Employers are Tracking Employees' 'Productivity' - Sometimes Badly (seattletimes.com) 122
Here's an interesting statistic spotted by Fortune. "Eight out of the 10 largest private employers in the U.S. are tracking productivity metrics for their employees, according to an examination from The New York Times."
"Some of this software measures active time, watches for keyboard pauses, and even silently counts keystrokes." J.P. Morgan, Barclays Bank, and UnitedHealth Group all track employees, The Times reported, seeing everything from how long it takes to write an email to keyboard activity. There are repercussions if workers aren't meeting expectations: a prodding note, a skipped bonus, or a work-from-home day taken away, to name a few. For employers surrendering in the fight to return to the office, such surveillance is a way to maintain a sense of control. As Paul Wartenberg, who installs monitor systems, told The Times, "If we're going to give up on bringing people back to the office, we're not going to give up on managing productivity....
But tracking these remote workers' every move doesn't seem to be telling employers much. "We're in this era of measurement but we don't know what we should be measuring," Ryan Fuller, former vice president for workplace intelligence at Microsoft, told the Times.
From the New York Times' article. (Alternate URLs here, here, and here.) In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others.... Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, "idle" buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.
Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their "inactivity" time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues'.... Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring. Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday.
They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don't have control — and in some cases, that they don't even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as "demoralizing," "humiliating" and "toxic." Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said. But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world's new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself....
But many employers, along with makers of the tracking technology, say that even if the details need refining, the practice has become valuable — and perhaps inevitable. Tracking, they say, allows them to manage with newfound clarity, fairness and insight. Derelict workers can be rooted out. Industrious ones can be rewarded. "It's a way to really just focus on the results," rather than impressions, said Marisa Goldenberg, [who] said she used the tools in moderation...
[I]n-person workplaces have embraced the tools as well. Tommy Weir, whose company, Enaible, provides group productivity scores to Fortune 500 companies, aims to eventually use individual scores to calibrate pay.
"Some of this software measures active time, watches for keyboard pauses, and even silently counts keystrokes." J.P. Morgan, Barclays Bank, and UnitedHealth Group all track employees, The Times reported, seeing everything from how long it takes to write an email to keyboard activity. There are repercussions if workers aren't meeting expectations: a prodding note, a skipped bonus, or a work-from-home day taken away, to name a few. For employers surrendering in the fight to return to the office, such surveillance is a way to maintain a sense of control. As Paul Wartenberg, who installs monitor systems, told The Times, "If we're going to give up on bringing people back to the office, we're not going to give up on managing productivity....
But tracking these remote workers' every move doesn't seem to be telling employers much. "We're in this era of measurement but we don't know what we should be measuring," Ryan Fuller, former vice president for workplace intelligence at Microsoft, told the Times.
From the New York Times' article. (Alternate URLs here, here, and here.) In lower-paying jobs, the monitoring is already ubiquitous: not just at Amazon, where the second-by-second measurements became notorious, but also for Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers and millions of others.... Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, "idle" buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.
Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their "inactivity" time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues'.... Public servants are tracked, too: In June, New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority told engineers and other employees they could work remotely one day a week if they agreed to full-time productivity monitoring. Architects, academic administrators, doctors, nursing home workers and lawyers described growing electronic surveillance over every minute of their workday.
They echoed complaints that employees in many lower-paid positions have voiced for years: that their jobs are relentless, that they don't have control — and in some cases, that they don't even have enough time to use the bathroom. In interviews and in hundreds of written submissions to The Times, white-collar workers described being tracked as "demoralizing," "humiliating" and "toxic." Micromanagement is becoming standard, they said. But the most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world's new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself....
But many employers, along with makers of the tracking technology, say that even if the details need refining, the practice has become valuable — and perhaps inevitable. Tracking, they say, allows them to manage with newfound clarity, fairness and insight. Derelict workers can be rooted out. Industrious ones can be rewarded. "It's a way to really just focus on the results," rather than impressions, said Marisa Goldenberg, [who] said she used the tools in moderation...
[I]n-person workplaces have embraced the tools as well. Tommy Weir, whose company, Enaible, provides group productivity scores to Fortune 500 companies, aims to eventually use individual scores to calibrate pay.
Of course they're tracking you (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you can't get a promotion/bump without metrics to prove you've increased your staff's output.
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The work place has changed so the metrics have changed. I recall when machinists began using automatic equipment and consumables were placed in vending machines. The metric was did you know how to use the equipment so as not to use excessive consumables.
In most cases you donâ(TM)t have to work at home. You can work in the office and be judged by the current set of metrics. However that usually means that you are judged by a
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Re:Of course they're tracking you (Score:5, Insightful)
I might agree to monitoring metrics as long as I can see the same metrics for my supervisor. I've been told numerous times I must strive to also learn my supervisor's job, with the suggestion that I might be promoted to that level in the future. If I'm going to work toward that goal, I need to see what metrics I will be expected to maintain.
If you don't want me seeing the metrics of my supervisor, I'm not interested in allowing you to track mine for the suggestion of promotion.
Re:Of course they're tracking you (Score:5, Insightful)
The metrics for your supervisor is "does my team make me look good in front of my boss".
