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.
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.
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.
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.
I always think of a Dilbert from the mid 90s along the lines of “when working from home, do I owe the company 8 hours of productive work, or just the same 2 hours of productive work I’d do if I were in the office?”
At home people probably play games or watch netflix instead of just browsing forums, I don't see people do that a lot at work, and I can see that reducing productivity more than just browsing forums.
> 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.
The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job.
Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).
When leading/mentoring junior engineers, it's important to check in periodically and ask questions so that you know that they understand what they're working on and that they're not stuck. You can't expect them to raise those issues themselves. That's one of the things that makes them juniors.
So yeah, you've got to spend some time every day syncing up with them and making sure things are on track. That's true if they're remote or in the office, but if they're remote, managers need to be a bit more proactive in asking questions and following progress.
My personal opinion, after over a decade of remote work, is that the tools we have available to us to accomplish remote work are low-fidelity solutions to a high-fidelity problem.
I think juniors and, to some extent all technical new hires, are really vulnerable to the problems presented by remote work and these shitty tools we use like Slack, Confluence, Zoom, or God help you if you're in an org using Teams.
You need mentors and folks to on-board you who have a high EQ and can empathize with the position of the mentee/new-hire. That's hard.
> 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.
It's also "clear to many" this is not the case.
Perhaps not all "junior members" are fungible. Perhaps this is a characteristic of their employer.
Yes. I've never been a manager, but when working as technical lead productivity was the one thing I've never bothered trying to measure, as a metric or even an informal impression. Estimating how long something is going to take is really difficult, and as a developer I constantly run into something I thought would take a few hours, and then hit a snag that took a week to rundown and fix. That is despite being a programmer myself, and being very familiar with the codebase and program area. If I can't set a reasonable bar for my own productivity, how can I do so for my team mates, let alone how could a manager removed from the day-to-day work do so? I've felt like the people who thought they could measure productivity were the ones where were fooling themselves.
Instead, I looked at a number of things. Are you making progress? Are you getting help quickly when you stop making progress? Does your code have lots of bugs later on? Do you take constructive criticism well? Do you give constructive criticism well? Do you help out your team mates? But how fast you got work done is not something I considered at all, as long as you were showing up, not wasting exorbitant amounts of time, and not putting in extra hours if there wasn't an emergency, I figure it will get done when it gets done.
Eg, I cared about work ethic instead of productivity, and that is much harder to gauge with work from home. Without it, I feel like I have to start judging based on perceived productivity and I hate that.
That said, I personally love WFH and so do my team mates, and I know them and trust them so it isn't an issue, but I wonder about how new people will work out.
Why do you find those characteristics more challenging to track in a WFH environment? Shouldn't things like commits, PRs, bug reports, etc. be better indicators than your in-person observations anyway?
Yes many of the things I listed are just as easy to track with WFH, and even before WFH online interactions were a significant part of those. It is the showing up, putting the hours, and not wasting too much time part that is hard to track remotely.
It sounds like there's something of a disconnect there.
If someone is making a reasonable number and quality of commits, fixing bugs, and communicating reasonably with their colleagues, does it matter if they're "showing up, putting in the hours, and not wasting too much time"?
Mostly, but if they aren't, is it because they keep getting tasks that are genuinely hairier than we expected, or because they are slacking and then making excuses? If you distribute work completely randomly then eventually it should all even out, but if you let people specialize, or self-select work, then it isn't unreasonable for someone to be more likely than others to get "surprises".
With on-site (and open-office even more so), it was much easier to differentiate these two. I don't want to give someone a luke-warm performance review because their work was taking longer, when in reality they were solving harder problems. I also don't want to push things like pair-programing on someone who really doesn't like it (and I assume it is worse over Teams or what not than in person).
This is one of the understanding gaps I've seen in these discussions.
If you have an employee who is producing very little work, you're face with a decision about whether to put in a ton of effort to try to turn the situation around or put a ton of effort into firing them and hiring a replacement.
