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.

Comments

Counterproductive

[mwvdlee]

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.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[nine-times]

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.