4 ms·

I'm convinced that keeping track if your employee is visibly working or not is so fundamentally wrong. Especially in an office setting. Just look at the output

• ddingus 4y ago
  I wonder how it is that basic idea seems lost amidst a sea of increasingly painful ways to monitor and control. The need to control is greater than... I don't know. I lack that need, instead needing people to be great people more, and they can't be great when the environment they work in snuffs out greatness.
• dspillett 4y ago
  > That's important. Not hours or anything else. Not to the bean counters. If they can get a good job out of you while distracted 25% of the time they think they could get 25% more out of you for no extra cost if they beat that distraction out of you. It is one of those double standards many companies have: if you are needed to work extra “you are salaried, not paid by the hour, a bit of flexibility is normal and expected” but if you don't do 37.5 hours one week or are seen to be relaxing too much “your contract clearly says that you are paid to be actively on the job for X time, no less”. Luckily our current regime is far more sensible about this sort of thing, considerate even, though before that buy-out this sort of issue was on the list of reasons I was days away from walking out & burning a few bridges along the way.
• raxxorraxor 4y ago
  It is an excuse for bad management that cannot set goals and verify if they are reached or not. To be honest you should immediately exploit that for your own career. Office surveillance exploiters wouldn't hold back as well. Tell them you want set goals and no surveillance, make your employment conditional to that. If that doesn't work go to the next higher instance. If it is only the CEO or owner and he supports it, change the company. Otherwise make an offer to replace the manager or being elevated to the same position with defined goals. Often just a little resistance is enough.
• Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  Especially in an office setting. Why especially then?
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >Why especially then? Because some office workers think they are special in regards to their output being more creative and cognitive rather than physical and therefore should not be measured in the same fashion as the number of widgets per hour made by a factory worker or tiles per hour laid by a handyman for example, even though ironically, modern SW tools like Jira and processes like Agile & Scrum attempt to do just that, turn cognitive work into factory style repetitive assembling/plumbing work. Which most of it is :) B.R.B, gotta wrap up those story points for the end of the sprint. /s, but only barely
    • marcosdumay 4y ago
      Hum... The only thing the tools do is documenting what is done and what needs to be done. All the commoditization of laborers is done by people. And yeah, commoditization of factory workers is a large problem too, and the commoditization of the skilled professions (WTF, a real oxymoron) is a "what the hell are you even thinking?" situation.
• jka 4y ago
  As a manager, would you worry about the stability of your own job role if you didn't have insight into the productivity of your reports? Would you worry what would happen to you and the company if one of your reports introduced a serious bug or security flaw into the software? (note: I think these concerns can -- and should -- be addressed in other ways that don't require intrusion into employees' day-to-day activities, but I raise them because I think they're part of the reason (along with compliance, perhaps in some cases?) why these systems are introduced in the first place)
  • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    >but I raise them because I think they're part of the reason (along with compliance, perhaps in some cases?) why these systems are introduced in the first place Problem is, they are still proxies. Proxies are great at satisfying feelings, but proxies are by no means a guarantee they will reflect what they try to capture. There are no end of examples of perverse incentives showcasing how a metric can "feel" great, but end up being a big bag of nothing if not detrimental. Other than that, even thinking along the terms of "well they must have a reason" is a great way of introducing slippery slopes all the way to extremism. I'd have a hard time arguing any answer would justify becoming more and more extremist and trying to deny people privacy and autonomy to such a degree.
    • jka 4y ago
      > Other than that, even thinking along the terms of "well they must have a reason" is a great way of introducing slippery slopes all the way to extremism. It's possible I misunderstand what you're saying here, but I think I agree; I wasn't intending to justify managerial surveillance, only to understand and elaborate why it might be happening. Without understanding the cause(s), the tendency of organizations will, I'd guess, instead be to patch over any problems that arise -- the process equivalent of adding warning signs instead of fixing a dangerous bridge. The solution in an effective employment marketplace is to build organizations that avoid the root causes entirely and thus attract (effective, motivated) employees and build desire in others to work at similar workplaces -- while perhaps reducing organizational running costs at the same time as a side-effect.
• osigurdson 4y ago
  Actual output is often hard to measure so we instead gravitate toward various easy-to-measure metrics - hoping that these are proxies for the real thing. The quantitative appearance of such metrics is intoxicating, particularly when it allows us to avoid thinking deeply about what would actually make a business better.
  • flatiron 4y ago
    Also gives them an easy reason to get rid of anyone.