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They Work Long Hours, But What About Results?
theodp writes "HBS lecturer Robert C. Pozen says it's high time for management to stop emphasizing hours over results. By viewing those employees who come in over the weekend or stay late in the evening as more 'committed' and 'dedicated' to their work, as a UC Davis study showed, managers create a perverse incentive to not be efficient and get work done during normal business hours. 'It's an unfortunate reality that efficiency often goes unrewarded in the workplace,' writes Pozen. 'Focusing on results rather than hours will help you accomplish more at work and leave more time for the rest of your life.'"
Judging employees by results is great, if you have a good way to measure results.
This is notoriously difficult in creative, team efforts such a software development.
While the author of the article seems to lean into this approach with the target of maybe working less hours, a results-based way of working can also have disadvantages: working more hours than the stipulated (to try to achieve visible results, or just better-looking results), burnout because of the latter, etc.
Coding is just what it is: knowledge discoverability. Sometimes you discover it very quickly, sometimes you don't find it. The only good management technique I know is: hire the best people, and then trust them. Don't measure neither hours nor results.
Measure performance based on lines of code put online. That should help efficiency.
I know someone who some years ago started work in a Scandinavian company. He then started staying back late (everyone else left mostly on time).
;).
After a few days the boss came to him and asked him:
1) Is there a problem with the project? Are there enough people and resources allocated for it?
2) Does he need extra training to do his job?
3) Is the job a good fit for him?
So he stopped staying late just for the sake of staying late
A colleague of mine used to work for a company where he would be criticized for not staying late with the others when deadlines were looming, even though he had already finished his part long before.
With the constant meetings, phone calls and emails, how do you ever get some serious code written?
Many of our group work either very early or very late, and often a bit on the weekend.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I measure "the rest of my life" in special "vacation time" hours tracked in a database to which i havent any access. I withdraw "vacation hours" to enjoy my life, and in turn the company I work for doesnt fire me for "the rest of my life" on their time.
these hours, due to the nature of my salaried employment, are however competely subjectively interpreted and at any time i can be called to work during them. The hours outside of $start_time and $end_time for my job are also rather nonexistent. In the literal words of my boss, "we can call you anytime we want." So the problem with "work smarter not longer" is the fact that it is entirely antithetical to the structural composition of "salaried employment."
Good people go to bed earlier.
Them Harvard guys don't miss a thing, do they?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The incentives are even worse if you're a lawyer. Inefficiency not only makes you look better for working long hours, but it objectively is better from the perspective of your employer. The more hours you work, the more you can charge the client. You solved a problem in 10 minutes because you're smart, know how to research and/or have worked on something like this before? Well shit... we were hoping it'd take 10 hours of research at $400/hour. The billable hour is terrible.
I worked for a company that based your annual bonus on the amount of overtime you put in. Not productive, mind you, just hours. At the end of the year, they would tally up the hours you worked, and those with the most hours at their desk got the biggest bonuses.
Being new to this, I asked my boss: "If I do everything right, and my project never needs rework, and my clients are happy, and all my projects are profitable, and I go home on time every day, will I get a bonus?" "No."
"If I screw up, my projects are late and over budget, and I'm working a lot of hours because my clients are pissed at the low quality of work I do, and my projects constantly lose money because I'm an idiot, will I get a bonus?" "Yes."
True to form, my bonus for the year was $50, in spite of being one of the most profitable employees in the organization. I left shortly thereafter.
I just go home for the day.
You are lazy! If you were a committed employee, you'd stay and read Slashdot instead! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, if you worked for me and you left an hour or two early from time to time I'd have no problem with that. But in general I expect people who work for me to spend down time "sharpening their saw" by doing research and experimentation. So if you routinely had nothing to do for several hours a day, I'd expect you to find something to do that'll make you awesome on the next big project. If you didn't find something like that, I would. In that kind of work environment a few hours of "mental health leave" couple of weeks is no big deal, as long as you're doing a good job and getting better at it.
When I managed a development team I recognized that the occasional all-nighter or weekend session was necessary,but I had a policy that my guys had to take comp time *right away*, within a day or two. That wasn't popular; they liked the idea of comp time, but they'd have preferred to bank it. But the point wasn't to compensate them for their extra effort -- they were salaried employees -- it was to make sure when they were at work their minds were sharp.