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Re:Of course they're tracking you (Score:5, Interesting)
It's about control and various Napoleon-jr's.
It is NOT BAD to be less productive at home. That's an acceptable trade off, especially if you have a pet or children to take care of and de-stress with.
At work? Try to bring your sick kid, or sick pet to work, and that's a firing.
It has to be stated that KPI's for "the office" are often fudged and cheated to make managers look better than they really are. Good god there was this one time when I worked at a call center (a job that is 100% doable from home, and the "company" has been doing it at home since the 90's with it's sales clients) where the first team I was with, productivity was fine, the co-workers was fine, and then they decided to do a reshuffle and stick everyone in different teams, and things just went down the toilet as the "most productive" team members were shuffled over to the most productive managers, and then "least productive", in this case the ones that kept calling for hand holding, were shuffled down the line to the less-competent managers. So the end result is you have at the "bottom" a manager that just fires people all the time because they, as a manager suck. And at the other end with the competent staff you have a manager that is completely chicken to push back on anything from upper management. Why rock the boat?
That has got to stop.
So how do we fix that?
Well, number 1:
Pay, competent workers more to STAY HOME. They are setting aside part of their home to work from, pay for that room to be their exclusive office, otherwise you do not get to complain about them working from home for the same grueling wage as coming into the office.
Number 2: Bring only staff to the "office" when their competency is lacking, not productivity. Because it's a lot easier to train and hand-hold people when you can just gesture to them to "come over here", and have an off-the-record communication than it is to use the "always on the record" microsoft teams or discord, or slack, or whatever your company chooses to use instead of a meeting room.
Speaking of meeting rooms. Some of the worst expenses a real office has. I've been in several, and they are always stupidly large, empty, and feels like a waste of time to be there. Offices pay for this space, and it remains empty nearly 100% of the time except when someone comes from another location and needs a "temporary office". This one lady, pretty much had a conference room as her private office for three weeks, despite having a dedicated cubicle in the corner of the building. Why? Because she was incredibly loud and did all her calls on speakerphone.
Now think about how much money the office saves if these kinds of people can have their own damn office in their home and keep them happy.
The only staff that "want to return to the office" are:
1. Control freaks
2. Men (or women) who hate their spouses or children
3. Staff who have no air conditioning at home.
That's it. So take advantage of point 3, and invite people to the office during the summer, and let them stay home during the winter. Saves the office energy, saves the staff, energy and time, and prevents the spread of diseases by keeping people home during the super-spreader seasons.
Re:Of course they're tracking you (Score:4, Informative)
It has to be stated that KPI's for "the office" are often fudged and cheated to make managers look better than they really are.
The fundamental problem with many KPIs is we measure what is easy to measure, not what matters. As a result, we get tons of data that doesn't really tell us anything; and, even worse, think it does and act on it. As you point out, we also learn how to game the system to make our numbers look good. I once worked for a large consulting firm where we were measured by billable hours and profit margin. Pretty straight forward, eh? Most of my projects were fixed price, so I knew how many hours there were to hit the desired target; and that was generally many more than it required. Since the customer got the same bill no matter how many hours it took to deliver the project, I had a safety margin to cover unexpected problems. If that didn't happen, I had a slush fund. So, I doled out the "extra" hours to my team so they could hit their billable hours target while still hitting the profit margin target. I certainly didn't want them to be punished for being efficient. Everybody was happy, and the KPIs used didn't tell you anything except we knew how to make the system work for us.
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Teach what ?
Programming ? Relatively easily taught remotely
Dentistry ? Maybe need more hands-on teaching
Actually I struggle to find an example of anything that can't at least be partially taught remotely
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That's simplistic and not compete, or correct.
I'm a manager these days. The company I work for generally knows it doesn't know and has left decisions up to individual mangers about WFH except for a few key areas where HR had decided to assert control so they feel that they aren't a completely useless bunch of fuckers.
They are BTW.
Anyway I digress.
Not everyone hates their job and co workers. Some people come in voluntarily because sometimes it's better to actually work with people.
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The only staff that "want to return to the office" are:
1. Control freaks
2. Men (or women) who hate their spouses or children
3. Staff who have no air conditioning at home.
This is so obviously not true. I would prefer a 2 day in the office hybrid schedule, and not for any of those reasons. I find that a small portion of my work is better in person. That is probably only a few meetings per week, but being in person for those provide a lot of value to me. On top of that having lunch with coworkers once or twice a week is a useful thing.
Okay, I'll have to admit that working from home with my wife in the house is tougher than working in the office, but not because of hating her.
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#2 should be rephrased as people who have too many distractions at home. Hating your family can certainly be a distraction but there are many others. Noises and interruptions from spouse, kids, pets, nearby construction work, loud music at neighbors, people ringing the doorbell, sirens from emergency vehicles, etc.
I worked at an MSP that installed this (Score:5, Informative)
I worked, for a horrible year, at an MSP. That MSP installed Veriato 365 on a client's entire infrastructure, and it fell to me to maintain this beast across a couple dozen machines.
It is the height in zero trust of your employees. It's a screenscraper, a screen video-making thing, a keylogger. Looks out for certain words and such. It hides its existance much like a virus.
