11 ms·

The perks workers want also make them more productive

189 points by rustoo 4y ago

rybosworld 4y ago
How often this point comes up: "shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive." If you can't determine an employee is productive without seeing them in the office, then I don't think you ever had a way to measure productivity. These types of managers have deluded themselves into believing that butts in seats correlates to productivity.
- qazxcvbnmlp 4y ago
  Monitoring butts-in-seats is a good metric for solving one kind of productivity loss. Eg - not doing job at all, the problem is that it doesn’t address the core issue of measuring what actually needs to be done.
  - SPascareli13 4y ago
    I guarantee that you can be sitting in a chair all day and still not get any work done. The only thing this might measure is time you are available to do work, but the same can be done remotely.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      At some point, sitting in front of a screen not doing anything gets harder than actually working. That's very different for "remote not working", where you can go out with friends, or run errands, or clean your house, or chill in your living room etc.
    - ljf 4y ago
      Not only that, but that same person can stop a lot of other people getting their work done. I am far less distracted by the random conversations people try to pull you into, or loud chatter of teams around me, when I'm at home. I deliver so much more at home, though I do see some value in being in the office, I just find it frustrating how many people seem to rely on the office for their social life and also loudly take video calls from their desks all day now.
  - twodave 4y ago
    Depends on the kind of work. If your "job" is pure data entry or smashing out code without any thought, then this might be a way to measure. It's still not necessary, though, since in that case it's a stupid job and you can therefore just measure something stupid like lines of code or data entries completed to get a sense of how well the job is being done. As soon as your job involves thought work, there is rarely any connection whatsoever between where the job is done and productivity. For example, in software development it's common that NOT writing code right now is the best choice if you haven't done the other steps. For jobs like this, productivity is a cycle that involves first learning, then planning, then finally maybe writing some code. Or maybe learning some more first and then continuing to plan. Planning is by far the most important piece, and it can be done literally anywhere and even while performing another task as long as it isn't a mentally-demanding one. So, at least in my experience you literally cannot plan while coding. Not anymore than you could write a novel. But you can do it while lifting weights, going for a jog, eating lunch, sleeping, taking a shower etc. etc. Where's the most comfortable place to plan? It's okay for that to be answered differently by different people. For some people that's the office. For many more people it's sitting at home in pajamas or whatever.
    - eptcyka 4y ago
      Why would you ever measure butt-in-seat time for a data entry job when you could, you know, just measure the amount of data being entered?
      - twodave 4y ago
        Convenience for managers is the only reason I can imagine, but I'm sure there are some others. I.e. you can easily tell who's working/not by looking around vs having to get somebody to build you a recurring report or whatever. Not necessarily an optimal choice in any of the cases.
        SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        One other is if you're a consultancy and you're billing out 10X Tommy at the same rate as .1X Oswald. We don't always care about productivity!
  - bachmeier 4y ago
    > Monitoring butts-in-seats is a good metric for solving one kind of productivity loss. Eg - not doing job at all Only if butts-in-seats is your company's output. Anything else, and you still have to quantify productivity by looking at output.
  - rybosworld 4y ago
    There are certainly some folks whose only motivation is a boss lurking over their shoulder. As a manager it would be your job to identify those folks and treat them accordingly. Arguing that "I can't manage remotely" is mainly an admission that you can't manage at all.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  > These types of managers have deluded themselves into believing that butts in seats correlates to productivity. It definitely correlates! Not 100%, but a lot better than nothing. You can at least be sure they're not working another job!
  - kelnos 4y ago
    Someone could totally work in an office while doing work for a different job. It's not even that difficult, or all that much more likely they would get caught than if they were to work multiple jobs from home.
    - jdminhbg 4y ago
      I really think it would be a lot easier to get away with taking part in two Zoom standups per day from home than from an office.
      - randomdata 4y ago
        Even if you could get away with it, no amount of money is worth having to endure two standups per day.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        kwhitefoot 4y ago
        When I was working on a team with people from all over Europe our standup was a 15 minute video conference at 09:00 CET. Each of us briefly said what we had done yesterday, what we intended to do today, and mentioned any problems that we thought that someone else might offer some insight into. The team leader would then summarize any concerns that were raised, suggest that person A contact person B to discuss the aforementioned concerns and that was it. We were mostly pretty self motivated but the standup helped us keep moving together. Fifteen minutes or even half an hour at the beginning of the day doesn't seem like much of a chore to me. And this was long before Zoom existed. Can someone explain to me why Zoom is such a big thing? We were using video conferencing in the last century without it.
- TexanFeller 4y ago
  I have not yet seen a measurement of SWE productivity that's more accurate or objective than a good manager's subjective judgement. I have also never seen companies able to consistently hire managers with good judgment. Objective performance measurement seems like a myth to me.
  - the_gipsy 4y ago
    It doesn't have to be objective. The real problem are those managers that can't measure subjectively - or are simply not willing to put in the effort.
    - Smoosh 4y ago
      I find it ironic/tragic that many of the managers who don't trust their staff to work from home are the most likely to abuse that situation themselves.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  It’s possible the folks saying this phrase are genuinely clueless. It’s also possible that some of the folks saying this are just trying to be politically correct and not saying what I see as the real problem: some work same whether they’re remote or in office, some work better when they’re remote, but some, they work so much less when they’re remote. You can divide the last group into two again, with one actively taking advantage of the lack of oversight and slacking off, while another is where the lack of structure makes them slack off or go in circles around tasks. I’m not gonna try to attribute numbers but it’s clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It’s a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.