I believe an engineering team needs three things: skill, energy and focus. "Dedication" is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned, at least if by that you mean some kind of sentimental attachment to the organization. If you have the big three, you'll get whatever else you need. Too many managers don't manage, they work out a personal psychodrama in which there are good employees and bad employees. To me that's baloney, unless an employee is "good" if and only if he contributes to productivity and "bad" if and only if he does not. An employee who suffers unproductively for the company is neurotic, no matter what else you choose to call him, and shouldn't be encouraged to do that.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why not just judge the team itself then, and let the immediate manager for that team decide who is valuable? A team will have goals that fit somewhere into the broader organizational goals; individuals on the team can advance those goals in different ways.
Let's say, as an example, that you have two programmers on a team, Alice and Bob. Alice writes large amounts of code, which has few bugs and which works consistently, and she is an expert in the languages and libraries that are used by the team. Bob is not great at writing code and does not have the language expertise that Alice has, but he is great at solving problems and figuring out what code needs to be written. If Bob is not around, Alice produces less because she is not as good at problem solving; if Alice is not around, Bob tries to write the code and does a terrible job. Can you really say that one of these employees is "better" or "more valuable" than the other? What about Catherine, the person who is a mediocre coder and a mediocre problem solver, but who is great at keeping the team's morale up and who can help motivate people to meet deadlines (but who is not officially in a management position, and who maybe lacks the qualifications when it comes to organizing budgets or making tough hiring or firing decisions)?
Palm trees and 8
about the long or even short term well being of workers. If you subscribe to this line of thought you're looking at workers as an asset. That plays well with workers that want to believe they're irreplaceable. Fact is, there's so many people in the Global Economy that you can easily find a worker that can do those kind of hours productively. Sure, he/she burns out. But again, Global Economy. Supply and Demand. There's a huge over supply of workers in a Global Economy, and always will be. And you don't have to train. Desperate workers will train on their own time and their own dime. A lot (most) will be crushed but the debt and stress. But as an employer in a modern, high productivity workplace the 10% that survive are more than enough.
I guess my point is, don't count on your boss caring about your productivity dropping as your hours increase. If you trip and fall there's 100 guys waiting to overtake you in the race to the bottom that is supply side economics...
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In Japan white collar workers are expected to stay late, even if they are out of work and are just looking busy. It's the total opposite of the Japanese blue collar factory worker experience. A lot of folks think the faux productivity has kept them from getting out of their financial woes. The article focuses on hourly billable jobs like lawyers but a lot of it apply to poor eastern management styles. In particular the focus on reading and writing memo and BS paperwork. There's a lot of rote BS work that goes on.
On the hand I quite enjoy working as an hourly computer consultant. I think my focus is results and I think things like iterative design really shift the focus from hours to what you got done. That brings a lot of value to the client in the end. But there are a lot of consulting companies out there where the focus is utilization and bill (mostly seen in creative services such as Marketing IT or off-shore consulting).
Because that would require management to do their job instead of trying to justify their 6-figure salaries. Personally, I'd say the reason why labor is exploited for overtime is because of the exempt salary provision in the law. Remove the exempt portion of it so all employees are covered by the overtime rules and such. That way, if managers think you need to be there beyond 8 hours, they'll pay you for it. Right now, if management tells me that I need to "work until the job is done", they are free to do so without providing anything extra for it.
Thought here: if you have that much of a problem with an open-plan office, do you really think your employees are any more satisfied with it than you are? I'm fairly sure they're having the same problem you have, with the same consequences for their work.
I've always though the opposite: it'd be nice if the default were individual offices where people could concentrate on the work at hand without disruption, with open shared workspaces available when needed. Especially with things like webcams for occasions when you need face-to-face with someone and don't need to leave the office.
As a member of the military, we do heavily take our cues from the Boss (Commander or Chief) When they go home everyone else feels safe enough to head home.
I learned a long time ago that was a pretty stupid thing to do. I've had a lot of bosses that hated their home life or didn't feel like driving accross town during rush hour, or were just burning time to make some regular events so they would stay late for no work related reason.
I get dirty looks when I head out the door on time or early to go to the gym, like I'm skating. The reality is my bosses know I'm a go to guy when things are screwed up, that I've been known to work 16-24 hour straight when they really go south, that I'll come in for however long it takes on the weekends, and can be packed and out the door to Krap-ic-stan on deployment without much fuss...if there is an actual reason to do.
Otherwise I head on home when it's time, take my vacation time without guilt, and ignore the drones' in the office snide comments, who make their own lives missereable while blaming it on work.
