the old Tetris game at the in the before the computer was even connected to the Internet.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. Well, you and I are of the age where we we're we're getting ready to start watching Matlock a lot. But for the younger generation, explain what the Tetris reference is because that's that's it's it's pretty funny to look back at it now and see we're still dealing with the same issue
Patrick Richter:now. What so so the for me, my experience with it in law school, I worked at an energy company in Houston as a law clerk, and we had a computer in the office, the little bullpen that the law clerk sat in, and and, you know, it was a green and black screen monitor. It wasn't even a color monitor and there was a Tetris game on there. And in the top right corner of the screen, it said boss button. And, and if you click the boss button, the Tetris game went away and instead made the screen look like an excel spreadsheet.
Patrick Richter:And that was your way that was your way of hiding that you were goofing off and playing a game on company time if the boss came to peep over your shoulder.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And and that's the thing is that's always been bad management. Management by walking around. The idea behind that was being in contact with your employees, knowing what's going on, you know, having conversations with them, being plugged in to what's going on in the culture. And but what it really for a lot of managers, what it meant was make sure people look busy.
Mike Coffey:And, you know, it's, you know, it's like the old joke, Jesus is coming, look busy, and, you know, that kind of, you know, attitude. And and so we're just doing it now remote. Yeah.
Patrick Richter:But And and look, if you're gonna tell your employees that you're gonna measure their performance by the number of times their mouse gets clicked, then that's what that's the performance that you're gonna drive.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. Right? Incentives matter. It's economics 101. Right?
Patrick Richter:Right. Right.
Mike Coffey:And let's take a quick break. Good morning HR is brought to you by Imperative. Bulletproof background checks with fast and friendly service. And from all of us at Imperative, we wish you a prosperous 2025. If you're an HRCI or SHRM certified professional, this episode of Good Morning HR has been pre approved for 1 half hour of recertification credit.
Mike Coffey:To obtain the recertification information, visit goodmorninghr.com and click on research credits. Then select episode 180 and enter the keyword jiggler. That's jiggler. And if you're looking for even more recertification credit, check out the webinars page at imperativeinfo.com. And now back to my conversation with Patrick Richter.
Mike Coffey:So employers are implementing the software to manage, and I've I've seen some of the software and some of it's really, you know, pretty impressive. There's software out there that lay over the entire network, and so you have Zoom calls and it monitors the conversations on the Zoom meetings and even gives employers feedback about sentiment, content. Every you know, we've all you know, most of us have been on a Zoom call now where it had Fireflies or one of those other programs recording it and taking notes. And the AI is really good and gives you a good summary of the meeting and who said what and what the action items were. You know, how much how long did this meeting take?
Mike Coffey:You know, what was the conversation? Was it on topic? All these things. And then you you mentioned plugging USBs in, all the all the kinds of things that people do, you know, paying attention to what emails get sent and all of that. I see why employers do those things.
Mike Coffey:And sometimes if especially when you trend that data, you say, hey. You know, we're really wasting a lot of time on this kind of effort that's not value producing. So let's, you know, let's cut these meetings. Let's get rid of some of these. And that maybe that raw data is useful for some of that.
Patrick Richter:Yeah. It reminded me of a post I saw the other day on on social media that was, like, that it was 2 panels, and the first panel was a guy sitting in a meeting, and the thought bubble over his head was this meeting could have been an email. Yeah. And then and then and then the second bubble was the same guy at his computer, and he's like, I get too damn many emails.
Mike Coffey:Exactly. Yeah. Well, and so, you know, I I see why employers are doing it, and I think there's value to it. But again, it can't substitute for man you know, for for good management. But now you get the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau came out a couple weeks ago and said that these company that the software companies themselves with and this is a reversal of what the Federal Trade Commission has said about 15 years ago.
Mike Coffey:You know, now the CFPB, which is probably the least business friendly government agency out there right now, but they came out and said, these software companies that employers are using to monitor employee productivity are basically consumer reporting agencies. That they're like the credit bureaus or your background screening company because they're collecting information on an employee. Now I know the Fair Credit Reporting Act. I've lived it for the last 30 years, and there's no way under the way the law is written or any existing court decisions that these software companies or even employers use to this data qualifies as a consumer report. But, you know, they're they're making that argument, and, you know, certainly, you know, now who knows what the Trump administration's gonna do?
Mike Coffey:And we got Loper Breit. Right? And so Yeah.
Patrick Richter:The the but that CFPB thing wasn't even a regulation. You know, Loper Breit was is deference to the courts have to defer to agency interpretation of of regulations. The CFPB thing is not even a reg. It's a, what is it called? A circular?
Mike Coffey:A circular, yeah.
Patrick Richter:Some sort of those are
Mike Coffey:the things. Which is like their logic often. Yeah. Yeah.
Patrick Richter:Yeah. Yeah. I mean look I'm not I'm not in the business of prognosticating the future, at least not accurately. I told the client the other day that I'm over 30 years at guessing what somebody else is going to do, what their motives are, but I'd be willing to bet that as of about a month from now the CFPB is no longer going to hold the position that the software companies are handling consumer data in a way that makes them subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Mike Coffey:Right. And certainly if, you know, if employers are buying information about an employee from somebody else and it's not their own employees activity while they're their employees, that's that probably is a consumer report. But if if you're monitoring what I'm doing on my computer, on my company computer while I'm supposed to be at work, and you're using software to generate that information, I I I think that'd be tedious. Yeah.
