4 ms·

The alternative to "butts in seats" is some kind of hard KPI. Uber doesn't need to pay for "butts in seats" because it can manage workers through discrete and e

by wisty 5y ago

The alternative to "butts in seats" is some kind of hard KPI. Uber doesn't need to pay for "butts in seats" because it can manage workers through discrete and easily monitored performance indicators. For any job where performance is hard to measure, either a company needs to basically manage contracts (why not just go to Fiverr), or manage by a bad KPI (lines of code? feature points?) or pay for "butts on seats". "Butts on seats" means "employees who are present, and hopefully intrinsically motivated (rather than driven by a bad KPI) to add value to the company in a way that's not fully specified by their manager." They very existence of employment as a phenomena (rather than contracting, as it originally happened (IIRC a "factor" was a subcontractor who made goods at home, before it became better to employ them in a "factory" where they didn't need to be micromanaged by KPIs) is because employees are better (in a lot of ways) than management by "things that bring results".

3np 5y ago
You seem to make the assumption that employee productivity must be reducible to and quantifiable as one-dimensional measurable metrics. I’m not saying it’s generally wrong to do so but just because it’s tricky for certain positions doesn’t make it a good idea to force it.
lostcolony 5y ago
>> "Butts on seats" means "employees who are present, and hopefully intrinsically motivated (rather than driven by a bad KPI) to add value to the company in a way that's not fully specified by their manager." Does the company gain value in employees being present? Sure, if the employee is a security guard. Not so much if it's a dev. "Hopefully (something else happens)" feels like you're saying "we need a KPI, this is -a- KPI, ergo...". Hoping an easily measured KPI correlates with what you actually care about feels like a -really- bad choice of metric. I'll also mention, pre-COVID, I've worked at places where attendance wasn't tracked; we had high performers we kept, and low performers we let go. I've never worked at a place that actually checked or cared about attendance, so I can't speak to that, but I can say highly effective workplaces didn't need it. How did we determine low performers? Well, the tasks they were given didn't get done, nor did they raise up the fact they were stuck. When asked they got defensive. When it eventually was handed to someone else it was done quickly. When they were asked to work with someone else on something, the other person ended up doing all the work. Etc. None of those are "hard KPIs". They're all data points that indicate "this person is not actually moving the work forward".

by wisty 5y ago

3np 5y ago

You seem to make the assumption that employee productivity must be reducible to and quantifiable as one-dimensional measurable metrics. I’m not saying it’s generally wrong to do so but just because it’s tricky for certain positions doesn’t make it a good idea to force it.

lostcolony 5y ago

>> "Butts on seats" means "employees who are present, and hopefully intrinsically motivated (rather than driven by a bad KPI) to add value to the company in a way that's not fully specified by their manager." Does the company gain value in employees being present? Sure, if the employee is a security guard. Not so much if it's a dev. "Hopefully (something else happens)" feels like you're saying "we need a KPI, this is -a- KPI, ergo...". Hoping an easily measured KPI correlates with what you actually care about feels like a -really- bad choice of metric. I'll also mention, pre-COVID, I've worked at places where attendance wasn't tracked; we had high performers we kept, and low performers we let go. I've never worked at a place that actually checked or cared about attendance, so I can't speak to that, but I can say highly effective workplaces didn't need it. How did we determine low performers? Well, the tasks they were given didn't get done, nor did they raise up the fact they were stuck. When asked they got defensive. When it eventually was handed to someone else it was done quickly. When they were asked to work with someone else on something, the other person ended up doing all the work. Etc. None of those are "hard KPIs". They're all data points that indicate "this person is not actually moving the work forward".