People who work remotely will soon be managed using this incredible animal training trick! It’s good enough for orcas, so it should be good enough for office workers!

Background:

One popular animal-training technique is to give the animal (such as the killer whale in Fig. 1) a small reward immediately after it accomplishes a task.


Fig. 1: After this orca completes a task, it’s given a fish as a reward. This classic animal-training technique encourages the whale to complete more tasks in the future.

Proposal:

Strangely, this approach—frequently-dispensed minor rewards—has rarely been attempted for humans.

But with the increasing rate of remote work and the implementation of the dystopian surveillance state from the novel 1984, it should now be technically feasible to use the orca-training method above on office workers as well (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: After this office worker completes a task (e.g. replies to an email / creates a spreadsheet / fills out a time card), the camera-and-computer-based surveillance system will notify the worker’s manager. The manager may then push a button to dispense a fish as a reward (top right of figure), thus encouraging this employee to continue to work diligently.

Since the fish-dispensing corporate office has full access to the employee’s use of the computer, they could install a piece of software that would tally up some sort of (highly-gameable) metric of “total work done”: perhaps “number of clicks in a document” or “number of times the space bar was pressed.

The software would then automatically dispense a fish after each threshold was met (such as “1000 words typed” or “2 emails sent”).

Conclusion:

This is probably the future of remote office work. Embrace it! The details of the fish delivery system are left as an exercise to the reader.

PROS: Encourages good habits in remote workers and provides valuable fish-based nutrients to employees, thus increasing overall health and potentially reducing the company’s health insurance premiums.

CONS: It’s possible that some highly negative employees—who aren’t “team players”—would think this system was dehumanizing and degrading. No fish for them!!!