  - Swizec 4y ago
    People hate it when I say this, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter why you aren’t producing results. If you need help, ask and I’ll be happy to help. If you don’t ask, I’m gonna be very annoyed when the thing you said you’d do isn’t done and i was relying on you to get it done. Conversely I don’t much care how you get the results. As long as they’re there when you said they would be. If you can do 10h of Netflix followed by 1h of frantic work, respect. You do you.
    - away271828 4y ago
      There's definitely a category of people who 1.) Are more or less available during work hours, 2.) Do a good job of what they say they will do on or before the deadline because they work quickly and efficiently and 3.) Don't work a full day to the degree they probably would sort of have to in an office.
      - whatshisface 4y ago
        Haha, people do not have to work a full day in the office. Source: thirty years of archived Dilbert cartoons?
        4y ago
- hinkley 4y ago
  What's sad/amusing about this is that these ideas where explored in the 80's and we seem to have forgotten. For sure '9 to 5' covers this territory (eg, daycare at work for working moms), and if memory serves so do two Michael Keaton movies (Gung Ho and Mr Mom). The old joke about Alzheimer's, "I get to meet new people every day" seems somewhat appropriate here. Forgetting things we already knew gives us lots of things to talk about.
  - forbiddenvoid 4y ago
    It happens in most contexts where generational change occurs within a group. We tend to treat the current environment as though it's been around forever, and often, as a group, remain unaware of what happened in the past. As more turnover occurs, more forgetting occurs. Often, the source of the forgetting is, in fact, the assumptions made by the earlier generation that 'everyone knows' something - when the truth is that new generations were never taught those things.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- IncRnd 4y ago
  This is an issue that many large companies face. There is a vast amount of work that is not core work, so the metrics get skewed into ancillary work instead of something like # of checkins, lines of code, tickets resolved, etc. In many large orgs there is often much "meta work" in order to produce justifications, forecasts or historical data for higher ups to make strategic decisions. So, it can be difficult for a manager to really know when their reports are working at home as much as at the office. I doubt anyone will ever be able to fully verify another without some metric, even if that's just seeing them at a desk - despite none of those methods really saying work getting done. The other problem, correlated with this, is that when everyone is remote there will be more meetings. It's six of one or half a dozen of an other. [1] The employees and managers all do what they can, which is never enough. In the next few years I suspect a culture will settle down around this and it will not be as suspect for people to work remote. The companies will see who works, and the remote workers will see what they need to do and not do. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/six_of_one,_half_a_dozen_of_the_other https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/six_of_one,_half_a_dozen_of_t...
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  People cannot really define productivity let alone measure it. What managers want here is not to measure productivity, but to FEEL confident about it. That is the issue here. Feels>Facts. And to be fair, there are few facts.
- flashgordon 4y ago
  I agree with everything here. Just one thing I want to correct. I hope you mean "HR, Leadership, VPs, Directors, Execs and front line managers" when you used a common "manager" term. As a manager (and several others like me) I have never cared where folks worked from and I have a very strong sense of measuring work through deliverables (and I like others have also gotten it wrong at times). Where I get triggered when I see the blanket "M" word used - is every other part of the machinery that is demanding this setup is being absolved and the Ms are demonized. Yes there are inexperienced managers but most of the malice I have noticed came from either lack of coaching, or an environment created by those much higher on the pay pole! Why is the L word (leadership) only used when things are positive and not when things like this come up?
- MBCook 4y ago
  The first company I worked at was small and the owner/big boss had an office with glass doors that could see a lot. As the company started to go down he got real insistent on productivity. If you weren’t doing something you were causing the company’s downfall. Our manager (a great guy) had to have a talk with us telling us to basically look busy to avoid the pointless heat. That owner was not the only person I’ve seen with such an attitude. Physically doing something = productivity. Even if they can’t see you and you’re playing minesweeper.
  - gav 4y ago
    One of my early jobs was being the most junior "mechanic" in an repair shop, basically the guy that did all the low-skill things that nobody else wanted to do. Our shop foreman was very keen that everyone looked busy if you were clocked in, you were getting paid to work so you should be working. I was trained by my seniors in the two key activities to do to avoid standing around: spraying things with a hose, and sweeping the floor. It didn't matter if you were going over what you did five minutes ago, it just had to look like you were doing something useful. Personally I try to avoid perpetuating a culture where looking busy is important because people will find ways to look busy.
- hinkley 4y ago
  It's a game of numbers. Some employees can't look you in the eye and lie about how much work they did today. You fire those and hire more people. But you don't catch the good liars, and each hire might be another liar. I'm sure there's a Market for Lemons in here that explains why some companies fail, "gradually at first and then all at once".
- SergeAx 4y ago
  Maybe this is because companies where managers can confidently measure productiveness are already switched back to work from office?
cmh89 4y ago
This article seems obvious to me. Happier workers care more about their job, especially retaining their job. What is unsaid in that article is why there is so much actual pushback from managers. Managers, especially has you become further abstracted from providing real value, depend on "face time". It's their currency. Remote work really hampers that. A big meeting with the boss on Teams is going to have less chit chat and really no opportunity have side conversations or get 'face time' before and after the meeting. I think remote work is also hard for bad managers and good for good managers. Bad managers care about time rather than value and rarely understand what's actually going on. If they don't understand the value their team is creating and they don't know how much time their team is spending sitting on a computer, they really don't know anything. Good managers on the other hand understand the value the team produces and don't really care how people spend their 40 hours, so I doubt they sweat it as much. Pretty much all the concern from management is veiled ways of saying 'this will make it harder for me to rise in the organization as I can't build personal relationships as effectively'
