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

We need more carrot, not more stick

[swb]

The problem with what boils down to browbeating by analytics is that it's still too much stick, not enough carrot (and the bullshit perks like a closer parking spot or free cafeteria tokens don't count).

American business has reaped huge productivity gains from its white collar workforces through computers, networking and telecommunications, both intrinsic gains (more output from the same effort) and structural gains (getting productivity where it would otherwise wouldn't have, like laptops in planes/hotels/homes, smartphone messaging, etc). And workers really haven't seen any income improvement from these productivity gains. You might make some side arguments that remote work enables leisure time that might otherwise be spent at a desk, but I think the reality is that pure leisure time has been degraded by electronic tethers.

In addition, business has reaped gains by other forms of wage suppression like offshoring and outsourcing to H1Bs, which probably has had a productivity increase by simply ratcheting up the fear factor and making employees less demanding of wage increases.

I'm pretty sure that global economic realities will allow employers to continue this trend, but I think they will facing rapid diminishing returns on their efforts. I can whip my dog and get some control over him, but ultimately he will stop doing anything useful. I'm much better off positively reinforcing the behaviors I want.

All of this reminds me of an apocryphal saying I was told was attributed to Soviet era workers. "They can never pay me less than I can work."

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[DarkOx]

The problem with what boils down to browbeating by analytics is that it's still too much stick

It also presumes you actually know what to analyze. Where your support staff really 'off task' for an hour because they did not close any tickets or draft any advisory documents or did they have an adhoc meeting where someone came up with a good idea for a process improvement that they can take to management later?

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.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Registered Coward v2]

The problem with what boils down to browbeating by analytics is that it's still too much stick

It also presumes you actually know what to analyze. Where your support staff really 'off task' for an hour because they did not close any tickets or draft any advisory documents or did they have an adhoc meeting where someone came up with a good idea for a process improvement that they can take to management later?

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.

You have hit the nail on the head: People confuse data with information and assume because they have more data they are making smarter decisions. It will be easy to flay the "5 minutes a day" but then counter with the "but I stayed an hour later on such and such days..." and simply spend more unproductive time arguing over the validity of the data and its relevance. In auditor, simply measuring activity doesn't tell what the results were. I might stare at the ceiling for 4 hours, visualizing actually what needs to be done in engagement, while apparently doing nothing and then sit down and write the 10 page proposal in 1 draft. Do I now need to randomly bang away at the keyboard, increasing the time to produce the product because my train of thought is interrupted? People think answers lie in more data and companies are glad to sell them that, when the real answer is more thoughtful analysis of what you had and not making it harder by adding more noise in the form of more data.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[bluefoxlucid]

I'm pretty sure that global economic realities will allow employers to continue this trend, but I think they will facing rapid diminishing returns on their efforts. I can whip my dog and get some control over him, but ultimately he will stop doing anything useful. I'm much better off positively reinforcing the behaviors I want.

The "global economic reality" is that we've figured out how to produce more output with less labor. You still need the employees, but not full-time. "The Cloud" is a fancy word for "outsourcing"; we're going to move to more outsourced services, hiring data center engineers to work 100 hours per year to keep our shit running, paying some outside contractor to supply the engineers instead of bringing our own. Then, for your $95,000 salary, you'll be busy as living fuck--for 40 hours per week.

That's cheaper.

It means each 2000 hour engineer becomes a 100 hour engineer. Instead of 20 companies with 20 engineers, you have 20 companies outsourcing to 1 contractor with 1 engineer. 19 unemployed engineers. The salary load might increase (with so much unemployment in the field, it could decrease--and everyone will still go to college for those free STEM degrees, and argue that free college creating an overrun of cheap labor is a *good* thing, instead of putting the responsibility on businesses to build a valuable work force with exactly the same number of jobs), but the number of employees will decrease.