If you know the person has been showing up and doing normal office stuff that's a huge signal in favor of "this person is making a genuine effort so I need to go the extra mile on my end." It's harder to get that kind of signal remotely.
This isn't to suggest remote work is wrong. It's just that, for managers, dealing with these kind of situations was a big part of the job and now has gotten much harder.
Yep this has been my experience as well, and it has popped up more than I expected, honestly. And this is the type of thing to affect a team's productivity for months at a time since it requires taking action, and then finding a backfill, all before the team gets the support they need
That sounds like it's a time when it's the responsibility of the manager to start communicating clearly with their colleague, rather than thinking they need to figure everything out just by looking at the situation from the outside.
Treat your employees/subordinates/colleagues like they're responsible adults, and they're more likely to act like it. That means, among other things, talking to them when you notice something that seems off, rather than just thinking it's your job as the Big Important Manager to solve all problems in your own head.
Treat them like they're bad children, or like they're all constantly looking for every way possible to get more money for less work, and you're more likely to get disinterested, frustrated, and rebellious employees. There's nothing more likely to make someone act like a child than treating them like one.
> Estimating how long something is going to take is really difficult
No one says it is easy, but it is not impossible too. It is okay to change one's estimation after several hours/days of work. But after months working on the same codebase estimations are getting better and better.
Not necessarily :) I was thinking of a different example, but this is the first one I could find:
He began working in-person as principal of Providence's E Cubed Academy on July 22, 2020. Meanwhile, he remained employed virtually as the assistant principal of Kramer Middle School in Washington D.C., a role he held since 2019.
I know someone who used to come in, put his coat on a chair, then go off fixing problems with desktops all over the campus. Eventually they found he was popping back to his car and doing 6 hours driving for a minicab firm.
On the other hand if you measure presenteeism in the chair I had a colleague that would sit down browsing various websites all day taking calls for some business he ran doing scaffolding or cars or something (right dodgy dealer).
That’s some weird jealousy thing right? Paranoia that your employees might possibly be working for someone else? Like that’s some jealous boyfriend “I don’t let my girl go out and party because she might be flirting with other guys” level of controlling behavior. Why would you want to date / work for someone who treated you like that in the first place, gross.
Sorry, what's 'weird' is thinking that taking out your feelings of jealousy on the object of your jealousy is acceptable behavior - that it's anything other than unproductive petulant spite.
Deliberately hurting your workers by enforcing RTO because you're jealous of who else they might be working for while WFH is wrong, is what I'm trying to say. That's not feelings of jealousy, that's an act of jealousy.
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.
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.
> 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.
a) Zoom is very good at reducing the number of clicks between a link in your email and being on a call
b) Zoom is easier to say and type than “video conferencing,” so people say it even when the actual application they’re using might differ
I'm not saying it's completely impossible, I'm just saying it is, contra OP, more likely that if you are in an office and take a conference room every morning at 10 for 15 minutes that you will be caught, versus working two jobs from home.
Plus you probably can't separate the jobs on two different laptops to prevent accidental crossing of the streams--where one or more of those laptops may be managed by a company. Could someone get off with letting some side consulting work bleed into work hours? I'm sure in a lot of cases--though it would be easier at home. But I have to believe that, as in the case of relationships per upthread, working full-time in-person and remote jobs at the same time must start looking to people like something is odd here.
I personally have seen (twice, both before 2000) people operating as their own IT consulting firm from their desks while working full time. One was fired immediately as soon as it was discovered. The other was told to quietly wind it down within the month or face termination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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'
“ 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)
>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.
I'm not sure that's true. My manager messages and asks if I'm free to talk and if I am, she gives me a call on Teams right then. Asking if someone is busy doesn't seem like a high bar.
Now, I do think its harder for them to do their daily ramble around the office to chat with everybody and interrupt their work. I agree its much harder for them to get information on office politics and relationship dynamics, which is really valuable if you are a corporate climber.
