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>Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours >Slack’s Workforce I
by cedws 3y ago
>Employees who log off at the end of the workday register 20% higher productivity scores than those who feel obligated to work after hours
>Slack’s Workforce Index, based on survey responses from more than 10,000 desk workers
Okay, so this "productivity" data is self-reported. How do you know that the after-hours workers aren't simply rating their own productivity lower than actual, or that the 9-5 workers aren't rating their productivity higher than actual? This data is useless.
- butterlesstoast 3y agoYou could say the opposite is true as well. How do you know after hours workers are not rating their productivity higher than actual? How do you know that the 9-5 workers aren’t rating their productivity as lower than usual? All data in of itself is useless. A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics.
- mym1990 3y ago“All data in of itself is useless”…what does that even mean? That’s like saying a chair in of itself is useless because no one is sitting in it. And this could be extrapolated to saying everything is useless. Data’s usefulness stems first from its many defining factors, which validates it, and then opens doors to using that data to explore insights.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- richk449 3y ago> And this could be extrapolated to saying everything is useless. Now we are getting somewhere.
- mym1990 3y agoI mean I can do mental gymnastics to understand the sentiment, but it really just comes down to individual preferences and definition of "use". To me, the usefulness of everything is in constant flux, and that's kind of cool to think about.
- richk449 3y agoI thought your comment was spot on. I just appreciated the possible turn towards nihilism or existentialism. We spend so much of our life determining what is useful in one sense of the word, and rarely stop to think about the usefulness of what we do in the philosophical sense.
- halfcat 3y agoIt’s the nature of the study that parent comment is referring to. If a study is self-reporting, it’s an observational study which can only establish correlation, meaning the study can only say, “there might be something here that warrants a further research”. A clinical trial is needed to establish causation. So while 10k sample size reduces the error bars, it only increases the confidence that there might be something here worth doing a more rigorous study later.
- kortilla 3y ago> A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics. No it’s not. No sample size can make up for other biases.
- robertlagrant 3y ago> All data in of itself is useless. A sample pool of 10,000 volunteers is pretty good in the realm of statistics. The point isn't the size. The point is there are too many confounding factors. It could be that people who work longer hours do so because they are high on trait conscientiousness, which also causes them to report low productivity It could even be because they are conscientious that they actually work slightly slower, and/or it could be that people who are less conscientious just don't care as mcuh about producing what was expected. To paraphrase the late Hitch: productivity metrics are not great. Neither is the word "connection" in science-adjacent reporting.
- christophilus 3y agoTo me, it reads like this: “those who log off of Slack are more productive” which matches my experience perfectly. My productivity shoots up as soon as I close Slack.
- antisthenes 3y agoDepending on your role, communication on Slack could be as much as 50% of your job responsibilities. Not everyone is a line dev who codes 7 hours after a 10 minute standup.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago[flagged]
- TeMPOraL 3y agoCorrect. Managers gotta manage, but code doesn't write itself either, and the constant push to turn software engineers into part-time faux-managers (all the responsibilities, none of control or status) isn't helping.
- groestl 3y ago> Not everyone is a line dev who codes 7 hours after a 10 minute standup. Funny enough, those often answer fastest. The busiest communicaters sometime don't answer for days.
- dwaite 3y agoBecause of how malicious notifications are by default in Slack (e.g. @here, @channel, bots you can't mute) and how poorly the catch-up flow is (e.g. no "unreads" view on mobile, I'm in 16 different slacks which have to be tabbed into individually), I tend to catch up 1, maybe 2 times a day. Similar to how when corporate email got pushed into a web view rather than being accessible via a native mail app; the only way I could manage things was to filter into topics, and some topics I only check once a week.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- autoexec 3y agoA lot of this stuff seems obvious and self-evident, and I wouldn't be surprised if much of it was supported by actual research, but you're absolutely right that self-reported data gathered from internet surveys is questionable at best. Every person has their own definition of what their "productivity" even means, they each have only their own subjective measures of their own productivity, and there's no verification to check who is providing the data, to catch those who simply outright lie or to catch people who click through the survey without even reading/understanding what is asked. Two people could both report 10% higher productivity when in fact there is nothing similar about their productivity levels at all. Internet polls and surveys are cheap and easy which is why so many people use them, and they can be pretty fun when all you're trying to find out is which celebrities are popular or which harry potter character you are, but they are generally terrible for getting data useful for actual science or for anything where accuracy matters. It's no wonder that there's such a huge reproducibility problem in social sciences considering the heavy reliance on self-reported data through internet surveys.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoWelcome to evidence in the soft sciences. I can't really blame them though, the kind of experiments needed to really measure these kinds of things would never past muster with an ethics board.
- bazoom42 3y agoIt is difficult to measure productivity, but what would be unethical about it?
- CoastalCoder 3y ago> what would be unethical about it? Introducing Jira to the experiment.
- tremon 3y agoIsn't this just a variation of "those who feel more productive during the day log off earlier"? Or reversing the statement, "those who feel less productive during the day feel compelled to work longer hours"?
- acchow 3y agoThose who are in a lower productivity state (stress, sleep quality, etc) are more likely to work after hours?
- taneq 3y agoThose who are under the pump are more likely to be stressed, sleep poorly, AND work longer hours. Zounds!
- mvdtnz 3y agoSure but is it a particularly long bow to draw to say those who feel less productive often are in fact less productive?
- kqr 3y agoNot at all, but then all the survey says is that less productive people make up for it by spending more time. That hardly surprises me -- desk workers usually feel an obligation to complete tasks even on days they aren't running hot.
- polishdude20 3y agoYeah or if you're the type of person who THINKS you're not productive and therefore that causes you to work more hours.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]