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  “ Managers, especially has you become further abstracted from providing real value, depend on "face time". It's their currency. Remote work really hampers that. A big meeting with the boss on Teams is going to have less chit chat and really no opportunity have side conversations or get 'face time' before and after the meeting” A more generous take is that managers used to derive a great deal of value & information from quick/frequent/informal check-ins with a lot of different people throughout the day, and that is much harder/impossible in a remote first work environment where all interactions must be explicitly planned/scoped. In another context: it’s the difference between an educator walking around and monitoring their students progress all the time via conversation/q&a vs sitting behind their desk and only getting progress data via weekly assessments. The former is supplemental to the later and provides a great deal (perhaps most) of the educator’s understanding of their student’s progress. (The relationship between workers/managers and teachers/students is not analogous in many other ways, of course)
  - cmh89 4y ago
robg 4y ago
Why don’t employers take seriously that for knowledge workers, brain health is brain performance? It’s like we never moved on from manual labor and factories with long grueling days. Professional athletes know they can’t train or perform for more than a few hours a day. Employers don’t recognize that learning, memory, and attention are finite biological resources.
- amw 4y ago
  Because chasing those quarterly returns will always trend toward taking money out of the comfort of the workers. Certain individual companies at certain individual times might get a temporary advantage by actually investing in themselves, but eventually they will all either start financializing that away for share buybacks, or get bought out by the company that did.
- tvanantwerp 4y ago
  Learning, memory, and attention are finite biological resources on the individual level. As long as there's a fresh crop of college grads each year, companies can afford to burn out a few older people.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Not sure if that athlete comparison works here - it’s substantially more than you think especially in big leagues and they basically work around the clock bc when they’re not training they are actively recovering so it’s like being oncall the entire season.
  - cmh89 4y ago
    But that's OP's point. Athletes understand recovery is crucial and limit the work they do to make sure they have time for recovery.
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      Note the word “active” - it’s actually just more training, not spending time with your kids or whatever we think of rest
iguanayou 4y ago
My theory: workers are capable of performing focused work for only a fixed number of hours per week. If productivity is essentially: work done divided by hours worked, then a lot of the things the article mentioned changes the denominator, not the numerator. Productivity goes up, but the amount of work being done doesn't change. Might as well let people have that other non-working time to themselves.
indigodaddy 4y ago
Atari days can attest..
yboris 4y ago
4DWW - Four Day Work Week. 100% guaranteed to make me more productive per hour worked. On average, with 8 hours fewer of work per week I would still get the same amount of work done, but would be tremendously happier with my life and with my job. This change can't come soon enough.
- jaysinn_420 4y ago
  Totally agree. I can't make more time, and I zealously protect my personal time. I want more of it. I stopped doing side jobs years ago, when I realized that the money wasn't enough to get my mind in that groove, let alone go somewhere and do something for someone. Now I'm getting to the point where I question if my FAANG salary is enough to justify 40 hours/week.
- geewee 4y ago
  I work a four day work-week (30 hours) and anecdotally my total output is just fine. I generally spread the work over five days, but I often work so few hours in a day that I'm excited to get back to work the next day. It's nice to have that feeling day-in day-out
  - away271828 4y ago
    My observation is a fair number of people are doing this informally. Spend Friday morning wrapping up the week, making to-dos for the next week, no meetings, minimal email, and generally shutdown for the day by lunchtime.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      This isn't so different from lots of offices, except that instead of hanging out the rest of the day at the office chatting and generally getting no work done, you can do the shit you need to get done around the house, so you can actually enjoy the weekend.
darth_avocado 4y ago
This is a classic issue of delusional management class that adds no value to the company trying to exert control over its workers because it can. Workers know what makes them productive and most workers will actually do a good job if they are treated respectfully. The fundamental fact is this: if you are a manager/company that gives your worker the flexibility and freedom they need to take care of their life outside work, they will work hard, do great work and try to retain the jobs, even at a lower pay. But if you treat workers as lazy people who will while away time if you don’t constantly monitor them, then that’s what you’ll get: people doing the bare minimum and not work any moment they can get away with it. Because if you’re going to treat me like a lazy slob, I might as just be that.
- x86x87 4y ago
  Ding ding ding! The whole RTO shenanigans is not about productivity. Don't let the propaganda fool you. It's about control and exerting control. Treat people like children? They will have zero incentive to put in one extra second of work. Treat them like adults and give them flexibility? That's when they give it all during the work hours.
- tagyro 4y ago
  > they will work hard, do great work and try to retain the jobs, even at a lower pay Maslow would like to have a word with you.
rr888 4y ago
I'd quite like a keyboard and mouse that is better quality that the $9 specials most companies prefer.
- swader999 4y ago
  I've been bringing my own since I started at this in 1998.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I don't understand people making very good salaries who don't just provide their own (cheap in the scheme of things) tools where practical if they don't like the ones they've been given.
    - twiddling 4y ago
      Chefs who bring their own knives
      - ghaff 4y ago
        In many of the trades (which arguably don't include chefs), supplying one's own tools is pretty common outside of heavy equipment.
cgb223 4y ago
It’s almost like we know what we need to be successful Most workers just want to do their job well and avoid bullshit and politics Only a small subset really take advantage of perks in a negative way
thegrim22 4y ago