I felt unclean just touching it. I felt unclean when asked to pull up employee X on date X and time X. I left that MSP as soon as practical. That MSP's owner ran it literally like a factory, and the owner had literal HD-quality cams positioned just over our shoulders, on the back wall, so he could see what we were up to. The manager had managed a paint factory for years. So that's the only way they knew how to run it -- like a factory. Worst IT job ever.
On my 2nd monitor I taped a Letter-sized paper with like 72-point font: "Like what you see?"
Any employer who surveils their employees like this is literal shit.
Veriato's garbage is on many Fortune 500 behemoths. I imagine there's even better / more insidious software now for monitoring.
I'd rather be dead than submit to this.
Bad management is as bad management does (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes it makes sense to track how much time (and effort) it costs to do something. Sometimes it's completely irrelevant. How long does it take to write an email? You can chase the answer to that question, or you can wonder how much that email contributes to the bottom line. Usually, the more quickly shat out that email, the more negative the impact on the bottom line. Because it's a shoddy confusing mess of an email inviting clarification requests and other unnecessary replies. You can streamline the process of losing money, or you can focus on making money instead.
What's management doing? If it's focusing on improving arbitrary and irrelevant metrics rather than the bottom line, then the problem is management. No amount of advanced tracking technology can improve that.
Doesn't stop the "technology providers" to make a nice buck destroying ever more privacy, though.
Re:Bad management is as bad management does (Score:5, Interesting)
How long does it take to write an email?
I think this misses a more context driven problem--how long does it take to decide not to send an email? That is to say, the intelligence to decide what battles are worth fighting is part of this. Programming saw this problem several decades ago with productivity being attached to output as measured by "SLOC". I can create more lines of code by adding new lines or new lines just a semicolon. Those lines don't do anything but make the metric happy.
The problem is known as the Principal-Agent Problem. How can the principal know if the agent is doing the best work? In "creative" work, including most office jobs that don't involve work that is "almost ready to be automated" the metrics are nearly impossible to define tight enough to be useful and cheap enough to be worth measuring. To give an example, low level tech support would be that "almost automated" level where some Frederick Taylor style metrics can be used, such as "tickets completed" but the top tier tech support is often too difficult to measure. The top tier expert may have to spend a day setting up a simulation of a user environment to track down an issue or they may have to speak to other experts to help resolve an issue, with you having no way to know if their judgement of choice was good or bad.
So how do you handle creative employees? The best option a business has is to split the work up, making it require more buckets of work, but smaller less complex buckets so they need less of those advanced folks. I'm not saying I like the outcome, but that is how you scale up businesses--making work more repeatable and more Taylor-like. Still, sometimes you need a few of these folks, so the best option is to occasionally monitor either the work or the output, depending how unbounded the complexity is. It might be stakeholder surveys or it might be a manager watching the work being done. The more unbounded the complexity, the less watching the work is useful as the number of samples required to evaluate the outcome becomes more unbounded as well. That just leaves stakeholder surveys-e.g. 360 reviews, customer surveys, etc. This is the area where good management can apply good judgement, both in figuring out how to split up the work and in how to evaluate outcomes. But who watches the watchers?
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gcc -E hello.c | wc -l
539
With the time gained, look for a new job.
Re:Bad management is as bad management does (Score:5, Insightful)
How long does it take to write an email?
I think this misses a more context driven problem--how long does it take to decide not to send an email? That is to say, the intelligence to decide what battles are worth fighting is part of this.
On that note, good management will have done (and continues to do) its best so the underlings don't need to pick battles, so they can get on with the actual work. Bad management, the opposite.
The problem is known as the Principal-Agent Problem. How can the principal know if the agent is doing the best work? In "creative" work, including most office jobs that don't involve work that is "almost ready to be automated" the metrics are nearly impossible to define tight enough to be useful and cheap enough to be worth measuring.
The outcome is clear enough, it shows in the bottom line. But not as an individual line-item. Which is one of the things that makes good management both hard and crucial.
Fundamentally the problem is trust. The brass have to trust management's decisions to have picked the right people to get the jobs done and management likewise has to trust its people, expressed through its decisions.
If you're faffing about with "zero trust" approaches to knowledge work, then you're really doing nothing but distrusting the workers, and through that, distrusting your own decisions. If that'd be the only considerations, the workers would all walk from such idiot workplaces.
People are social animals. It matters a lot what the workplace ethic and mood is (or whatever the term of art is).
To give an example, low level tech support would be that "almost automated" level where some Frederick Taylor style metrics can be used, such as "tickets completed" but the top tier tech support is often too difficult to measure.
Even for the low level the metric is tricky. "Tickets completed" says nothing about "problems solved". The former without the latter means more repeat tickets, in the best of cases, or simply hidden unproductivity through failing to have actually helped.
The top tier expert may have to spend a day setting up a simulation of a user environment to track down an issue or they may have to speak to other experts to help resolve an issue, with you having no way to know if their judgement of choice was good or bad.
It takes considerable subject matter expertise to be able to even gauge the probable soundness of judgement. Meaning the "black box" approach to management is completely dead here.
So how do you handle creative employees? The best option a business has is to split the work up, making it require more buckets of work, but smaller less complex buckets so they need less of those advanced folks. I'm not saying I like the outcome, but that is how you scale up businesses--making work more repeatable and more Taylor-like.
