[HN Gopher] The perks workers want also make them more productive
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The perks workers want also make them more productive
Author : rustoo
Score : 162 points
Date : 2023-03-06 15:13 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fivethirtyeight.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fivethirtyeight.com)
| iguanayou wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| ljf wrote:
| I do agree that serendipity and connection are two things that
| can be harder to build remotely, but they are not impossible.
|
| I still feel that "we" haven't learnt the skills or tools for
| great remote working, yet.
| thegrim22 wrote:
| 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.
| recycledfood wrote:
| WFH tends toward commoditizing employers.
|
| 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.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| 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.
|
| And that's without getting into Goodhart's law...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| This "data" aspect may be overthinking things.
|
| 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 all you really need to know.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| 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...
| 4iuvosvjf23 wrote:
| 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?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| 4iuvosvjf23 wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Control. They want to fucking own you and every aspect of
| your life.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| 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.
| jdeaton wrote:
| No shit. Its like people would actually prefer to be better at
| their jobs if given the choice.
| rybosworld wrote:
| 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.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| 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.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _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.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| away271828 wrote:
| 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.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Haha, people do not have to work a full day in the
| office. Source: thirty years of archived Dilbert
| cartoons?
| acheron wrote:
| 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?"
|
| (Found it : https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-02-06 )
| away271828 wrote:
| No. But there's generally a difference between what
| people can get off with at home and what they can
| routinely get off with in an office.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Does the company really care about whether they are
| vacuuming their floor or browsing hacker news?
| Jensson wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key
| Swizec wrote:
| Vacuuming is more restorative than hacker news. Gives
| your brain a break and gets you off the computer
| alar44 wrote:
| [dead]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > 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).
| eschneider wrote:
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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.
| forbiddenvoid wrote:
| 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.
| MBCook wrote:
| 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.
| gav wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| flashgordon wrote:
| 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?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _These types of managers have deluded themselves into
| believing that butts in seats correlates to productivity._
|
| It definitely correlates! Not 100%, but a lot better than
| nothing.
|
| You can at least be sure they're not working another job!
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| I really think it would be a lot easier to get away with
| taking part in two Zoom standups per day from home than
| from an office.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Offices tend to have conference rooms and other places
| for private calls.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| That seems uncontroversial.
|
| 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.
| randomdata wrote:
| Even if you could get away with it, no amount of money is
| worth having to endure two standups per day.
| [deleted]
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| 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.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > 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
| JackFr wrote:
| 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.
| mysterydip wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/man-accused-simultaneously-
| working-...
| mock-possum wrote:
| 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.
| SergeAx wrote:
| This is not about jealousy. When people working second
| jobs, their productivity tanks dramatically.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| You can all it "weird" if you like, but people _do_ cheat
| in relationships, and employees _do_ secretly work several
| jobs.
|
| If you naively trust people, you will probably be taken
| advantage of.
| mock-possum wrote:
| 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.
| pavon wrote:
| 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.
| SergeAx wrote:
| > 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.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| 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?
| pavon wrote:
| 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.
| danaris wrote:
| 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"?
| pavon wrote:
| 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 than
| 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).
| iso1631 wrote:
| Really? When I used to work in an office I could
|
| 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).
| IncRnd wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/six_of_one,_half_a_dozen_of_t...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| People cannot really define productivity let alone measure it.
|
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| 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".
| TexanFeller wrote:
| 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_gipsy wrote:
| It doesn't have to be objective. The real problem are those
| managers that can't measure subjectively - or are simply not
| willing to put in the effort.
| Smoosh wrote:
| 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.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Maybe this is because companies where managers can confidently
| measure productiveness are already switched back to work from
| office?
| qazxcvbnmlp wrote:
| 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.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Monitoring butts-in-seats is a good metric for solving one
| kind of productivity loss. Eg - not doing job at all
|
| Only if butts-in-seats is your company's output. Anything
| else, and you still have to quantify productivity by looking
| at output.
| SPascareli13 wrote:
| I guarantee that you can be sitting in a chair all day and
| still not get any work done.
|
| The only thing this might measure is time you are available
| to do work, but the same can be done remotely.
| ljf wrote:
| 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.
| luckylion wrote:
| 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.
| rybosworld wrote:
| 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.
| twodave wrote:
| 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.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Why would you ever measure butt-in-seat time for a data
| entry job when you could, you know, just measure the amount
| of data being entered?
| reidjs wrote:
| Sometimes the act of measuring productivity requires the
| same amount of work as just doing the job
| twodave wrote:
| 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.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| One other is if you're a consultancy and you're billing
| out 10X Tommy at the same rate as .1X Oswald. We don't
| always care about productivity!
| DrScientist wrote:
| Bit of a shock to see 'paid leave' in the list.
|
| In Europe is a legal requirement.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Atari days can attest..
| m3kw9 wrote:
| It's human nature to always want more, after 4 day work weeks we
| will demand 3 day work weeks.
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| And why shouldn't we?
|
| I care about my health far more than my productivity. Let me
| advocate for myself as much as corporations do for themselves.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| RNs already do this.
|
| 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.
| cmh89 wrote:
| 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'
| germinalphrase wrote:
| " 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)
| cmh89 wrote:
| >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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| zimzam wrote:
| 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.
| robg wrote:
| 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.
| amw wrote:
| 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.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| 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.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| 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.
| cmh89 wrote:
| But that's OP's point. Athletes understand recovery is
| crucial and limit the work they do to make sure they have
| time for recovery.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Note the word "active" - it's actually just more training,
| not spending time with your kids or whatever we think of
| rest
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| That's exactly the point!
|
| 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!
| GoToRO wrote:
| We are living the equivalent period of manual labor, for
| knowledge workers.
|
| 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?"
| unity1001 wrote:
| > 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...
| fleddr wrote:
| 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.
| yboris wrote:
| _4DWW_ - Four Day Work Week.
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| geewee wrote:
| 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
| away271828 wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| supernova87a wrote:
| 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.
| iso1631 wrote:
| If we don't do remote working will enough people leave so that
| the team in general suffers / no longer works well?
| supernova87a wrote:
| Well, as I alluded to, sophisticated programmers/managers
| think about all the cases they may have to optimize for.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| 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.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Ding ding ding! The whole RTO shenanigans is not about
| productivity. Don't let the propaganda fool you. It's about
| control and exerting control.
|
| 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 wrote:
| > they will work hard, do great work and try to retain the
| jobs, even at a lower pay
|
| Maslow would like to have a word with you.
| rr888 wrote:
| I'd quite like a keyboard and mouse that is better quality that
| the $9 specials most companies prefer.
| swader999 wrote:
| I've been bringing my own since I started at this in 1998.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| twiddling wrote:
| Chefs who bring their own knives
| ghaff wrote:
| In many of the trades (which arguably don't include
| chefs), supplying one's own tools is pretty common
| outside of heavy equipment.
| cgb223 wrote:
| It's almost like we know what we need to be successful
|
| 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
| hadlock wrote:
| On site daycare would be revolutionary.
|
| 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 wrote:
| This is the sort of benefit that's worth its weight in gold for
| retention.
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