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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
by 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 agoMonitoring 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 agoI 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 agoAt 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 agoNot 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 agoDepends 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 agoWhy 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 agoConvenience 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 agoOne 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 agoThere 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 agoSomeone 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 agoI 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 agoEven 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 agoWhen 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 agoI 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 agoIt 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 agoI 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 agoIt’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 agoPeople 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 agoThere'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 agoHaha, people do not have to work a full day in the office. Source: thirty years of archived Dilbert cartoons?
- 4y ago
- hinkley 4y agoWhat'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 agoIt 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 agoThis 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 agoPeople 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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 agoOne 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 agoIt'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 agoMaybe this is because companies where managers can confidently measure productiveness are already switched back to work from office?