GenethicsModernHybrids

The head of HR scheduled a mysterious 15 minute sync with me to get what she described as a "quick blessing" on a standard termination package. I should've known immediately that absolutely nothing about this request was going to be standard or quick. She wanted to fire a mid-level account executive for cause, which'd effectively deny him his severance package and all of his unvested equity. I asked her to provide the documentation proving his persistent failure to meet performance quotas or any records of his formal disciplinary warnings. She informed me that the termination wasn't about quotas at all, it was actually about repeated time theft. I asked her how a salaried, legally exempt employee working entirely remotely could possibly commit time theft under our current employment policies. She shared her screen to show me a highly detailed dashboard from a third-party employee monitoring software platform I'd never seen before in my life. I asked her what exactly I was looking at and how she obtained this level of granular telemetry data on our staff. She explained that she quietly used her administrative privileges to install a background keylogger and webcam monitoring tool on all company-issued laptops last month. I felt the blood drain entirely from my face as I stared at the dashboard. She pointed to a graph showing the employee was physically away from his desk for roughly 2 hours every single afternoon. I asked her if she'd informed the employees or obtained written consent that their private keystrokes and home webcams were being actively monitored by the HR department. She said no, because telling them would completely defeat the purpose of catching them intentionally slacking off during business hours. I had to explain that secretly recording employees inside their own homes without their explicit consent is a massive, inexcusable violation of federal and state wiretapping laws. I pointed out that we currently have 45 employees living in California, which is famously a two-party consent state with incredibly aggressive privacy regulations. She asked if we could just fire him anyway and pretend we found out he was slacking off through other legal means. I explained that constructing a parallel narrative to cover up illegal corporate surveillance is called fraud and usually leads to depositions. She seemed genuinely hurt that I wasn't highly impressed by her proactive, data-driven approach to workforce optimization. I mandated that she uninstall the spyware immediately across the entire organization and delete all the collected data. I now have to draft a highly sensitive disclosure notice to the entire company admitting that the HR department has been illegally spying on them for a month. The account executive is getting his full severance package, his equity, and probably an apology fruit basket. I'm actively questioning every single life choice that led me to this chair.