Architect-builders, right? A smart architect does this anyway, because less complex buckets are easier to debug. That is, a software architect. No idea how this'd work in, say, graphic design.
Still, sometimes you need a few of these folks, so the best option is to occasionally monitor either the work or the output, depending how unbounded the complexity is.
Pop over and talk to them. You want them enthousiastic enough you don't have to ask them, they'll volunteer the full story. Show you too.
This is the area where good management can apply good judgement, both in figuring out how to split up the work and in how to evaluate outcomes. But who watches the watchers?
They're not supposed to be watchers. They're supposed to be overseers, supporting and protecting their charges so they can get the work done. It's the adversarial mindset that's the problem. Which arised from insecure bad management.
Re:Bad management is as bad management does (Score:4, Insightful)
Even for the low level the metric is tricky. "Tickets completed" says nothing about "problems solved". The former without the latter means more repeat tickets, in the best of cases, or simply hidden unproductivity through failing to have actually helped.
I was thinking of the folks who reset password and tell you to reboot the box. If it is anything more complex, it goes up the chain to the next level. That is to say, work so simple you could practically automate it. I don't disagree with your concerns for the ticket-level folks who have different levels of difficulty in tickets, like say a printer that has faulty hardware and you keep showing up to unjam the printer rather than fixing it by replacing it. That goes beyond nearly automatable. That being said, tickets completed may still be useful as a first level metric, to get one to ask "Why is Sam so much slower than Ralph?" It might be that Sam does jobs that are hard and Ralph doesn't and thus Ralph needs more training to take those jobs. It might be that Sam gives more personal touches. Some level of "Watching" to see what is going on is useful. Asking Sam or even Ralph why they think there is a difference would require Sam to watch Ralph or visa-versa. In a remote world they might not have enough contact to answer the question. Watching the two enough to notice the difference in behavior might create a valuable insight for a manager.
They're not supposed to be watchers. They're supposed to be overseers, supporting and protecting their charges so they can get the work done. It's the adversarial mindset that's the problem. Which arised from insecure bad management.
We simply disagree here, but I suspect mostly on wording, not philosophy. A "overseer" literally is describing someone who drove slaves to work in the cotton fields, when the slaves had no motivation to work. I don't think that is a good model. Management should be watching the work and the way the work is done. Maybe this is best described in a story.
I worked with two developers, each whom had coding habits that caused the other to dislike working in the code base. One was very "standard" in his coding practices with clear code, but tended to be sloppy while the other was very eccentric but wrote code that just worked. They both worked in separate code bases as much as possible, meaning they never worked together, even though they were on the same team. Both had things they could have learned from the other, but neither wanted to change. Both were high risks to the company as they both had 15+ years of experience and neither could do the work of the other, nor could anyone else. A manager who noted such behavior could have asked questions. A manager who only asked for high level status reports would not have known they were always in different code bases or why. Asking the team if they were happy would have resulted in both saying yes and no one else on the team would have cared, as they were the only two developers. Watching the way the work is done, as well as measuring the output, as well as stakeholder reports all add value. The problem is, who knows which managers do these things well and who doesn't? If the manager had forced those two to cross pollinate, they would have reported being less happy, would have probably been (temporarily) slower, meaning the manager would have looked worse than a manager who failed to force the team to grow. Thus a manager who did nothing would look better than one who actually paid attention.
Watching the watcher is hard. At the end of the day, the shareholders watch the board who watch the CEO (if the shareholders are lucky), who watches his executives who watch the middle management who watch the employees. One executive might have 10 VPs under them who have 100 managers under them with 2000 total employees under them. At higher the level, the harder it is to "just ask" and so you end up forced to watch via metrics and thus who watches the watcher becomes more than just an ac
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Or try changing the pickup rollers first.
Hahaha, yes, that is certainly a good idea. You might even replace the fuser, depending on the issue and machine. The point was to give a generic example, not to deep dive into printer debugging and how to look up and fix 13.* paper jams.
I was thinking... "supervisor", I think. You know, "foreman". Somebody who knows how the job is done and will assist or teach or give hints as and when necessary, but who also knows how to stroke the bosses and keep them off his underlings' backs. (I ran that shop alone for a year with no manager. I got all the shit from below and all the shit from above and then the external shit too. I can tell you, that's no fun.)
I think we're nearly in agreement. A foreman knows all the jobs, probably worked in all the jobs, knows how to do them and knows when you're screwing it up. They keep an eye on the shop which means they have to see the work being done. This is where the whole remote viewing
No one is rewarded (Score:5, Insightful)
That "industrious workers get rewarded" is a red herring. They are not. Rather, the expectations of performance are set by the above average worker's productivity. Then, everyone else is expected to "shape up" and produce the same. Those who do not get disposed of. Rinse-repeat. This is a never ending treadmill, and the prize is always the same - more work for the same pay.
And it's not only in menial jobs. My wife works in healthcare. An independent medical office she works for was bought out by a regional healthcare system a few years ago (as were virtually all independent practices nearby). That system has its own time and efficiency tracking for everyone including doctors. They reduced per-patient-encounter time from 20 min to 15 min (that includes everything from the greeting by a nurse, to checking/updating records, seeing the dr., and out the door) and meticulously follow every dr. adherence to this pace. Those drs. who spend more time with their patients (and thus are "slow") are punished (for example by taking away their telemedicine privileges).
