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How many decision makers are willing to admit that they are subconsciously using "chair time" as a measure of productivity?
by brobinson 10y ago
How many decision makers are willing to admit that they are subconsciously using "chair time" as a measure of productivity?
- jarin 10y agoI think it's also probably an issue of trust. If someone isn't in front of you banging on their keyboard you have no assurance that they're actually doing work. The solution is really to use communication tools like Slack and also put the focus on deliverables instead of "work units".
- jackmaney 10y ago> If someone isn't in front of you banging on their keyboard you have no assurance that they're actually doing work. If someone is in front of you banging on their keyboard, you need not have any assurance that they're doing work, either.
- bambax 10y agoIt's much worse than that; they're using number of warm chairs as a measure of their own importance. Troops you can't see aren't troops and their general not much of a general.
- jdc0589 10y agohilariously, some companies with remote workers have "activity monitors" installed that tell coworkers you aren't doing anything if your mouse/keyboard goes inactive for a few minutes.
- dudul 10y agoIs that for real?
- chadscira 10y agoIf so i bet someone is spending company type coding a bypass, all the while being tracked as being productive.
- ohjeez 10y agoIt was, at least. About 15 years ago I got a demo at a Gartner conference from a company doing just that. The vendor's primary goal, they said, was to measure where the developer was spending his time (coding vs debugger vs editor... I think it was a Visual Studio add-in?). But they admitted employers could use it to track what the developer was/wasn't doing. ...and that was before Facebook.
- dudul 10y agoI see. But it was not necessarily just to target remote people. My wife had to use a time tracker like that a while ago, supposedly for the same reason: understand where people spend their time.
- ohjeez 10y agoThis is a tangent... but I haven't run across such tools recently. I wonder whether they weren't good at what they purported to do, or whether companies quit paying such careful attention to where workers spent their time.
- jdc0589 10y agohilariously, some companies with remote workers have "activity monitors" installed that tell coworkers you aren't doing anything if your mouse/keyboard goes inactive for a few minutes.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]