So about WFH, the conspiracy theory is that all of these leaders across all of these businesses across the country are either incapable of measuring productivity, or they measured it and see that people are more productive when WFH and yet for reasons unknown want to bring them back into the office so they're less productive again, and make the business worse? They have years of data from before WFH, and years of data of WFH, and with all of that data, all of these companies across the country think what's best for their business is to bring workers back in. It just seems so outrageous to claim all of these companies have no idea or no data that justifies what they're doing.
- 4iuvosvjf23 4y ago
  If there's data supporting RTO then why do they justify it with vague appeals to "company culture" and "watercooler moments" rather than just explaining the data?
  - x86x87 4y ago
    Control. They want to fucking own you and every aspect of your life.
    - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
      Why would they want that? That seems delusional to me. What they want is all the normal things corporations are criticized for: short term returns, growth, employee productivity, etc. Why would my organization VP want to "fucking own you and every aspect of your life"? That is extremely strong language, and I'm having a hard time taking it seriously.
      - x86x87 4y ago
        Nah. In a corporation 80℅ of the work is done by 20% of the people and by design there is a lot of redundancy aroud. The worst thing that can happen is for the drones to figure out just how badly they are getting screwed. Productivity? If you can figure out how to measure it let me know. Here: https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://libcom.org/article/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-graeber https://libcom.org/article/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gr...
DrScientist 4y ago
Bit of a shock to see 'paid leave' in the list. In Europe is a legal requirement.
m3kw9 4y ago
It’s human nature to always want more, after 4 day work weeks we will demand 3 day work weeks.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  RNs already do this. They're hourly, work three 12 hour shifts, and get paid for 40. Both of my sisters are RNs. One is now a director at a hospital, the other has a normal RN position. The one who is still performing regular nursing responsibilities fills in at another hospital one day a week. Because she isn't getting benefits, her pay is higher, and she essentially pays her house note with that extra day a week.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Good. I've long thought three is about right, as far as what we as a free society ought to be aiming for. Fewer than half of one's days dominated by work [EDIT: for someone else] and autocratic bureaucracy.
- phist_mcgee 4y ago
  And why shouldn't we? I care about my health far more than my productivity. Let me advocate for myself as much as corporations do for themselves.
jdeaton 4y ago
No shit. Its like people would actually prefer to be better at their jobs if given the choice.
supernova87a 4y ago
You know, one thing that I don't see discussed much is: Just like more advanced programmers worry about the worst case scenario of some code you've written rather than just the average -- with these remote working policies, sometimes the question is not just, will it make everyone on average a more productive employee, but what is the worst case that might affect your team under very tolerant remote work policies? Because if a few people's decrease in productivity is so noticeable working remotely that the team in general suffers / no longer works well, then it's a different consideration. There is something difficult to quantify about the notion that when a few people on a team start being less responsive /interactive, it can have a real impact to how people think of the pace of what you want the team to operate at. Especially if you're doing prototyping / early stage creative work where you're not operating by tickets, but rather looking over each others' shoulders to give live feedback and trade ideas. Not everything about work is to be designed to simply give what the employees would naturally want.
- iso1631 4y ago
  If we don't do remote working will enough people leave so that the team in general suffers / no longer works well?
  - supernova87a 4y ago
    Well, as I alluded to, sophisticated programmers/managers think about all the cases they may have to optimize for.
jedberg 4y ago
It should be noted that when Amazon's CEO published his note about return to office, increasing productivity was not listed as one of the reasons. Company culture, ad hoc meetings, serendipity, were the listed reasons. So it sounds like companies are not optimizing for productivity, they are optimizing for innovation. Whether these things contribute to innovation is still up in the air. I personally think happier employees will be more innovative, but have no data to back that up.
- ljf 4y ago
  I do agree that serendipity and connection are two things that can be harder to build remotely, but they are not impossible. I still feel that "we" haven't learnt the skills or tools for great remote working, yet.
hadlock 4y ago
On site daycare would be revolutionary. My wife used to work at a company who offered it and there was a lottery to get into the daycare because it was so popular. The company ran it at a slight profit so there was no cost involved to the company. People arrived on time since they didn't need to make a side trip to a third location, and could visit their kid at lunch or if they were sick or whatever. Huge, huge bonus as a parent.
- eschneider 4y ago
  This is the sort of benefit that's worth its weight in gold for retention.
- realjhol 4y ago
  It would be better if you were paid enough to allow your wife to stay home with the kids.
fleddr 4y ago
My take on this is that bizarre as it is, most companies do not seem to care much about productivity in the first place. If you look at the typical knowledge worker (non-manager) today, they're drowning in meetings, chat and email. Leaving tiny snippets of time to do actual work, perhaps as little as 2 hours per day. I find it absolutely baffling how there doesn't seem to be any serious effort to address most of your productive base being spent on communication. Basically, people spent most of their time figuring out what they're even supposed to do, and when, and precious little time actually doing that. This is why the 4 day work week works. I'll repeat it again as this is a key insight: This is why the 4 day work week works. It's not because of a better "work life balance", as much as I love to believe that. It's because a 5 day work week has overhead as high as 50-75% where no actual work gets done. So to cut back from 5 days to 4 days, you just scrap the least useful meetings/chats/email whilst you continue to do the 25% we used to call actual work. In other words, when your employees work a day less and still are just as productive, you should be embarrassed and have a serious issue in your organization. And sadly, this issue seems to be the norm, and somehow gets no attention at all. Collaboration is not the solution, it's the fucking problem. In a utopian work state, you'd give me a work package that is clearly specified and I'll get to work. I wouldn't need 17 meetings to understand what you even mean, report status 3 times per day to 50 people, call 3 vendors to resolve dependencies, get a sign-off from 5 internal institutes or be pulled into 20 directions at once regarding 7 other projects.

