The question is, why are people underperforming? Engineering tasks take super long, and are super hard to plan. So is underfperformance from the difficulty or the work and poor scoping, or is it from not trying hard enough?
In the US, the UK, and many other geographies, you can fire people relatively easily. The labour laws in France, for example, are one of the reasons we never hire from there. For context, our remote team in the Philippines gets paid more than the average French wage . So their Labour laws are really hurting them. But I digress....
Companies are legally and morally entitled to monitor communications of their staff on the company's resources. Even so, we're not actually reading the internal messages, just taking metadata. The concerns aren't primarily around privacy, but rather compliance and security, which we'd need to officially demonstrate (ISO, SOC2) for orgs to implement the solution.
While I do trust the core team we have now, there are always people who will take advantage of you, as they did in our case. I have no love for them and I can't be rid of them quickly enough.
Finally, I want to push people to perform at their best. This does mean working longer, but I don't want to push people already at their limit, it's demoralising and risks burning them out.
While I may sound somewhat abrasive, after 10 years of running companies, I believe the industry needs to stop pretending. We're not a family, we're a sports team, and underperformers need to gooo.