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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.
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
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.
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
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.
Nobody "codes" in Perl. Perl programs are written by eating a bag of alphabet pasta and then chasing it with ipecac.
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!
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.