189 points by rustoo 4y ago

How often this point comes up: "shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive." If you can't determine an employee is productive without seeing them in the office, then I don't think you ever had a way to measure productivity. These types of managers have deluded themselves into believing that butts in seats correlates to productivity.

qazxcvbnmlp 4y ago
Monitoring butts-in-seats is a good metric for solving one kind of productivity loss. Eg - not doing job at all, the problem is that it doesn’t address the core issue of measuring what actually needs to be done.
- SPascareli13 4y ago
  I guarantee that you can be sitting in a chair all day and still not get any work done. The only thing this might measure is time you are available to do work, but the same can be done remotely.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    At some point, sitting in front of a screen not doing anything gets harder than actually working. That's very different for "remote not working", where you can go out with friends, or run errands, or clean your house, or chill in your living room etc.
  - ljf 4y ago
    Not only that, but that same person can stop a lot of other people getting their work done. I am far less distracted by the random conversations people try to pull you into, or loud chatter of teams around me, when I'm at home. I deliver so much more at home, though I do see some value in being in the office, I just find it frustrating how many people seem to rely on the office for their social life and also loudly take video calls from their desks all day now.
- twodave 4y ago
  Depends on the kind of work. If your "job" is pure data entry or smashing out code without any thought, then this might be a way to measure. It's still not necessary, though, since in that case it's a stupid job and you can therefore just measure something stupid like lines of code or data entries completed to get a sense of how well the job is being done. As soon as your job involves thought work, there is rarely any connection whatsoever between where the job is done and productivity. For example, in software development it's common that NOT writing code right now is the best choice if you haven't done the other steps. For jobs like this, productivity is a cycle that involves first learning, then planning, then finally maybe writing some code. Or maybe learning some more first and then continuing to plan. Planning is by far the most important piece, and it can be done literally anywhere and even while performing another task as long as it isn't a mentally-demanding one. So, at least in my experience you literally cannot plan while coding. Not anymore than you could write a novel. But you can do it while lifting weights, going for a jog, eating lunch, sleeping, taking a shower etc. etc. Where's the most comfortable place to plan? It's okay for that to be answered differently by different people. For some people that's the office. For many more people it's sitting at home in pajamas or whatever.
  - eptcyka 4y ago
    Why would you ever measure butt-in-seat time for a data entry job when you could, you know, just measure the amount of data being entered?
    - twodave 4y ago
      Convenience for managers is the only reason I can imagine, but I'm sure there are some others. I.e. you can easily tell who's working/not by looking around vs having to get somebody to build you a recurring report or whatever. Not necessarily an optimal choice in any of the cases.
      - SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        One other is if you're a consultancy and you're billing out 10X Tommy at the same rate as .1X Oswald. We don't always care about productivity!
- bachmeier 4y ago
  > Monitoring butts-in-seats is a good metric for solving one kind of productivity loss. Eg - not doing job at all Only if butts-in-seats is your company's output. Anything else, and you still have to quantify productivity by looking at output.
- rybosworld 4y ago
  There are certainly some folks whose only motivation is a boss lurking over their shoulder. As a manager it would be your job to identify those folks and treat them accordingly. Arguing that "I can't manage remotely" is mainly an admission that you can't manage at all.
BurningFrog 4y ago
> These types of managers have deluded themselves into believing that butts in seats correlates to productivity. It definitely correlates! Not 100%, but a lot better than nothing. You can at least be sure they're not working another job!
- kelnos 4y ago
  Someone could totally work in an office while doing work for a different job. It's not even that difficult, or all that much more likely they would get caught than if they were to work multiple jobs from home.
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    I really think it would be a lot easier to get away with taking part in two Zoom standups per day from home than from an office.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      Even if you could get away with it, no amount of money is worth having to endure two standups per day.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - kwhitefoot 4y ago
        When I was working on a team with people from all over Europe our standup was a 15 minute video conference at 09:00 CET. Each of us briefly said what we had done yesterday, what we intended to do today, and mentioned any problems that we thought that someone else might offer some insight into. The team leader would then summarize any concerns that were raised, suggest that person A contact person B to discuss the aforementioned concerns and that was it. We were mostly pretty self motivated but the standup helped us keep moving together. Fifteen minutes or even half an hour at the beginning of the day doesn't seem like much of a chore to me. And this was long before Zoom existed. Can someone explain to me why Zoom is such a big thing? We were using video conferencing in the last century without it.
TexanFeller 4y ago
I have not yet seen a measurement of SWE productivity that's more accurate or objective than a good manager's subjective judgement. I have also never seen companies able to consistently hire managers with good judgment. Objective performance measurement seems like a myth to me.
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  It doesn't have to be objective. The real problem are those managers that can't measure subjectively - or are simply not willing to put in the effort.
  - Smoosh 4y ago
    I find it ironic/tragic that many of the managers who don't trust their staff to work from home are the most likely to abuse that situation themselves.
ramraj07 4y ago
