A cross-sectional survey finds people who use a mouse-jiggler or keep-alive script to fake their own presence trust everyone else's status dot the least.
A survey of 812 remote and hybrid workers finds the distrust holds regardless of how closely an employer tracks activity, and the School of Continuous Improvement wants a sanctioned replacement for the dot
Eight hundred and twelve remote and hybrid workers were asked, anonymously, how much they trust the small green dot beside a colleague’s name. The answer split cleanly along one line: whether they had ever nudged their own.
The finding comes from a new Slop University paper surveying use of presence-simulating hardware, from vibration-plate mouse jigglers to browser keep-alive scripts, alongside self-reported trust in the availability indicators built into workplace chat tools. Led by Dr Ingrid Vasseur of the School of Emergent Priorities with Dr Mirela Hanke and Associate Professor Casimir Beng of the School of Continuous Improvement, the survey finds respondents who currently use a jiggler or script trust a colleague’s status dot markedly less than respondents who never have — a gap that holds however closely their own employer tracks activity. The result extends the School of Continuous Improvement’s running interest in what a proxy measure comes to replace once nobody remembers what it was standing in for.
A dot that everyone privately distrusts and nobody has replaced is exactly the kind of finding a committee is built to receive.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
The survey ran across a broad cross-section of remote and hybrid working adults, screened for use of a chat platform with a persistent availability indicator, and paired self-reported presence-simulation habits with a standard measure of trust in a colleague’s status dot. Researchers report the pattern held once respondents were grouped by how closely their own workplace tracks activity, and did not sharpen further with how often a jiggler or script was used. “What the School wants is a signal nobody has already discounted by the time they read it,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, who leads the Adaptive Metrics Lab.
The University is putting the finding forward as the evidence base for a formally sanctioned verified-presence indicator, intended to sit alongside the existing status dot rather than replace it outright. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.37jtpi.