Tools that keep a worker’s online status as active, often known as “mouse movers,” are the newest technological debate of the virtual work era.
Last month, Wells Fargo disclosed to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority that the bank had fired nearly a dozen employees “after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.” Mouse movers “took off during the pandemic-spurred work-from-home era, with people swapping tips for using them on social-media sites Reddit and TikTok,” reports Bloomberg. “Such gadgets are available on Amazon.com for less than $20.”
But despite the negative consequences for the Wells Fargo employees who were accused of faking their online productivity, mouse movers continue to rise in popularity among workers. And manufacturers report a rise in demand.
But why do employees feel the need to keep their cursor in flight? Better yet, why are managers so intent on measuring the performance of remote employees through their hours online?
“There is the question of control in an era of remote work,” says Sarah Wittman, assistant professor of management at George Mason University. “How do you ensure that the workers that you do not have on site, that you do not see in person, are doing the jobs that you are paying them to do?”
Fast Company spoke with academics, workplace experts, and even mouse mover manufacturers to offer a glimpse inside the bubbling workplace trend.
What is a mouse mover?
Mouse movers or “mouse jigglers” are tools that keep online productivity metrics awake, even when an employee is away from their computer. Shaking the cursor too and fro, a mouse mover can, for instance, keep a Slack status from being marked as “away.” Use a mouse mover and that little green dot will never go away.
There are many manufacturers of mouse movers. One of the leading companies in the space is Tech8 USA. However, Tech8’s mouse mover product didn’t begin as a tool for virtual work.
“We started out making the mouse movers for the gaming industry a couple of years before the pandemic,” says Diana Rodriguez, marketing representative for Tech8 USA. “When COVID hit, our sales spiked.”
Tech8 offers a variety of different “flavors” of mouse movers, as Rodriguez puts it. There are tools that spin the mouse’s internal disk, tools that jiggle the entire mouse back and forth, and even chip technology that simulates keystrokes.
Rodriguez is unworried about the Wells Fargo firing—in fact, she says it brought Tech8 some TikTok virality and boosted their sales. She laughs off the story: “It reminds me of Squid Games.”
TikTok trends and work evasion
Mouse movers are just one in a series of recent viral workplace fads, predominantly originating from TikTok. Back in 2022, “quiet quitting” was one of the biggest workplace conversations of the year. In 2023, many workers on the internet entered a pact to practice “bare minimum Mondays.” No matter the term, many of these trends boil down to one idea: work less.
Kate Walker, an HR consultant, expresses her irritation with growing work evasion trends like mouse movers.
“[Mouse movers are] frustrating because it signals to me that someone is bored with their job,” Walker says. “If you’re doing more deceitful, scheming things, that just feels sad to me. That probably means you don’t like what you’re doing.”
Walker suggests that social media is partly responsible for the rise in many of these efforts to work less. “But I also think that employees are becoming more brave to speak out and speak up about their dissatisfaction,” she says.
Indeed, it may be that these trends indicate that workers are hungry for independence and empowerment. Today, many workers are demanding more transparency from management, and don’t put up with overwork. Perhaps mouse movers are not just a social media fad to get out of work; they are a tool to combat micromanagers.
The surveillance state of virtual work
In the era of virtual work, it is increasingly more difficult to measure employee productivity. A manager cannot have eyes on their employees across the office; surely measuring time online is the next best solution? However, measuring productivity in the first place may now be outdated.
Jennifer Nahrgang, professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa, says a smarter way to measure workers is to assess their outputs. Time online is a faulty metric, she argues; how can we know when employees are engaged in “deepwork,” or even just reading off of paper?
“We are now in a knowledge economy where it’s hard to measure productivity,” Nahrgang says. “We’re not producing widgets anymore.”
Wittman compares the managers who track an employee’s mouse status to those who wander the office to check if workers are on-task. “Just walking around the office doesn’t give you the full information about what they’re doing and what their productivity is,” she says.
In this way, the question of mouse movers may be a sign of short-sighted management. It is entirely possible to measure employees based on the output they produce, rather than the hours they log. So when employees feel the need to fight off a manager’s online surveillance with a mouse mover, it could signal that employees are being overworked—or that managers don’t have enough of their own work to keep themselves busy with.
“Are you as an organization crafting jobs that are actually full-time jobs?” asks Wittman. “Is there a disconnect between a manager who maybe has never done this job, does not know how much time this job takes, and a worker who has to perform it?”
Still, as managers demand more and more surveillance over their employees, experts say the use of mouse movers will continue to increase. It appears the (mouse) jig is not up just yet.