They also constantly query and track patient reviews, and punish offices for less-than-stellar results. One ironic example was "handwashing". Patients for reasons unknown did not notice that nurses wash their hands before each visit. This is a line item on the survey, and the office got demerit points due to low scores. So, to make patients notice, nurses now make a point to use hand sanitizer in front of the patient simply to make sure it is noted (still wash hands prior).
"Data driven" management is only as good as the objectives it tries to achieve. Where objectives are - superficial customer happiness and maximum profit extraction, core values will inevitably suffer.
Re:No one is rewarded (Score:5, Insightful)
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You think governments can set up metrics for "quality of care"? Most government metrics I've seen just ape professional metrics as they have even less idea of what is going on than the private sector.
Way back in the distant past, the VA had reasonable quality of care for the cost. Then they started pulling in consultants from the private sector and completely destroyed what was working within their operations.
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If you try to manage by numbers, all your staff will care about is to produce numbers.
Not results.
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The problem starts at the top. You have over achieving types looking to solve problems that don't exist Maybe they think it is part of some continuous improvement mantra but it isn't.
These are the types of folks where the current situation is never good enough so they are always looking ways to make things (really themselves) look better in the eyes of the stockholders.
I am not against always trying to improve things but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it. There is no need for constant
No, the core value is in profit taking. (Score:2)
Not whatever it says on the surface - int his case health care. There are limited options around here for that and pretty much all of them seem to run something like you describe.
I used to wait 90+ minutes in the lobby and another hour in the exam room because the doctor was so overbooked that I switched to a different network only to have the opposite - people being timed to the millisecond who don't give a fuck at all because it's their ass if you're there more than 15 minutes.
The best doctor I ever had
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Hey at least those are better metrics than "hours employee is at their computer, typing".
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For instance, when you only have 15 minutes per patient, what's the goal: get them out of the office and make sure they never come back. For the patients (and the employees), their goal is being heard, receiving care and compassion, and having their health needs met. That is incompatible with 15-minute pre-se
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Hm, that's a weird way to troll.
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Okay, let's examine your statement "If an above average employee demonstrates what is possible.." That is the first problem "above average". If you are setting your metric to meet the above average abilities, you're guaranteeing almost no one will meet it. The second problem is "below average".. why exactly are they below average? Did they get a bare minimum of training before being dumped into a position? Were they shuffled in from a different dept. in a merger and expected to keep up? Are they sick a
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It's punishing and rewarding people randomly for things out of
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Why shouldn't they be? Why should good workers have to carry the weight of poor workers?
Because statistics.
Sack all the "below average" workers and the average moves up and capacity down.
Iterate until you have one perfect worker.
How's your productivity now, dickhead?
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You seem to forget the "replace" portion of the "sacking" equation.
The productivity has now improved, dickhead.
But I get it...you're trying to be pedantic about arithmetic...rather than admit that many worker choose to be less productive than they could be.
The other side of that coin, is that workers can choose to be more productive than they need to be.
You can argue that the more productive individual is a fool...but who has better prospects for their own personal future?
You're a moron. Go replace yourself.
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More like lack of trust (Score:4, Interesting)
In other words, they don't trust their employees to do their work... which, of course, doesn't exactly instill a sense of loyalty from these employees to do a good job for their employer.
Quite the perfect little vicious circle.
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Notably, this explicitly implies they have no way of knowing if any of the work the employees are doing is actually useful.
There is already a perfectly good metric (Score:5, Insightful)
For employees that are capable of doing their job remotely, the only thing they should be measured on is whether they are able to deliver the work expected as described in their job description.
I am a software engineer (as I assume a significant number of /.ers are as well). I am not hired to produce a certain number of keyboard clicks or for my laptop to be active during certain hours. I was hired to produce working applications according to business requirements in a reasonable amount of time.
As long as I do the latter satisfactorily, it is none of my employerâ(TM)s business when I am actually physically at the keyboard coding, and the moment they start measuring my performance by the former, I will be taking my talents elsewhere.
Luckily, I have found an employer that fully understands and respects this.
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Have you read any accurate job descriptions lately? How many of them are just boilerplate mumbo-jumbo? In my experience, quite a few of them. And even the accurate ones rarely list anything that is actually measurable.
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You have a job description that actually matches what you're doing? I never had one in my life. Most managers, hell, most companies don't have a fucking clue what security actually does.
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Good employers employ you to do some work, and are happy as long as you complete it and provide value to the company.
Bad employers want a virtual slave for 8 hours a day, that they can control and force to grind. You often see it with managers who can't up from factory floors and the like where the job is unskilled and all they need is a body on the line.
Drunk on data (Score:2)
The only metric that should matter is the finished tasks on time. Whatever happens in between and where shouldn't be anyone's business. 100% surveillance of all actions makes people robots and data processing machines. With less human reality there will be more mental stress and less social cohesion. I wouldn't be surprised if the next level is to dispense pills to keep productivity up (The series Severance lays out the ultimate vision).