It’s possible the folks saying this phrase are genuinely clueless. It’s also possible that some of the folks saying this are just trying to be politically correct and not saying what I see as the real problem: some work same whether they’re remote or in office, some work better when they’re remote, but some, they work so much less when they’re remote. You can divide the last group into two again, with one actively taking advantage of the lack of oversight and slacking off, while another is where the lack of structure makes them slack off or go in circles around tasks. I’m not gonna try to attribute numbers but it’s clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It’s a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.
- Swizec 4y ago
  People hate it when I say this, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter why you aren’t producing results. If you need help, ask and I’ll be happy to help. If you don’t ask, I’m gonna be very annoyed when the thing you said you’d do isn’t done and i was relying on you to get it done. Conversely I don’t much care how you get the results. As long as they’re there when you said they would be. If you can do 10h of Netflix followed by 1h of frantic work, respect. You do you.
  - away271828 4y ago
    There's definitely a category of people who 1.) Are more or less available during work hours, 2.) Do a good job of what they say they will do on or before the deadline because they work quickly and efficiently and 3.) Don't work a full day to the degree they probably would sort of have to in an office.
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      Haha, people do not have to work a full day in the office. Source: thirty years of archived Dilbert cartoons?
      - 4y ago
hinkley 4y ago
What's sad/amusing about this is that these ideas where explored in the 80's and we seem to have forgotten. For sure '9 to 5' covers this territory (eg, daycare at work for working moms), and if memory serves so do two Michael Keaton movies (Gung Ho and Mr Mom). The old joke about Alzheimer's, "I get to meet new people every day" seems somewhat appropriate here. Forgetting things we already knew gives us lots of things to talk about.
- forbiddenvoid 4y ago
  It happens in most contexts where generational change occurs within a group. We tend to treat the current environment as though it's been around forever, and often, as a group, remain unaware of what happened in the past. As more turnover occurs, more forgetting occurs. Often, the source of the forgetting is, in fact, the assumptions made by the earlier generation that 'everyone knows' something - when the truth is that new generations were never taught those things.
deleted 4y ago
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IncRnd 4y ago
This is an issue that many large companies face. There is a vast amount of work that is not core work, so the metrics get skewed into ancillary work instead of something like # of checkins, lines of code, tickets resolved, etc. In many large orgs there is often much "meta work" in order to produce justifications, forecasts or historical data for higher ups to make strategic decisions. So, it can be difficult for a manager to really know when their reports are working at home as much as at the office. I doubt anyone will ever be able to fully verify another without some metric, even if that's just seeing them at a desk - despite none of those methods really saying work getting done. The other problem, correlated with this, is that when everyone is remote there will be more meetings. It's six of one or half a dozen of an other. [1] The employees and managers all do what they can, which is never enough. In the next few years I suspect a culture will settle down around this and it will not be as suspect for people to work remote. The companies will see who works, and the remote workers will see what they need to do and not do. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/six_of_one,_half_a_dozen_of_the_other https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/six_of_one,_half_a_dozen_of_t...
LatteLazy 4y ago
People cannot really define productivity let alone measure it. What managers want here is not to measure productivity, but to FEEL confident about it. That is the issue here. Feels>Facts. And to be fair, there are few facts.
flashgordon 4y ago
I agree with everything here. Just one thing I want to correct. I hope you mean "HR, Leadership, VPs, Directors, Execs and front line managers" when you used a common "manager" term. As a manager (and several others like me) I have never cared where folks worked from and I have a very strong sense of measuring work through deliverables (and I like others have also gotten it wrong at times). Where I get triggered when I see the blanket "M" word used - is every other part of the machinery that is demanding this setup is being absolved and the Ms are demonized. Yes there are inexperienced managers but most of the malice I have noticed came from either lack of coaching, or an environment created by those much higher on the pay pole! Why is the L word (leadership) only used when things are positive and not when things like this come up?
MBCook 4y ago
The first company I worked at was small and the owner/big boss had an office with glass doors that could see a lot. As the company started to go down he got real insistent on productivity. If you weren’t doing something you were causing the company’s downfall. Our manager (a great guy) had to have a talk with us telling us to basically look busy to avoid the pointless heat. That owner was not the only person I’ve seen with such an attitude. Physically doing something = productivity. Even if they can’t see you and you’re playing minesweeper.
- gav 4y ago
  One of my early jobs was being the most junior "mechanic" in an repair shop, basically the guy that did all the low-skill things that nobody else wanted to do. Our shop foreman was very keen that everyone looked busy if you were clocked in, you were getting paid to work so you should be working. I was trained by my seniors in the two key activities to do to avoid standing around: spraying things with a hose, and sweeping the floor. It didn't matter if you were going over what you did five minutes ago, it just had to look like you were doing something useful. Personally I try to avoid perpetuating a culture where looking busy is important because people will find ways to look busy.
hinkley 4y ago
It's a game of numbers. Some employees can't look you in the eye and lie about how much work they did today. You fire those and hire more people. But you don't catch the good liars, and each hire might be another liar. I'm sure there's a Market for Lemons in here that explains why some companies fail, "gradually at first and then all at once".
SergeAx 4y ago
Maybe this is because companies where managers can confidently measure productiveness are already switched back to work from office?