It's the old wealth cycle that nobody's bothered to document because economists are concerned with this "value" thing that has no place in economics. You need 100 labor-hours to make a thing; you find a new way to do it in 50 labor-hours; it costs half as much to produce; market forces eventually push the price down (fast forces like direct competition, and slow forces like changing consumer demands); consumers now have more residual wealth (as money), an increase in buying power caused by transferring the wealth of the displaced laborers to the broader consumer market; a new product is produced, or a niche product expands, to capture that wealth (this can take capital investment, which is why we need a few rich people); production requires labor (labor is 100% of all costs), so this creates jobs to replace lost jobs; and now people spend the same proportion of dollars available but buy more shit, thus there is more wealth (more buying power) in total.

In truth, the labor cost is measured in cost: cheaper labor does this as well; but, in the long term, you can't reduce labor costs without reducing total labor hours invested. Some workers may be $8/hr and some may be $12/hr, but those boundaries fluctuate back and forth; the longer downward trend of labor cost comes from cutting away raw invested labor time, but the measure of cost comes from the measure of buying power invested.

We'll see new unemployment as we pack these idle workers into contracting organizations. We'll then find new jobs for them. That turn-over takes time (and, in best fortune, happens simultaneously between markets) and may not employ the same displaced workers (1000 unemployed becomes 1100 unemployed, which becomes 1000 unemployed; the new unemployed may all still be unemployed at the end, and some of the old unemployed are newly employed). If you ever see people screaming about automation causing mass unemployment, this is the crux of it: if we don't slow the bleeding, we're going to see 80 years of high (like 60%-80%) unemployment; the same mass unemployment spread over a decade or two will probably just be an annoyance, more so to some people than others.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[tlhIngan]

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.

Even worse, you get what you measure.

If, for example, you measure keystrokes, then you'll find productivity "went up" according to the keystroke measure. But real productivity probably went down because as anyone knows, it's trivial to write a load of crap. Or even worse, just have someone retype a bunch of crap because it counts as more "productivity" than using copy-and-paste.

The real problem is productivity isn't measurable. So people use all sorts of proxy methods, all of which are extremely poor proxies. And crunching garbage data produces garbage, thanks to that old time computer idiom, garbage in, garbage out.

It also doesn't take long before people figure out how to game the system, either, by looking at the proxies and doing just that.

Heck, remember when lines of code was the proxy to measure programmer productivity? Yeah, you can see what happened.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Responsiveness to emails or IMs is one such proxy. If you want to know if I am sitting on my hands doing nothing, time how long it takes for me to respond to emails and IMs. If you get responses nigh immediately, I'm actually goofing off. If it's a few hours, or I don't notice your IM, it's because I'm working my ass off.

But others judge you on that. They love you when you have nothing to do, and hate you for having and doing work. If you want to get into management you have to worry about that. You avoid having substantial tasks on your plate so that you can keep people happy. CC all asking others what they are doing while not producing anything yourself so people see your name on an email thread and know you're working, and soon that will be your job, and you move up the ladder.

Perform labor, and you'll forever remain labor. Also you'll have to make something up to put on your timesheets when it's slow. If you ask for more, you'll be penalized because you were waiting to be able to perform another task and two threads will demand your full attention immediately and all others will see is unresponsiveness.

The fact that anyone can spend all day sending useless emails kinda scares me away from trying to be a pointy headed boss. The plentiful supply of such people makes me feel it would become a pain endurance contest that I would lose.

I remember making endless excuses and telling many lies an breaking promises to reform as a child in response to being bugged to do my homework or chores. I made the life decision to grow out of it and produce for real. I was lured into this because having a good reputation lets you get away with more goofing off in the long run. But perhaps this is truly lazy.

Sometimes I regret changing my lifestyle because I was pretty good at it. I see that people who behave that way as adults in the real world have their lies covered by others and rise.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[eulernet]

you get what you measure.

I remember a documentary about a company in India doing 3D animation.
One manager explained how he monitored in real-time how people were working.

Then, the boss explained how he was proud of producing movies in India, and he showed a few seconds of the animated movie his company was working on (it was something similar to the Jungle Book).
The animation was pretty miserable.