The other option would be to use a portion of the profits this all crea
Re: (Score:2)
The only metric that should matter is the finished tasks on time.
A lot of managers don't trust that because they don't know how long tasks should take.
If you're subjected to this BS.... (Score:3)
B) Find another place to work that respects you and your talents
Just use a gaming mouse and keyboard (Score:5, Interesting)
...with macros.
Works wonders, I've tried :)
Our large corporate uses an "idle" function that we can't alter. But a little macro on a Mouse and a Keyboard with built in memory, is untrackable and will do the "clicking" for you. You're welcome.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What this means is that the company has no way of knowing whether the work the employees do is useful or not. This is the kind of environment where Wally thrives.
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Well they use KPI (Key Performance Index) for that, like how many cases you solved etc.
So they do know - otherwise we'd all be fired.
But the idle function is annoying, say you're on a bathroom break, you would show up as idle in teams, and you'd get an annoying message from your manager asking you why you weren't at your desk etc. Managers are too lazy to check up on you manually, they'll be perfectly happy as long as they see that Green "Available" indicator in teams.
Re:Just use a gaming mouse and keyboard (Score:4, Interesting)
Friend solved this problem with a sheet of paper tacked to the mouse and both of them hanging out the window and moving in the wind. Also keeps the idle screen from appearing.
Welcome back (Score:3)
Re:Welcome back (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a coworker who literally double-spaced his code. While it was a little weird, I couldn't help but admire the efficiency in achieving metrics.
If they count my keystrokes (Score:5, Insightful)
And if they track the number of problems solved, suddenly there will be 10 times the number of problems to solve.
Sorry to say, but its easy to quantify blue collar jobs. Bags packed hour, boxes loaded per day. That stuff is HARD to fake. Same goes for some white collar jobs. Very hard to fake sales numbers without breaking a bunch of federal laws. But many jobs will resist numericization.
Re: (Score:2)
I’ll give them keystrokes. Hooo boy will they get keystrokes in massive quantities. That work issue that could have been solved with a single 1 sentence email to the right contracts person, because I happen to know the exact person in the organization to solve my problem? Clearly I need to ask advice from my boss or colleague as to who to approach. And the email definitely needs a full description of the problem, with every nuance and 3 proposed solutions.
This is an amazing paragraph.
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I’ll give them keystrokes. Hooo boy will they get keystrokes in massive quantities. That work issue that could have been solved with a single 1 sentence email to the right contracts person, because I happen to know the exact person in the organization to solve my problem? Clearly I need to ask advice from my boss or colleague as to who to approach. And the email definitely needs a full description of the problem, with every nuance and 3 proposed solutions.
This is an amazing paragraph.
This is called malicious compliance. It's usually a great way to communicate up the chain. There can be unwanted ramifications if someone in the chain gets their feelings hurt and wants to play rough in turn.
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No you clearly misunderstood. If someone gets their feelings hurt, that will be an opportunity for even more keystrokes.
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I remember a company that measured the productivity of their security staff by the number of problem tickets they generated and the productivity of their operative staff by the number of problem tickets they solved.
Needless to say that security and operations entered a mutually beneficial symbiosis by one side creating a ticket for every trivial crap they found that should otherwise have been combined in a single, logically cohesive problem, with operations spending 2 second fixing the "problem" and 2 minut
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I can't go into detail, but it's absolutely certain nobody who understood the first thing about security or software took a look at the tickets, or else both security and operations would have gotten a "quit that bullshit" lecture. I have seen some of those tickets. For example, they produced one ticket for every file that had wrong permissions in a folder, all copy/pasted with the file name replaced.
"silently counts keystrokes" (Score:3)
I am writing many lines of code (Score:3)
slipping in a lot of whitelines and comments to artifically inflate my productivity numbers
Counting keystrokes (Score:2)
I remember a Dilbert cartoon [dilbert.com] about that.
Everything old is new again (Score:3)
20 years ago I worked at a company that employed the "butts in chairs" measure of productivity -- every night at 7pm, as the Director of SW Development was heading home, he'd cruise through the lab to see who was still there and who'd left for the day. Obviously the people still there were his productive employees (ahem).
It's obviously gotten much, much more fine-grained and intrusive since then but the idea is the same. Don't trust your people: surveil them.
Re:Everything old is new again (Score:4, Informative)
I love this kind of manager. Come to work at 2PM, leave at 7.
No one knows how to measure IT productivity (Score:4, Interesting)
In IT field, I have yet to see any productivity metric that can be used which will not incentivise the wrong behaviour in individuals.
At the very least, the risk of sacrificing long term quality for short term "productivity" gain would not be worth tracking such "productivity".
Especially in IT support functions, the best scenario you want is for them all to be sitting idle because there is zero IT problems in your company. So are they being "productive" or not, by simply sitting on their asses?
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Re:No one knows how to measure IT productivity (Score:4, Interesting)
In IT field, I have yet to see any productivity metric that can be used which will not incentivise the wrong behaviour in individuals.