cmh89 4y ago

This article seems obvious to me. Happier workers care more about their job, especially retaining their job. What is unsaid in that article is why there is so much actual pushback from managers. Managers, especially has you become further abstracted from providing real value, depend on "face time". It's their currency. Remote work really hampers that. A big meeting with the boss on Teams is going to have less chit chat and really no opportunity have side conversations or get 'face time' before and after the meeting. I think remote work is also hard for bad managers and good for good managers. Bad managers care about time rather than value and rarely understand what's actually going on. If they don't understand the value their team is creating and they don't know how much time their team is spending sitting on a computer, they really don't know anything. Good managers on the other hand understand the value the team produces and don't really care how people spend their 40 hours, so I doubt they sweat it as much. Pretty much all the concern from management is veiled ways of saying 'this will make it harder for me to rise in the organization as I can't build personal relationships as effectively'

germinalphrase 4y ago
“ Managers, especially has you become further abstracted from providing real value, depend on "face time". It's their currency. Remote work really hampers that. A big meeting with the boss on Teams is going to have less chit chat and really no opportunity have side conversations or get 'face time' before and after the meeting” A more generous take is that managers used to derive a great deal of value & information from quick/frequent/informal check-ins with a lot of different people throughout the day, and that is much harder/impossible in a remote first work environment where all interactions must be explicitly planned/scoped. In another context: it’s the difference between an educator walking around and monitoring their students progress all the time via conversation/q&a vs sitting behind their desk and only getting progress data via weekly assessments. The former is supplemental to the later and provides a great deal (perhaps most) of the educator’s understanding of their student’s progress. (The relationship between workers/managers and teachers/students is not analogous in many other ways, of course)
- cmh89 4y ago

robg 4y ago

Why don’t employers take seriously that for knowledge workers, brain health is brain performance? It’s like we never moved on from manual labor and factories with long grueling days. Professional athletes know they can’t train or perform for more than a few hours a day. Employers don’t recognize that learning, memory, and attention are finite biological resources.

amw 4y ago
Because chasing those quarterly returns will always trend toward taking money out of the comfort of the workers. Certain individual companies at certain individual times might get a temporary advantage by actually investing in themselves, but eventually they will all either start financializing that away for share buybacks, or get bought out by the company that did.
tvanantwerp 4y ago
Learning, memory, and attention are finite biological resources on the individual level. As long as there's a fresh crop of college grads each year, companies can afford to burn out a few older people.
dilyevsky 4y ago
Not sure if that athlete comparison works here - it’s substantially more than you think especially in big leagues and they basically work around the clock bc when they’re not training they are actively recovering so it’s like being oncall the entire season.
- cmh89 4y ago
  But that's OP's point. Athletes understand recovery is crucial and limit the work they do to make sure they have time for recovery.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    Note the word “active” - it’s actually just more training, not spending time with your kids or whatever we think of rest

iguanayou 4y ago

My theory: workers are capable of performing focused work for only a fixed number of hours per week. If productivity is essentially: work done divided by hours worked, then a lot of the things the article mentioned changes the denominator, not the numerator. Productivity goes up, but the amount of work being done doesn't change. Might as well let people have that other non-working time to themselves.

indigodaddy 4y ago

Atari days can attest..

yboris 4y ago

4DWW - Four Day Work Week. 100% guaranteed to make me more productive per hour worked. On average, with 8 hours fewer of work per week I would still get the same amount of work done, but would be tremendously happier with my life and with my job. This change can't come soon enough.

jaysinn_420 4y ago
Totally agree. I can't make more time, and I zealously protect my personal time. I want more of it. I stopped doing side jobs years ago, when I realized that the money wasn't enough to get my mind in that groove, let alone go somewhere and do something for someone. Now I'm getting to the point where I question if my FAANG salary is enough to justify 40 hours/week.
geewee 4y ago
I work a four day work-week (30 hours) and anecdotally my total output is just fine. I generally spread the work over five days, but I often work so few hours in a day that I'm excited to get back to work the next day. It's nice to have that feeling day-in day-out
- away271828 4y ago
  My observation is a fair number of people are doing this informally. Spend Friday morning wrapping up the week, making to-dos for the next week, no meetings, minimal email, and generally shutdown for the day by lunchtime.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    This isn't so different from lots of offices, except that instead of hanging out the rest of the day at the office chatting and generally getting no work done, you can do the shit you need to get done around the house, so you can actually enjoy the weekend.

darth_avocado 4y ago

This is a classic issue of delusional management class that adds no value to the company trying to exert control over its workers because it can. Workers know what makes them productive and most workers will actually do a good job if they are treated respectfully. The fundamental fact is this: if you are a manager/company that gives your worker the flexibility and freedom they need to take care of their life outside work, they will work hard, do great work and try to retain the jobs, even at a lower pay. But if you treat workers as lazy people who will while away time if you don’t constantly monitor them, then that’s what you’ll get: people doing the bare minimum and not work any moment they can get away with it. Because if you’re going to treat me like a lazy slob, I might as just be that.

x86x87 4y ago
Ding ding ding! The whole RTO shenanigans is not about productivity. Don't let the propaganda fool you. It's about control and exerting control. Treat people like children? They will have zero incentive to put in one extra second of work. Treat them like adults and give them flexibility? That's when they give it all during the work hours.
tagyro 4y ago
> they will work hard, do great work and try to retain the jobs, even at a lower pay Maslow would like to have a word with you.

rr888 4y ago

I'd quite like a keyboard and mouse that is better quality that the $9 specials most companies prefer.

swader999 4y ago
I've been bringing my own since I started at this in 1998.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I don't understand people making very good salaries who don't just provide their own (cheap in the scheme of things) tools where practical if they don't like the ones they've been given.
  - twiddling 4y ago
    Chefs who bring their own knives
    - ghaff 4y ago
      In many of the trades (which arguably don't include chefs), supplying one's own tools is pretty common outside of heavy equipment.

cgb223 4y ago

It’s almost like we know what we need to be successful Most workers just want to do their job well and avoid bullshit and politics Only a small subset really take advantage of perks in a negative way

thegrim22 4y ago

So about WFH, the conspiracy theory is that all of these leaders across all of these businesses across the country are either incapable of measuring productivity, or they measured it and see that people are more productive when WFH and yet for reasons unknown want to bring them back into the office so they're less productive again, and make the business worse? They have years of data from before WFH, and years of data of WFH, and with all of that data, all of these companies across the country think what's best for their business is to bring workers back in. It just seems so outrageous to claim all of these companies have no idea or no data that justifies what they're doing.

