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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] rybosworld|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ramraj07|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|3 years ago|reply
It definitely correlates! Not 100%, but a lot better than nothing.
You can at least be sure they're not working another job!
[+] [-] TexanFeller|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MBCook|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] qazxcvbnmlp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] IncRnd|3 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/six_of_one,_half_a_dozen_of_t...
[+] [-] flashgordon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LatteLazy|3 years ago|reply
What managers want here is not to measure productivity, but to FEEL confident about it.
That is the issue here. Feels>Facts. And to be fair, there are few facts.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hinkley|3 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] SergeAx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmh89|3 years ago|reply
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'
[+] [-] germinalphrase|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] zimzam|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] robg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] dilyevsky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GoToRO|3 years ago|reply
Then it was "I pay you to sit 8 hours with your hands above your head, what is the problem?"
Now it is "We will make sure that you are stressed and have no time to regroup, we pay you, what is the problem?"
[+] [-] amw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darth_avocado|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] x86x87|3 years ago|reply
Treat people like children? They will have zero incentive to put in one extra second of work.
Treat them like adults and give them flexibility? That's when they give it all during the work hours.
[+] [-] tagyro|3 years ago|reply
Maslow would like to have a word with you.
[+] [-] yboris|3 years ago|reply
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.
This change can't come soon enough.
[+] [-] jaysinn_420|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] geewee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hadlock|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eschneider|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] realjhol|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thegrim22|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ljf|3 years ago|reply
I still feel that "we" haven't learnt the skills or tools for great remote working, yet.
[+] [-] iguanayou|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fleddr|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] supernova87a|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] iso1631|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cgb223|3 years ago|reply
Most workers just want to do their job well and avoid bullshit and politics
Only a small subset really take advantage of perks in a negative way
[+] [-] rr888|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swader999|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdeaton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yamtaddle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] phist_mcgee|3 years ago|reply
I care about my health far more than my productivity. Let me advocate for myself as much as corporations do for themselves.
[+] [-] DrScientist|3 years ago|reply
In Europe is a legal requirement.
[+] [-] indigodaddy|3 years ago|reply