Across industries and incomes, more employees are being tracked, recorded and ranked. What is gained, companies say, is efficiency and accountability. What is lost?
Why do you think there’s a problem? If you’re worried about employees doing work, you can simply track their output, or ask colleagues they work with what they contribute to the team. Honestly both of those measurements are going to be flawed, with the latter being a bit more useful as it’s more likely to capture some level of soft skills (although inherently sexist and capitalistic, just slightly less than measuring output), but perhaps you should care less about maximizing profits and more about creating a work environment that is ultimately productive and healthy for the workers who contribute.
Imo the main problem here is in-transparency. Nowadays many jobs have very little tangible, measurable or even observable output.
Take programming job for example, a person can sit all day or even week tackling a difficult task that noone can evaluate well except him. Producing any kind of reports on the progress would just eat away from his productivity while bringing very little useful information.
At the same time, tracking clicks, keyboard activity by the hour may show if the person engaged or not. Maybe he’s stuck but unwilling to accept it. Imo it’s actually better for both him and his senior to “somehow” recognize that and make appropriate changes. I mean rather than regularly asking the programmer if he needs help, that would be real annoying.
Yes, the measurement is flawed but in the environment where we cannot get any other better tool, it’s good enough for both programmer and his senior.
This is nothing new. The tangible, measurable, observable output of jobs has always been there. The poisoning of the mindset such that tangible, measurable, and observable must all be financial metrics is precisely the problem. The issue is that management science has been created through the lens of far too specific of a use case - it started looking at very specific kind of work, that of factory workers, and decided that this lens was appropriate for all jobs. It simply is not.
Complex work is not so easy to financially qualify, because outputs are much more complex and sometimes having specific steps be optimized for finance is actually undesirable for the total end goal. For example, saving pennies on screws might make your product ultimately cheaper, but when it falls apart all the time and you spend millions tied up in court over suits you may have lost all the money you saved from using cheaper metal on the screws, or a competitor might sell their product for slightly more expensive than you do, but have brand loyalty because their products don’t fall apart. This loyalty may cause them to outcompete you and eventually cause you to fold, despite having optimized for the cheapest product or the product which nets you the most profits.
a difficult task that noone can evaluate well except him
This is precisely the problem. The task is not the output. The task is an input. The final code, the project deliverables, the application it helps to launch - those are outputs. Measuring too close to the source is overhead and unless you’re doing an incredibly simple job is often not overhead you want.
Yes, the measurement is flawed but in the environment where we cannot get any other better tool, it’s good enough for both programmer and his senior.
Pushing back against the measurement itself is what is needed. Someone so focused on keystrokes being equivalent to output is not paying attention to the system, only a tiny portion of it. You can see this in the sentiment of many of the people interviewed - they absolutely loathe the way they are being treated by the company. This means these companies have higher turnover, less employee engagement, and while workers are ‘busy’ they are likely less productive. There’s plenty of science to back this up in a whole slew of fields - happy workers output more, even when they work less hours. In the end their productivity tools are likely costing them much more than they think are saving by the ‘problems’ its identifying.
I feel I stepped on a topic of discontent of yours. I’m sorry. I certainly would like to understand your position better but I suppose it would be uncomfortable to do in a form of comments to the article.
If you have time and an interest to discuss it further, you can find my matrix handle in my profile. I’m sure our views on the issue is not that different and in real time we could probably establish that in fewer characters typed.
In any case, thank you for sharing your perspective, it was quite an interesting take
I appreciate your concern, I’m not upset in the least 💜
We probably would agree on quite a bit, but I guess I’m just very strongly anti-capitalist and often find myself strongly advocating on behalf of the people who get ignored by the system. Try applying any of the measurements suggested in this article to the hospitality industry, for example, and you’ll quickly see how it only measures a very tiny slice of everything that is going on.
I’m not really techie enough to have made the jump over to matrix quite yet
Haha, great design of the page!
Yeah, I guess that’s one of those things which do not have a good solution, so we’re stuck with a bad one.
Why do you think there’s a problem? If you’re worried about employees doing work, you can simply track their output, or ask colleagues they work with what they contribute to the team. Honestly both of those measurements are going to be flawed, with the latter being a bit more useful as it’s more likely to capture some level of soft skills (although inherently sexist and capitalistic, just slightly less than measuring output), but perhaps you should care less about maximizing profits and more about creating a work environment that is ultimately productive and healthy for the workers who contribute.
Imo the main problem here is in-transparency. Nowadays many jobs have very little tangible, measurable or even observable output.
Take programming job for example, a person can sit all day or even week tackling a difficult task that noone can evaluate well except him. Producing any kind of reports on the progress would just eat away from his productivity while bringing very little useful information.
At the same time, tracking clicks, keyboard activity by the hour may show if the person engaged or not. Maybe he’s stuck but unwilling to accept it. Imo it’s actually better for both him and his senior to “somehow” recognize that and make appropriate changes. I mean rather than regularly asking the programmer if he needs help, that would be real annoying.
Yes, the measurement is flawed but in the environment where we cannot get any other better tool, it’s good enough for both programmer and his senior.
This is nothing new. The tangible, measurable, observable output of jobs has always been there. The poisoning of the mindset such that tangible, measurable, and observable must all be financial metrics is precisely the problem. The issue is that management science has been created through the lens of far too specific of a use case - it started looking at very specific kind of work, that of factory workers, and decided that this lens was appropriate for all jobs. It simply is not.
Complex work is not so easy to financially qualify, because outputs are much more complex and sometimes having specific steps be optimized for finance is actually undesirable for the total end goal. For example, saving pennies on screws might make your product ultimately cheaper, but when it falls apart all the time and you spend millions tied up in court over suits you may have lost all the money you saved from using cheaper metal on the screws, or a competitor might sell their product for slightly more expensive than you do, but have brand loyalty because their products don’t fall apart. This loyalty may cause them to outcompete you and eventually cause you to fold, despite having optimized for the cheapest product or the product which nets you the most profits.
This is precisely the problem. The task is not the output. The task is an input. The final code, the project deliverables, the application it helps to launch - those are outputs. Measuring too close to the source is overhead and unless you’re doing an incredibly simple job is often not overhead you want.
Pushing back against the measurement itself is what is needed. Someone so focused on keystrokes being equivalent to output is not paying attention to the system, only a tiny portion of it. You can see this in the sentiment of many of the people interviewed - they absolutely loathe the way they are being treated by the company. This means these companies have higher turnover, less employee engagement, and while workers are ‘busy’ they are likely less productive. There’s plenty of science to back this up in a whole slew of fields - happy workers output more, even when they work less hours. In the end their productivity tools are likely costing them much more than they think are saving by the ‘problems’ its identifying.
I feel I stepped on a topic of discontent of yours. I’m sorry. I certainly would like to understand your position better but I suppose it would be uncomfortable to do in a form of comments to the article.
If you have time and an interest to discuss it further, you can find my matrix handle in my profile. I’m sure our views on the issue is not that different and in real time we could probably establish that in fewer characters typed.
In any case, thank you for sharing your perspective, it was quite an interesting take
I appreciate your concern, I’m not upset in the least 💜
We probably would agree on quite a bit, but I guess I’m just very strongly anti-capitalist and often find myself strongly advocating on behalf of the people who get ignored by the system. Try applying any of the measurements suggested in this article to the hospitality industry, for example, and you’ll quickly see how it only measures a very tiny slice of everything that is going on.
I’m not really techie enough to have made the jump over to matrix quite yet