Another option is to have an 'office hours' zoom room you sit in with your mic and camera off, and only turn them on when someone joins and you have time to chat. The only real issue is that joining someone's zoom is still a fairly intimidating, since you can't tell if they're in the mood to chat, and probably can't gauge how busy they are during the conversation if they don't mention it.
Some bad managers also want to be able to walk over to your desk, ask what you are working on, and tell you to work on something else.
When things are remote this kind of sloppy management doesn't work anymore, which makes bad managers hate remote work rather than work on improving how they manage.
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.
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.
> It’s like we never moved on from manual labor and factories with long grueling days
The corporate culture didnt. The existing corporate culture descends from mid 20th century corporate culture, that descends from late 19th century Victorian corporate culture, and that in turn descends from the late medieval feudal culture in which the commoners had to be 'hardworking & honest folk' who would come dutifully to the farm field every morning, work hard for the sake of their feudal lord, and be honest enough not to steal from him.
Hence, butts in seats and the expectation that you should devote your life to a company owned by your contemporary feudal lord without you having any shares or say in it...
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.
Pro athletes are maintaining their physical health just like knowledge workers; it's not like they can step onto the field to work our or compete, and it's not like they can just sit at any keyboard, and achieve optimal performance immediately. Resting well, eating good foods, stress management, and other factors that happen away from the actual event are critical for both athletes and employees!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Probably because saying "some employees in WFH are playing videogames all day instead of doing any work" is not a politically correct answer so then corpo-speak about culture and values it is.
They don't even need to say that though, just present some evidence to make me believe this is something other than an arbitrary management cultural preference and I'll feel much less imposed upon and bitter about it.
Anecdotally, when Cyberpunk dropped during covid winter of 2020, all the big gamers on the team had nothing to show for over a couple of weeks in terms of output.
I'm pro WFH, but it was obvious the productivity of some people had dropped significantly after the switch to WFH and were actively avoiding dodging work due to no more in-office oversight and being too close to many fun distractions at home, like their gaming rigs.
You want proof, well obviously the management or company has no proof that those employees were playing cyberpunk all day on their gaming rigs at home, since they don't have CCTV in your living room, but the guys were admitting it themselves during some calls with other colleagues, which correlated with the major drop in their productivity.
Again, I'm pro WFH, but let's not pretend that there are no slackers in this racket who would abuse every bit of trust and privilege to do very little work. I'm sure everyone met some.
The data is in the attrition reports they run - more often than not, it's a soft layoff, while still justifying the rent cost and investments they've put into their office space.
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.
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.
For most office roles, employers have almost no data on productivity. The limited data they do have is very noisy.
Consider a developer: what data does an employer have? Number of lines of code committed? Number Commits? Maybe if they are very diligent in collecting data the bugs found son after those commits? You know nothing about quality of code, nothing about speed, nothing about complexity, nothing about bugs avoided, nothing about value added, nothing about mentoring others or managing tasks.
You can do the same analysis for almost any role, from Sales to SecOps.
Developers get assigned tasks. A guesstimate is made by the dev over the time/effort required, which is approved as plausible by a senior dev/manager. Then the task is done or not done on time. If done, good, next task. If not, the explanation ought to be reasonable.
That's great unless they were pulled off that task to work on something else. Plus now we know estimates will be used to punish all estimates just doubled. And what does Done mean? I can do a pretty terrible job but still commit "something"...
People have this idea that modern jobs are like factory work: you can measure how many widgets I made and mine are the same as every other operator. But it wasn't even like that in factories, let alone now no two jobs are the same and output cannot be measured in any meaningful way...
> 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
I would argue that the real conspiracy theory is that those leaders have a conflict of interest - they have a stake in the real estate game either: by directly holding interest in real estate that will plummet in value if it goes unused, or by receiving kickbacks or other incentives for leasing certain office space.
It makes perfect sense for business leaders, as agents of the owner class, to continue doing as much as possible to minimize and undermine labor power.
X% less productivity is more palatable to such creatures than the risk of workers gaining a real seat at the table.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.