So I sit in a chair in front of a laptop for 8 hours writing "documentation" and dealing with change manglement processes, then another 1-3 hours actually getting real work done after the close of business. It'd be cheaper for them to hire a wannabe actor to sit in my seat from 9-5, and then just pay me for my 3 hours a day of actual productivity.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I had the exact discussion with my boss the other day. She was inquiring on how to motivate me to work harder -- meaning, she has seen that when I am focused, I can get loads of non-stop quality work done quicker than anyone else in our team, however there are days when I accomplish little in terms of new functionality etc. This is the flow that we all know, you either can get there or not, it does not always come on whim.
Anyhow, I replied that I am a simple being and I can be motivated easily -- if I coded harder, and more quickly, would there be a monetary bonus if the project was finished early? No. If I coded harder, and more quickly, would it be possible to use less than the allocated hours per week sitting in the office? No. Well, how do you expect to motivate people to code quick and hard on constant basis? Uhh.. *insert generic company talk here*.
Anyhow -- if there are no incentives to work hard, why should I drain myself more? I do not get paid more, there are no bonuses for meeting the deadline, there is no extra time to spend for my own activities if I finish the job quicker. Why should I strain myself more than I have to, when the no-sweat approach brings me far above average in productivity?
If anyone can help me here, I would be keen to know the solution. And so would my boss.
One VP for whom I used to work referred to employees that left right at closing time as "Fred Flintstones." He made sure his derisive attitude towards these employees was well displayed in front of the CEO of the company at the end of the day as the line of cars left the parking lot. Most of the employees who stayed after the 5PM quitting time were there because they started their shifts later than the other employees.
This VP's attitude blinded him to the fact that those be labeled "Fred Flintstones" were on the job first thing in the morning, well before he arrived to sit in his office for the day doing nothing engaged with production of product in the company. Never mind that these very employees were the engineers that developed and made the technology of the company's primary product. Ironically, the one engineer he praised for staying late each day was staying late for a very special reason: it was the only time he could switch out the sabotaged firmware he created into shipping machines and put non-sabotaged firmware into machines that were being returned for "repairs". He was sabotaging the firmware in order to ensure that his job of hunting down bugs in the programming would be too important to get laid off.
This sabotage was discovered when the engineer was out of vacation and forgot to remove his secret code from his computer. The senior engineer on the project needed to double check the programming, logged into the saboteur's computer and discovered the two sets of code. Sadly, it was long too late for the many employees that had to be laid off because the company was struggling due to the problems the device was having. Most of the employees let go were the ones the VP had labeled Fred Flintstones. With the truly productive employees gone, it was pretty much game over for the company. They were able to float a little longer, but the lack of improvement and productivity stopped any possibility of growth in the company. When the sabotage was discovered, the laid off employees were no longer available. Eventually, the company pretty much closed their doors, being bought out by a competitor.
The attitude that the people who left at the end of the day and didn't put in extra hours were substandard employees was dead wrong. They were the people who made things happen in the company. Once let go, no longer were there any doers in the company and everything ground to a halt
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Don't we call those areas 'offices'?
I have a friend who doesn't work for a company that does bonuses like that, but still is a "moar hours = moar better" kind of place. My friend is a nice guy but... not as competent as one might hope. Back when we both worked at the same place another co-worker described him as someone who "Broke down big rocks in to little rocks and then glued the rocks back together." Basically he has a lot of enthusiasm, but ends up spending a lot of time fixing problems he created by not having a good understanding what he was doing and being careful.
Well he keeps trying to convince me to come work for his new company. He is so happy because he makes a lot more money. They also think he's one of their best employees. That right there tells me all I need to know, and that I'd hate it. He's the kind of guy who will work 10-12 hour days 6-7 days a week. However much of that time is spent fixing problems he created. He replaces finesse with brute force. He does get things done, but no faster than someone "works smarter" to steal a management cliche and often slower.
The reason they think he's great is because he's always at work. He's a "hard worker". They value face time, not results. That is all kinds of not my place. I want a place, and work at a place, that is happy if you can solve a problem quickly and efficiently.
As one on the recieving end of such treatment, all I can say is thank you for seeing the light. As I'm constantly able to use my "free" time to do research on random subjects, more often than I tend to read about different aspects of what I'm tasked on. Each day brings new insight as a result. This allows me to constantly be a number of steps ahead on my approach on each new project. It is a balancing act, and you have to be careful not to over do it, but having the freedom to make such decisions had been invaluable to me as a tool of self improvement. I would even say it had worked for me to do this whenever a mental break was required. A 5 minute read on an equally important though currently unrelated topic is enough time to step away from a problem to refresh yourself and see it in a slightly new way. Our greatest mistake is to treat human beings as machines and expect them to thrive.
