19 votes

The rise of the worker productivity score

15 comments

  1. MimicSquid
    Link
    All I'll say is this: If my employer expects perfect productivity for eight solid hours a day, I need a much higher salary than I've been getting.

    All I'll say is this: If my employer expects perfect productivity for eight solid hours a day, I need a much higher salary than I've been getting.

    31 votes
  2. stu2b50
    Link
    Interesting content, and the extra interactive bits are cute - good job NYT. Worthwhile to check out although it is soft paywalled. Some parts I thought were interesting Seems like it's pretty...

    Interesting content, and the extra interactive bits are cute - good job NYT. Worthwhile to check out although it is soft paywalled. Some parts I thought were interesting

    Some radiologists see scoreboards showing their “inactivity” time and how their productivity stacks up against their colleagues’. At companies including J.P. Morgan, tracking how employees spend their days, from making phone calls to composing emails, has become routine practice. In Britain, Barclays Bank scrapped prodding messages to workers, like “Not enough time in the Zone yesterday,” after they caused an uproar. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. 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.

    Seems like it's pretty prevalent, which was surprising to me - but I suppose it's difficult to be that in-tune with what other companies not your own are doing. Not exactly a topic most people are passionate about.

    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 ran a division of the company Ms. Kraemer joined, and said she used the tools in moderation.

    Some employers are making a trade: “If we’re going to give up on bringing people back to the office, we’re not going to give up on managing productivity,” said Paul Wartenberg, who installs monitoring systems for clients including accounting firms and hospitals.

    The remote work battle is probably being lost by office proponents for white collar workers - less than a 1/3 of office workers reported going back to the office full time, and a survey of business leaders showed that they project only 20% of the workforce to return to the office - a sharp dropoff from 50% a year prior.

    The system drew adherents, because the productivity gains were remarkable. Goofing off was excised. In interviews, former supervisors described having newfound powers of near X-ray vision into what employees were doing other than working: watching porn, playing video games, using bots to mimic typing, two-timing Crossover by programming for other businesses, and subcontracting their assignments out to lower-paid workers.

    Damn, those supervisors must have a lot of spare time of their hands.

    If technology could optimize productivity, everyone would benefit, the executives said. The company would accomplish more. Workers would perform better, then log off to live their lives.

    Sounding like the premise to Severance


    Well, it sounds like the trend isn't stopping any time soon.

    14 votes
  3. [2]
    NaraVara
    Link
    I really don't understand this approach to management. My least favorite part of managing people is the babysitting shit, tracking hours, making sure people are showing up, etc. Anyone who makes...

    I really don't understand this approach to management. My least favorite part of managing people is the babysitting shit, tracking hours, making sure people are showing up, etc. Anyone who makes me spend more time on that crap than is strictly necessary is getting a bad evaluation.

    Every minute you spend micromanaging people and telling them how to do their jobs is time not spent setting the tone and strategic direction of your product or department. It's just a way to make yourself feel busy without impacting anything. Just hire people you trust to follow through on their commitments and you don't have to worry about any of this shit. You just plan out your targets and milestones and ship by those milestones. There's plenty of pressure in the business world to go fast and get things done so it's not like anyone can realistically set a lackadaisical pace if their management chain knows how things work.

    Is that the real problem then? These managers don't actually understand how the work gets done and they don't trust their teams to accurately estimate effort and targets so they adopt this weirdly hostile approach to managing a team? Seems like it would be easier to just learn some basics about the industry you're in than spend every day of your working life trying to wring people dry and deal with staffing churn.

    13 votes
    1. vord
      Link Parent
      Yup. At my employer, the managers clamoring the most for return-to-onsite were also clamoring for spyware on their workers machines. It 100% signals a lack of understanding about what the job of...

      Is that the real problem then? These managers don't actually understand how the work gets done and they don't trust their teams to accurately estimate effort and targets so they adopt this weirdly hostile approach to managing a team?

      Yup. At my employer, the managers clamoring the most for return-to-onsite were also clamoring for spyware on their workers machines. It 100% signals a lack of understanding about what the job of your underlings entails.

