>> "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 w

>> "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".