Patrick Richter:That's an enormous stretch in my opinion, and especially to hold the the all the software company is doing is analyzing the data. They're not even you know, to the extent the Fair Credit Reporting Act is to make sure that the underlying data is fair.
Mike Coffey:Right. You know, they're in
Patrick Richter:these cases, the AI or the software company that's evaluating the employee performance sort of in bulk is all that's they're just running the math. Right. You know? It's the employer that's providing the the the raw data about what the employees are doing and the mouse clicks and everything else.
Mike Coffey:And, you know, that employee monitoring is also there's a new lawsuit from an Apple employee saying that, well, Apple is monitoring their employees are spying on us. Well, I got news for you. I mean, you know, we've all got these devices, and yes, they they are spying on us, but, you know, but we know it. I I don't think any of us are surprised to find out that that's happening, but with these Apple employees, it's as I read what was written about the the summaries of the lawsuit is the employee was saying, well, Apple will give us Apple devices, but they there's things we can't do on them because Apple doesn't want them to us to do it on their devices. And so it's easier on us if we just use our own devices.
Mike Coffey:And so Apple is paying attention to what we're doing when you're using company resources, networks, and and doing company work on our personal devices, and that's not fair. Well, I'm like, yeah, I'm not sure I buy that argument.
Patrick Richter:I I don't. If, you know, if you're accessing my data and my network through a device, and you're and you're doing it to circumvent the restrictions I put on the device I I ask you to use, I don't know that you got much of an argument that you're being spied on at least not in a way that you haven't consented to. You know we for years had company policies that said you know it goes all the way back to the stuff you stash in the locker at the in the in the in the company, you know, changing room. We're gonna search it and you you don't have any right of privacy of what's behind that that locker. This is just the digital version of that.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. And you remember when bring your own device became a thing 10, 15 years ago and and and even then, I said, this is not a good idea. Employers just need to to shell out their own money for the equipment that the employers are gonna use, lock it down so that you you know how it's being used, but then also enforce your policies. And it's it kind of seems like that's maybe what Apple where Apple might have dropped the ball here as they said don't use, you know, we're giving you this equipment, you know, use this Macs, use these iPhones, whatever for work and then come on. They're a tech company.
Mike Coffey:They they know what the Mac addresses are for these off, you know, for these this equipment. They know when it's not being used, and they should have just said, no, don't do it, but nobody wants to be, you know do we really wanna know what the headaches are the employees complaining all the time that, you know, I the you know, I have to carry 2 stupid iPhones around, you know.
Patrick Richter:If the good morning HR drinking game is about managers being or good good performers being promoted and being bad managers, the the Pat Richter employment law drinking game is, well, we have a policy that would have prohibited that, but we didn't enforce it because it was inconvenient.
Mike Coffey:Yeah.
Patrick Richter:A policy in your handbook that you choose to ignore is is just a problem. You know, the only reason you have you wanna have those things is so if somebody ever says you did something wrong, you can say, no, look, we followed our rules. And so if you you have a rule and then you ignore it, and like you said, in this case, Apple damn well knows like you said, they're a tech company. They know if somebody's not using the assigned device to access the network, they could stop it if they wanted to.
Mike Coffey:Right. But that, you know, it boils down to, you know, the just trying to keep, you know, manager get managers to do what they wanna do. And and those kind of policies, they wanna use them often. Well, let's have this as a policy. We're not gonna enforce it.
Mike Coffey:We're not gonna enforce it. We're not gonna enforce it. Oh, now we're mad at this employee, so we're gonna go find this and and enforce it against them in this one instance.
Patrick Richter:Right. That's that, you know, that's what I'm saying. The selective enforcement is is is terrible. But you know to kind of put a bow on the whole thing, a lot of this just comes down to I think people get in a hurry. You know you've got all these companies who are striving to hire employees and you've got recruiters and hiring managers trying to get them in in a hurry and it's you know take 15 extra minutes, take one extra step, you know, if it smells fishy double check, you know, like you were telling me earlier look look and see you know this LLC that this guy said he worked, at Lockheed for, is it real?
Patrick Richter:You know, you know, do do your homework. Do your due diligence.
Mike Coffey:Well and, you know, it's no secret listeners that we're a baggage screening company, and we're probably usually the most expensive option most our clients come to, and most of them only come to us after things have gone wrong. Right? I mean, you know, you can buy a $50 background check on the Internet all day long, but it's after the fact that, you know, things go wrong, and you're like, oh, suddenly we want to spend some money.
Patrick Richter:What what costs more? Hiring you on the front end to make sure that it's done right or having to pay North Korea to
Mike Coffey:get your your data back? To get your
Patrick Richter:your server unlocked. Pay you.
Mike Coffey:Yeah. I would prefer you to as well. Yeah. Well, hey, Patrick. That's all the time we have.
Mike Coffey:Thanks for joining me for the very last episode of 2024.
Patrick Richter:Happy to put a bow on the year for you.
Mike Coffey:That's perfect. And thank you for listening today and throughout the year. You can comment on this episode or search our previous episodes at goodmorninghr.com. You can also find us on your favorite social media. Rob Upchurch is our technical producer and you can reach him at robmakespods.com.
Mike Coffey:And as I say every week, thank you to Imperative's marketing coordinator, Mary Anne Hernandez, who keeps the trains running on time. And I'm Mike Coffey. As always, don't hesitate to reach out if I can be of service to you personally or professionally. I'll see you next week, and until then, be well, do good, and keep your chin up. Happy New Year.