Relevant Dilbert
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-21/
...and then people will learn to work to the metrics instead of actually being productive.
Suddenly, the reports say everything is peachy, but in reality nothing is getting done. The managers sit in meetings scratching their heads wondering what has gone wrong, and try to fix it by setting more targets and measuring them with metrics.
because if they don't they can't compete with the 100+ guys gunning for their job. If it ends badly you blame it on the worker and replace him. When labor's this cheap you can have a bunch of projects fail and not care. You're thinking like a worker, not an owner. An owner has twenty companies he owns. When they fail he writes the failure off on his taxes and moves on. If they all fail he uses his money to buy a bail out from the government (capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich).
:(. We're taught that if you work hard and play by the rules you'll win. But the big guys. The owners. The 'Capitalists'. They make the rules. You can't win like that. You can't even stay out of the gutter.
That trouble is, the way the world works doesn't match up with the economics we're taught in school
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The set of employees that has come in to work extra hours is almost surely more "willing to work extra hours when necessary" than the set of employees who have never worked extra hours (including, potentially, because they've never needed to.) On the other hand, the "extra hours" probably also contains a higher percentage of "people who can't budget their time well enough to finish things within the time planned." As a manager I'd certainly count overall productivity as one of my main concerns, but I might value an employee with lower "average" productivity but who is better able to accommodate spikes than the employee whose average productivity is higher but who is unwilling to make any personal sacrifice during extenuating circumstances. And that seems perfectly reasonable.
Have you noticed that the "extenuating circumstances" seem happen more frequently the more "people who can't budget their time well enough to finish things within the time period" are on the case? Is it possible that the "no personal sacrifice" folks feel that way because they don't want to pick up the slack left by the highly-valued-but-can't-budget people?
I am not a crackpot.
Jim Goodnight, SAS Institute CEO, in: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-550102.html
Sara Robinson, http://www.alternet.org/visions/154518/why_we_have_to_go_back_to_a_40-hour_work_week_to_keep_our_sanity/?page=entire
;-) who figured it out, but Henry Ford.
"Management Summary": It's not Karl Marx
Keep up the good work, dude.
If your metric is hours, smart people will optimize with respect to hours. If your metric is students passing a standardize test, some teachers will optimize by "helping" the students pass the test.
Deciding on what metric to evaluate people is a very challenging problem that surfaces in any situation where you need to manage people. The best approach that is supported by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great is to create a culture on your team/company/etc.. that has the values that you as a manager want. This culture will then weed out the people who don't "fit in". Of course, creating this culture may take some time and so is suited for managers looking for long-term reward. Unfortunately, some managers are looking at things in the short-term.
In order to place performance over the appearance of labor, management will have to develoop some metrics for measuring actual work done. In its own right, this is a difficult problem in engineering, CS and other disciplines that involve creative, self directed and non-repetitive work*.
Problem: There are employees hiding among the ranks of professional who would never survive such a metric. They would push back against any adoption of actual performance criteria in favor of the status quo. Long hours is something that the untalented can achieve and keep their standing in the workplace.
* A 'professional', as defined in the NLRA.
Have gnu, will travel.
All employees should be working at 100% of their ability during every hour and if employees are competent and giving full effort there shouldn't be drastic variations in work output. So the big variable should be number of hours worked.
In general the idea is that anyone who isn't giving full effort every hour of every day is a bad employee waiting to be caught and fired no matter how "good" they are at the job function. If you are giving full effort and producing substantially less you probably would benefit from training by someone who is "good" at the task and be able to produce increased output. Working extra hours is a sign of commitment to the task. So the guy who works extra hours but produces low output you train. The guy with high output who does the minimum needed to not look bad vs peers you try to motivate. The guy who produces high output and works extra hours you give maximum increases. The guy who produces high output, works extra hours, and is always telling you about the work that needed doing that he found and just did or is in the process of doing before you can tell him about it, you promote.
That is why this type of argument always fail with management. Why should producing more an hour mean you work less hours when it can mean you work the same number of hours and produce more?
It isn't all bullshit. There isn't a one to one correlation but in general when the company is raking in profits it is a hell of a lot easier to get broken things replaced and fixed and to get pay and benefit increases. Even in a fortune 500 where nobody gets real pay increases without a promotion, the company being flush means expansion which means room to promote more staff.
What about 1 shift crews that have to maintain 3 shift servers and police departments? Off hours is a necessity and out budget doesn't cover overtime.
So don't work off-hours, and your budget should be increased following the next problem.