Slashdot Mirror
Data-Crunching Could Kill Your Downtime At Work
An anonymous reader writes: How many of you are reading this at work? One of the unspoken perks of many white collar jobs is that you can waste time while still appearing productive. Workplaces are aware that this goes on, and they police it to some extent by blocking Facebook or simply looking over your shoulder — but there's only so much they can do. The new generation of workplace analytics software is starting to change that. "Employers of all types — old-line manufacturers, nonprofits, universities, digital start-ups and retailers — are using an increasingly wide range of tools to monitor workers' efforts, help them focus, cheer them on and just make sure they show up on time." This inevitably leads to the question: does cracking the whip more often actually increase productivity? To hear the makers of this software tell it, the value is almost limitless, and it will never be misused to micromanage your job. But the article lacks any independent support for that idea, and I'm sure many of you could provide examples where time-keeping software has only been a hindrance.
the heads of those workers will be down looking at their smart phones.
I know of several companies where even taking your smartphone out of your pocket and looking at it during work hours will get your knuckles rapped by your manager. Needless to say these companies have high staff turnover rates because they take such an overbearing attitude to their staff.
I've worked at a company where people were required to be at work for 40 hours (not counting lunch) each week.
The company did not have any systems to check this and they suspected people cheated.
So they implemented a time registration system which required employees to justify their working hours using a feedback system.
Turns out most employees were doing well over 40 hours without noticing, so the employees started leaving for home earlier.
A few months later the feedback system was disabled, so employees no longer got reports of the registered hours.
By then, the employees had grown accustomed to monitoring their working hours and kept going home on time instead of too late.
A few months after that, the entire system was removed.
In the end, the whole ordeal managed to catch a handful of cheating employees and taught ~1,500 honest employees to work less hours.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I find distractions and interruptions to be the real focus/productivity killer.
Now, I'm usually not doing pure development, but my work also requires me to focus on my work for extended periods of time. By measuring myself, I found it takes about 20-30 minutes to become fully focused and ease into maximum productivity, which could last for hours if not interrupted. But as a cubicle drone (not by choice), I am frequently interrupted by:
- meetings: I don't have to be there but the colleagues that should be there in my place are incompetent (sad but true) and if left unchecked they would promise things that I have to do and most times can't be done with the tools at hand.
- sudden noise spikes: there are Support people around me and while I've grown accustomed to a constant phone chattering background noise, sometimes they start yelling at each other "JACK HOW DO I ASK FOR THIS RESPONSIBILITY FOR CUSTOMER X?" and there goes my concentration.
- groups of people trotting by: I am 30 feet from the large floor cafeteria and more often than not I see groups varying between 10 and 50 people all going for a smoke or coffee or whatnot, accompanied by a sizable uptick in noise and chatter.
- IMs: Prakash from internal support asks me where can he find that report that I built 2 years ago. Doesn't matter that he asked the same thing two days ago. And last week. And two weeks before that. And a month ago.
- E-mails: Prakash is thorough, he also sends me an e-mail with the same question, and I usually reply and attach the last 18 e-mails in which I had answered him - wondering how long until he comes back. Maybe I should take bets.
I tried isolating myself as much as possible for short periods of time (days) and invariably been called "antisocial".
"He ain't communicatin' none!"
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
How about a successful startup founder?
If you want to sue an ex-employee for misconduct, there are strict deadlines. You can't just wait for years, until the startup is successful, and then file. A much more lucrative approach would be to save evidence that the ex-employee worked on their startup during paid work time, and therefore what they produced was "work-for-hire" and therefore you own the copyright to their source code.
If you metric everything to the point the adhoc does not occur you might be missing out value you don't know how to measure.
Yes. I know, for example, that sometimes when I'm dealing with a difficult problem, I have to take a break. I go get a coffee, stare out the window for a few minutes, or read a little Slashdot. Sometimes I still won't figure out a solution until I have a chance to go home, get some sleep, and then a great solution will occur to me when I'm talking to friends over beer. It's much easier to measure "productivity" of someone making widgets in a factory than of someone who is inventing new widgets.
When the topic of metrics comes up, I'm always reminded of an experience I had early in my career. To make a long story short, some executive got it into their head that they should have helpdesk metrics for each tech based on things like "number of tickets closed" and "mean time to resolution per ticket". They collected a bunch of data and found one guy was severely under-performing, and they asked the manager to let him go, and find a better worker. The IT manager was surprised, since he thought that the under-performer was a good tech, so instead of firing him, he decided to pay close attention for a few days to figure out what the deal was.
After a few days, it became much clearer what was going on. The "under-performing" tech was frequently helping the other techs, giving them advice, and suggesting troubleshooting steps. In addition, the other techs would sometimes reassign their difficult tickets to the "under-performing" tech, since he had a knack for figuring out the really tough ones. The "under-performing" tech was taking on and completing fewer tickets because he was helping everyone else with their tickets. He was taking longer to resolve the tickets because he was taking on the more difficult cases. He was essentially the best-performing tech they had, but the metrics completely failed to capture his performance.