      I'm not a manager, but the daily standup should resolve damn near any issue, like it does on my team. 5-15 minutes to sum up yesterdays tasks, issue new ones if needed.

      I've made a point of jotting notes and planning stuff on paper during video calls to give me more plausible deniability against the spyware metrics when they inevitably show up.

      7 votes
  4. [6]
    FishFingus
    Link
    We use KPIs at work, and they are a frequent source of complaints. Im certainly not the only one in my team who has just stopped looking at them entirely because it's not worth the stress. The...

    We use KPIs at work, and they are a frequent source of complaints. Im certainly not the only one in my team who has just stopped looking at them entirely because it's not worth the stress. The managers who are meant to be managing the system seem confused by the results it spits out sometimes, and we already know it's less than 90% accurate. At the same time, we're so concerned with efficiency that we need to note down virtually anything we're doing outside our scheduled tasks in case we're called up on it. Any meeting with my manager is still a source of stress and worry.

    I'll never forget one of them telling me that if everyone shaved a second off their call time, the company would save enough money to hire another two full-time workers. I bit back my initial responses - and yes, record profits this year. I can already think of so many other ways to improve efficiency and save money that wouldn't involve piling more onto the front-line workers. I mean...Jesus, priorities. Just hire the workers, we're already understaffed.

    9 votes
    1. [4]
      AugustusFerdinand
      Link Parent
      At my previous job, after the company was purchased by private equity, they implemented a bonus plan based on company sales. While a bonus is always welcomed, the company had three sales people....

      At my previous job, after the company was purchased by private equity, they implemented a bonus plan based on company sales. While a bonus is always welcomed, the company had three sales people. The rest of us had zero to do with sales. So the company-wide bonuses were based on a small group of people doing their job. Yay... Either way, first year goal was set low so everyone got a bonus.

      The next year they implemented KPIs and a bonus structure based on sales, position in the company, KPIs, performance review, and executive review of your performance review. So the bonus went from being out of my control, to being out of my control and despite getting high marks from my bosses, it would be further slashed down by people I never interact with "because immediate managers always rate their employees too high."
      So some of us are good, some of us are mediocre, some of us do the bare minimum, but we're all going to go through a committee of people we never speak to who will make some arbitrary guess of how good we really are at our job (or how much ass we kiss) that'll determine what percentage of a bonus we'll get.

      This wasn't explained until they were handing out the bonuses at the end of the first year.
      I asked during the conference call where they explained this final judgement if anyone in the final tally received one of the two highest ratings.
      The answer was no.
      I asked who judge me. I wasn't given an answer. Now, I started when the company was very small, still owned by the husband/wife couple, I was in programming, and my boss was a straightforward as possible Indian man. I knew who judged me because I asked him and he told me. It was a member of the board from the private equity company that has never even spoken to me and the sales executive who was both a complete moron and someone I've shared maybe 3 minutes of conversation with.
      The next year my KPIs, performance, etc were the same. My final judgement was magically worse and had notes about me being "too outspoken." People started leaving. They kept hiring more and more "managers" and not filling positions of people that actually did things. Then they outsourced nearly all of the department.
      My new job doesn't do any of this shit and I speak to the owner on a weekly basis. He is a "too outspoken" New Yorker that appreciates that I just answer questions directly. It's wonderful.

      That was over a year ago now. Earlier this year I had dinner with a bunch of the old Indian coworkers and found out from the two that still work there that...

      1. The new version of the software that was "about to launch" when I was laid off, still hasn't launched.
      2. One of the two outsourced developer companies was eventually axed because it still hadn't launched.
      3. A company that was #2 in the industry when it was bought from the original owners is now so low in the industry rankings that they're no longer listed in them, but are just a footnote about how they were also evaluated.
      4. All but the CFO have been axed by the board.
      5. It was just bought by a company that, when I worked there, was considered too small to be real competition for less than the private equity company paid to the original owners.

      I don't often take pleasure in the failings of others, but this slice of schadenfreude is damn delicious.