In my last job, at an MSP, one of the help desk employees exceeded the "tickets closed" metric 3 months in a row before it was found that he was coming in 30 minutes before other help desk staff and claiming ownership of all the easy tickets where he could:
1. Have them closed in 1-15 minutes
2. Start a resolution on them that ran in the background while he worked other tickets
3. See it was obviously going to need escalation, do his part to identify and move it to the next queue
This meant the other staff came in with most unclaimed items in the queue being long, drawn out, tickets. He'd close 20-30 tickets a day compared to others getting 6-12. And he got the productivity bonus for all 3 of those months.
He turned in his notice within a couple of weeks of being caught.
Re: No one knows how to measure IT productivity (Score:2)
The only metric we really use is percentage of reopened tickets. This seems to give really good results and means the focus is on getting things right first time, and doing a proper job rather than rushing things through to tick them off the list.
Of course, this can be gamed, but less so than other metrics and it feels like its measuring the most important thing (at least, if you sell yourself on quality, as we do).
Process !== Results (Score:2)
> It's a way to really just focus on the results
That's funny, you know, because if there's one thing that this is not, it's that.
good thing I have the bird hit's the letter y over (Score:2)
good thing I have the bird hit's the letter y over and over
Badly? (Score:2)
Badly? I'd say an employer tracking anyone is bad indeed. Of course (as a previous comment states) an employer is tracking you, but tracking how far and with what?
I remember one Fortune 50 company that there was "real employees" and everyone else. When I mentioned to one manager I was going a tech book, it was as if he, and the other managers, wanted to say "only a 'real' employee of the company can write a book." :(
JoshK.
Re: (Score:2)
What is a "real" employee?
They miss the first question (Score:5, Insightful)
The first question you need to ask before you start tracking productivity is this: what results do you want your employees to produce? Once you have the answer, start measuring and tracking that and things directly related to it. If you want your engineers to complete projects, then measure projects completed and related metrics like how long each project took to complete, how many changes were made to the project between start and completion, how complex the project was. If you measure things like keyboard activity and number of emails generated instead, you'll find your engineers spending their time and effort doing meaningless typing and sending one email per bullet point or question rather than combining them all into a single email rather than completing projects.
And if you can't answer that first question? Then you need to stop worrying about your employees' productivity and start worrying about the fact that you don't know what your business needs done.
There is another way. (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's what I tell my techs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
And this is a hint: if employee productivity is suffering, it is almost always the fault of management, not weird metrics.
If employees (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Doesn't increase productivity (Score:2)
Such tracking tools are useful for collecting data on what habits are used for productive employees vs those who are less productive. But most bosses don't understand data. And will apply their own assumptions on what productive is and use the data to find people who meet or fail at their assumptions.
A good company usually can tell with other metrics what a good employee does. Then use this data to match up any possible trends on what a good employee does.
For my work, I am known for getting my projects d
Re: (Score:2)
Such tracking tools are useful for collecting data on what habits are used for productive employees vs those who are less productive.
For this to be useful, you need a way to identify the productive employees.
Re: (Score:3)
There is no measurement for "productivity". There are only proxies.
And once you engage proxies, the employees game the proxies.
Want employees to write shit code? Measure productivity by say, lines of code. You'll find employees suddenly writing thousands of lines of code per week. Must be really productive right?
Likewise, measure a call center productivity by calls completed per hour, and you'll find employees are completing calls within 60 seconds. How? The complex problems are transferred up the chain so
What's the point of more productivity? (Score:5, Interesting)
If we're producing more, shouldnâ(TM)t I have to work less? If you insist on keeping me working despite the fact that I'm 3x more productive than a decade ago, shouldn't I be making 3x as much?
I'm tired of productivity gains only going to the people that aren't actually doing any of the work. The CEO didn't become more productive, the worker did. So why does the CEO keep it?
Re: (Score:3)
Lack of a union (collective bargaining)
Customer call centers have done this for decades (Score:2)
Seattle Times is just NOW realizing this?!
News Flash! The Sun Rises EVERY morning!
"It's a way to really just focus on the results" (Score:3)
said someone who is explicitly focusing on anything *but* results.
Nice to see someone admitting to the real motivation in TFS though, for once: "If we have to give up on bringing people back to the office, by god we're going to find a way to continue the micromanagement that makes everyone less productive *and* more miserable".
Anyone who's had to deal with any call center in the last decade knows what the impact of this stupidity is. Workers will do anything to keep their rates up, including flat out lying to customers if it means ending the call sooner; customers get annoyed at the crappy support and go to a competitor. And now the genius plan is to expand this failure to the entire workforce - well, the plebs in the workforce, that is - right as workers are pushing back against incompetent bosses and abusive workplaces harder than they have in 40 years. Great timing there!
Every single wound that these companies suffer is self-inflicted, yet they still fight with each other to be first over the cliff edge every time.
If you manage by numbers, you get numbers (Score:3)
People who are managed by a system will do what is necessary to please the system instead of doing their work. If you judge your delivery driver by the number of packages he drops off, he'll throw them across the fence and sign the slip himself, or just drop off the "we didn't catch you" slip by default because it's faster. If you try to rectify that by counting the number of slips vs. number of actual in person deliveries, you will find that your numbers become pure random and by no means any better, because in some neighborhoods it is practically impossible to catch someone during the day and you'll find insane fluctuations in those neighborhoods because you keep firing and hiring drivers because they can't accomplish the quota of successful deliveries even if they tried.