4iuvosvjf23 4y ago
If there's data supporting RTO then why do they justify it with vague appeals to "company culture" and "watercooler moments" rather than just explaining the data?
- x86x87 4y ago
  Control. They want to fucking own you and every aspect of your life.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Why would they want that? That seems delusional to me. What they want is all the normal things corporations are criticized for: short term returns, growth, employee productivity, etc. Why would my organization VP want to "fucking own you and every aspect of your life"? That is extremely strong language, and I'm having a hard time taking it seriously.
    - x86x87 4y ago
      Nah. In a corporation 80℅ of the work is done by 20% of the people and by design there is a lot of redundancy aroud. The worst thing that can happen is for the drones to figure out just how badly they are getting screwed. Productivity? If you can figure out how to measure it let me know. Here: https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html https://issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://libcom.org/article/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-graeber https://libcom.org/article/phenomenon-bullshit-jobs-david-gr...

DrScientist 4y ago

Bit of a shock to see 'paid leave' in the list. In Europe is a legal requirement.

m3kw9 4y ago

It’s human nature to always want more, after 4 day work weeks we will demand 3 day work weeks.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago
RNs already do this. They're hourly, work three 12 hour shifts, and get paid for 40. Both of my sisters are RNs. One is now a director at a hospital, the other has a normal RN position. The one who is still performing regular nursing responsibilities fills in at another hospital one day a week. Because she isn't getting benefits, her pay is higher, and she essentially pays her house note with that extra day a week.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Good. I've long thought three is about right, as far as what we as a free society ought to be aiming for. Fewer than half of one's days dominated by work [EDIT: for someone else] and autocratic bureaucracy.
phist_mcgee 4y ago
And why shouldn't we? I care about my health far more than my productivity. Let me advocate for myself as much as corporations do for themselves.

jdeaton 4y ago

No shit. Its like people would actually prefer to be better at their jobs if given the choice.

supernova87a 4y ago

You know, one thing that I don't see discussed much is: Just like more advanced programmers worry about the worst case scenario of some code you've written rather than just the average -- with these remote working policies, sometimes the question is not just, will it make everyone on average a more productive employee, but what is the worst case that might affect your team under very tolerant remote work policies? Because if a few people's decrease in productivity is so noticeable working remotely that the team in general suffers / no longer works well, then it's a different consideration. There is something difficult to quantify about the notion that when a few people on a team start being less responsive /interactive, it can have a real impact to how people think of the pace of what you want the team to operate at. Especially if you're doing prototyping / early stage creative work where you're not operating by tickets, but rather looking over each others' shoulders to give live feedback and trade ideas. Not everything about work is to be designed to simply give what the employees would naturally want.

iso1631 4y ago
If we don't do remote working will enough people leave so that the team in general suffers / no longer works well?
- supernova87a 4y ago
  Well, as I alluded to, sophisticated programmers/managers think about all the cases they may have to optimize for.

jedberg 4y ago

It should be noted that when Amazon's CEO published his note about return to office, increasing productivity was not listed as one of the reasons. Company culture, ad hoc meetings, serendipity, were the listed reasons. So it sounds like companies are not optimizing for productivity, they are optimizing for innovation. Whether these things contribute to innovation is still up in the air. I personally think happier employees will be more innovative, but have no data to back that up.

ljf 4y ago
I do agree that serendipity and connection are two things that can be harder to build remotely, but they are not impossible. I still feel that "we" haven't learnt the skills or tools for great remote working, yet.

hadlock 4y ago

On site daycare would be revolutionary. My wife used to work at a company who offered it and there was a lottery to get into the daycare because it was so popular. The company ran it at a slight profit so there was no cost involved to the company. People arrived on time since they didn't need to make a side trip to a third location, and could visit their kid at lunch or if they were sick or whatever. Huge, huge bonus as a parent.

eschneider 4y ago
This is the sort of benefit that's worth its weight in gold for retention.
realjhol 4y ago
It would be better if you were paid enough to allow your wife to stay home with the kids.

fleddr 4y ago

My take on this is that bizarre as it is, most companies do not seem to care much about productivity in the first place. If you look at the typical knowledge worker (non-manager) today, they're drowning in meetings, chat and email. Leaving tiny snippets of time to do actual work, perhaps as little as 2 hours per day. I find it absolutely baffling how there doesn't seem to be any serious effort to address most of your productive base being spent on communication. Basically, people spent most of their time figuring out what they're even supposed to do, and when, and precious little time actually doing that. This is why the 4 day work week works. I'll repeat it again as this is a key insight: This is why the 4 day work week works. It's not because of a better "work life balance", as much as I love to believe that. It's because a 5 day work week has overhead as high as 50-75% where no actual work gets done. So to cut back from 5 days to 4 days, you just scrap the least useful meetings/chats/email whilst you continue to do the 25% we used to call actual work. In other words, when your employees work a day less and still are just as productive, you should be embarrassed and have a serious issue in your organization. And sadly, this issue seems to be the norm, and somehow gets no attention at all. Collaboration is not the solution, it's the fucking problem. In a utopian work state, you'd give me a work package that is clearly specified and I'll get to work. I wouldn't need 17 meetings to understand what you even mean, report status 3 times per day to 50 people, call 3 vendors to resolve dependencies, get a sign-off from 5 internal institutes or be pulled into 20 directions at once regarding 7 other projects.