      11 votes
      1. [2]
        NaraVara
        Link Parent
        I'm sure the PE goons somehow still found a way to make money off this complete dissolution of shareholder value.

        I'm sure the PE goons somehow still found a way to make money off this complete dissolution of shareholder value.

        4 votes
        1. AugustusFerdinand
          Link Parent
          I'm sure they did, but not as much as they wanted to purely because of the CFO. That man knew exactly what he was doing and multiple times was able to lessen the debt to the PE asshats by getting...

          I'm sure they did, but not as much as they wanted to purely because of the CFO. That man knew exactly what he was doing and multiple times was able to lessen the debt to the PE asshats by getting lower interest elsewhere and paying it off in huge chunks. Probably delayed the demise by at least a couple of years.

          2 votes
      2. FishFingus
        Link Parent
        It sounds like what imagine working at a factory meeting quotas in the fudgemonkeying Soviet Union must've been like.

        It sounds like what imagine working at a factory meeting quotas in the fudgemonkeying Soviet Union must've been like.

    2. Omnicrola
      Link Parent
      If only you worked harder, we could somehow manage to do X. GTFO of here with that shit.

      I'll never forget one of them telling me that if everyone shaved a second off their call time, the company would save enough money to hire another two full-time workers.

      If only you worked harder, we could somehow manage to do X. GTFO of here with that shit.

      2 votes
  5. [4]
    JXM
    Link
    I hate this kind of productivity tracking. I’m lucky enough to make my living in the creative field (creating video content), so I’m a lot less worried about this kind of thing than many of my...

    I hate this kind of productivity tracking.

    I’m lucky enough to make my living in the creative field (creating video content), so I’m a lot less worried about this kind of thing than many of my friends are. While we do measure the reach and engagement of content, it’s more so that we can adjust our priorities and what kind of content we make to make sure we put resources into areas that make sense, rather than to measure an individuals’ effectiveness.

    One of my best friends works in IT for a massive organization and he was recently warned that the number of calls that he had worked through was too low and that he was taking too long on each call. Except that he’s a higher level tech and deals with the complex issues that the first line people can’t. His calls are supposed to be long so that the front line people can work through the easy stuff quickly! He had to get in touch with his boss and have his boss reach out to the people who manage the metric tracking stuff and get them to remove the “demerit” from his employment record.

    8 votes
    1. [3]
      vord
      Link Parent
      Quick turnaround time is useless if the issue isn't actually resolved. I really wish metrics drivers would get through their heads that 1 tech taking 1 hour to fix a problem permanently is better...

      Quick turnaround time is useless if the issue isn't actually resolved.

      I really wish metrics drivers would get through their heads that 1 tech taking 1 hour to fix a problem permanently is better than 10 techs pushing through a 5 minute fix.

      5 votes
      1. [2]
        archevel
        Link Parent
        Sadly this isn't always true from a business perspective. For instance if the business is payed for helping customers there can be a perverse incentive to keep applying that 5 min fix. Another...

        Sadly this isn't always true from a business perspective. For instance if the business is payed for helping customers there can be a perverse incentive to keep applying that 5 min fix. Another would be if there is more important things going on and taking 1 hour to fix something properly (whatever that might mean) could be detrimental to those activities, while a 5 min fix every X weeks might be less so.

        At the end of the day for a business it might be better to keep applying patches.

        2 votes
        1. cfabbro
          Link Parent
          Reminds me of XKCD's 'Is it worth the time?' calculus.

          taking 1 hour to fix something properly (whatever that might mean) could be detrimental to those activities, while a 5 min fix every X weeks might be less so

          Reminds me of XKCD's 'Is it worth the time?' calculus.

          3 votes
  6. knocklessmonster
    Link
    My consulting firm only expects 5-6.5 hours of billables a day, which frankly only serves to keep the lights on and the partners happy. There are tools in use to track work hours and tasks, but...

    My consulting firm only expects 5-6.5 hours of billables a day, which frankly only serves to keep the lights on and the partners happy. There are tools in use to track work hours and tasks, but those are for self improvement, not job reviews.

    It shouldn't matter as long as the company's getting paid, I think.

    5 votes