People who are gauged by a hard to meet quota will do anything to game your system, especially if their job and income depends on it. They will stop doing their work and instead do what's necessary to keep their job. And sadly, with these ridiculous measuring systems, that's usually quite detrimental to actually doing what their job supposedly is.
Track results, not time or keystrokes (Score:3)
Of course all of the above fails if you don't have solid planning and don't have tangible results metrics. Recording metrics just because you can, such as time at the computer, is useless and most times counter productive. I don't even believe in logging time spend on any particular tasks, as human nature will just have most people end up spreading 8 hours every day on assigned tasks, even if that does not reflect reality. Instead, I recommend all team members only update estimated time left on their tasks, which may even go up if new challenges are discovered. The burn-down chart will tell you the speed of progress.
Goodhart's law (Score:4, Informative)
Whilst proposed in economics in response to the failure of monetary policy, it applies more generally; it states that 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'. The productivity metrics that companies resort too usually fall foul of this, as the many anecdotes on this thread illustrate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Productivity is not the real concern here (Score:2)
Obviously this tracking doesn't measure actual productivity. In the best case scenario, it may reward some enthusiastic fool who breaks twice as much stuff as they fix. Most likely, employees are sitting there reading social media and tapping the keyboard, while their more technically minded colleagues have scripts running in the background generating key press events. Really dumb metrics like this are very easily gamed.
But I don't think the managers who install this monitoring shit actually care if it meas
Be careful what you measure .... (Score:3)
...because that is what people will do
If you measure time spent on emails - people will send emails, useless, pointless ones
If you measure keystrokes, people will type... rubbish
Which is more productive someone who does it right first time, and avoids any issues coming back from the customer,
or the person who works all day to solve it badly and then corrects all the issues
One is sitting around doing very little most of the time, One is working hard all day?
Won't work... (Score:3)
All I can see this doing is pissing off a lot of employees through incorrect inferences from data, reducing morale, & employees finding tricks to game the system which would more than likely make worker productivity less productive. Also, it'll reduce risk-taking & innovation, i.e. employees experimenting with processes, workflows, etc., to see how it affects their productivity. In other words, it's a case of Goodhart's law: When a metric is used for control purposes, it ceases to be a good metric.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
To add, the metric becomes a target for exploitation, and you end up rewarding employees that know how to game the metrics rather than the intrinsic value you seek.
Metrics like hours at screen, mouse movement, keystrokes, time to create email, are all lacking inherent correlation to value, but are universal to all work so they get targeted.
In software development, I've seen them turn 'story points' into metrics, then start praising pretty lazy folks who declare it was a lot of story points to do whatever la
Re: (Score:2)
It was funny when Dan spoofed his metrics (Score:2)
It was funny when Dan spoofed his metrics. It's not funny when the radiologist does it.
Dan was in tech support. As legend would have it, he once became tired of the call time metric and threw in a string of "Sorry sir, the Internet is down" replies even though the network was just fine. This got his numbers right where management wanted them, and he kind of did this right under their nose. Point made, and he got away with it. Such was the need for qualified techs at the time, as well as the nature of t
devotion (Score:2)
They're not measuring productivity, they're measuring devotion.
Modern society is full of bullshit jobs that don't benefit anybody, where people write reports and documents that are never acted upon, but might be proofread or judged or filed to be procured during discovery in some future lawsuit. For jobs like these, keylogging and eye-tracking employees is just an extension of the purpose of the job: you're not earning a living through productivity, you're earning a living by demonstrating devotion to the
Oh yeah? Well... (Score:2)
I challenge you to measure this [youtube.com].
Europe vs US. (Score:2)
(Note this applies to certain countries in the Europe, not everyone. Europe is not one culture.)
The US wants employees that look productive, so they measure everything but the end result, in particular overtime (preferably 'unpaid overtime').
Europe wants employees that are productive so they do NOT respect people that work harder or longer. Instead they respect end results. I am not saying that all of Europe does this or that all of Europe is more productive, but that is how certain European countries hav
Fortunately, metrics are impossible to game. (Score:2)
In unrelated news, I'm only programming in assembly language and eschewing all libraries from here on out -- many more productive keystrokes per function point for the win!
Re: (Score:2)
While many people here think that the only thing that matters is whether they can complete a task or not, I beg to differ. Everyone is getting paid by the hour, so it is not only about completing your tasks but also actually about being there all the time they are reporting.
And that's the difference between a salaried job and a by-the-hour contract. Sure, if you're being paid based on hours spent, then you should be actually working that many hours, or else it's straight-up fraud. Whether that should be nearly as common as it is, of course, is another question. Paying people in customer-facing jobs by the hour makes sense, because the call center or restaurant or whatever has to be staffed for those hours. For pretty much all other jobs, it is probably counterproductive.
Re: (Score:1)
Just checked, there are 160 people in the dev dep't, everyone is paid by the hour. There are 850 people in other dep's, but there the time is accounted for. The only issue is with some people in development, they are simply writing up more hours than they work and that is an issue.
Re: (Score:3)
For that to work, you first of all need a management that can actually manage and knows what project plans, milestones and deadlines would be sensible.