Their system encouraged finishing tasks the fastest as possible, not the best as possible, so it was absolutely talentless.
If you try to measure work, you'll get quantity but not quality.
How is it even possible to measure quality ?

Moral of the story: if you need robots, take robots, not human beings.

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.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[Shadow of Eternity]

This. A lot of people working intellectual tasks at a high level will do the same thing, they may appear completely unproductive for long periods and then sit down and slam out a massive amount of material in a single draft, leapfrogging anyone that seemed to be more "productive" writing and rewriting garbage day in and day out.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[houghi]

I did a lot of numbercrunching. I ALWAYS asked what they wanted the numbers for and what their goal was. No, I was not going to falsify any numbers. I would just think about what numbers they did not ask for, yet could help whatever they were after.

One of the most difficult things was productivity. In a callcenter you are able to measure almost everyting. The downside is that you have all the numbers.
So if a call takes 6 minutes (including after call work) it was almost impossible to explain why people would never have 10 calls. If they didn't, the people, department and manager would look lazy.
This already takes into account the 15 minutes break in the morning and in the afternoon, the lunchbreak, meetings, training and what not.

I have only seen one CEO smart enough to say to the call center manager: I do not understand it, but I trust you and if you say that 75% productivaty is very good, then I am going to trust you and believe you.

That does not mean numbers are useless. They can be great indicators if you know what you are looking for and if you want objectivaty. e.g. on the day that was the one with the least calls, we also did the lowest numbers. Why? Because there were less calls, people could get half a day or a day off easier (This is Europe) than on other days.
Mondays was the day with the most calls, so almost no days off were given.
This ment that there would be less people compared to the amount of calls that were coming in. Increased the FTE account just a fraction and numbers were good and decreased them on tuesday and targets were hit all the time.

But yeah, productivaty is a horible way to measure anything, unless you know ALL the other factors and even then you will NEVER reach 100%. And if you reach 100%, you can bet any if not allof the other numbers are way off.

Re:We need more carrot, not more stick

[sjames]

Excessive reliance on metrics in a call center costs money. Once they tighten up too much, incidents of customers getting 'accidentally' disconnected go up and customer satisfaction goes down. It also results in more escalations and a busier customer retention department.

Naturally, it creates a situation where they cannot see the forest for the trees. They don't manage to measure what percentage of their advertising budget gets effectively burned in a fire due to bad word of mouth created by support metrics.

Intagibles

[DarkOx]

I wonder how carefully this stuff will consider the intangibles. How busy my team is or isn't often depends on how much selling the sales force have or have not does. I know for example if we are having a slow week. We might all go out to lunch together. It will take more than the allotted hour and nobody really cares. The flip side is when we are having a busy week and we have to work through lunch to keep up, no time for Slashdot etc; we don't feel like we are being shit on, at least I don't and I assume that goes for the others.

Optimizing away all the downtime at work sounds like a way to ensure employee burn out. I don't think just giving people more vacation would fix the problem either. Sometime what someone really needs is just to space out for 20min, drink some coffee and come back at it. Nobody is going punch out to do that. Its just going result in people being more stressed and likely less productive.

Re:Intagibles

[JaredOfEuropa]

An increasingly common cause of burnout is cognitive overload. That doesn't mean too much work, but too many tasks, and/or too may distractions throughout the day. Our work is increasingly compartimentalized; where in the past we'd work on 1-3 things, nowadays it's not uncomming to contribute to over 10 different projects at a time. Upping the pace by managing away downtime using this software is a surefire way to push more people over the edge.

In contrast, monitoring software could also be used to spot employees on the verge of burning out (something that often goes unnoticed by the employee or their co-workers and managers), and offer advice to better manage their time, not to increase productivity but to prevent an actual burnout. It might actually suggest little breaks, a bit like RSI prevention software that locks out the keyboard every now and then for half a minute (annoying but it did help me recover). Even so I am not a big fan of monitoring software even in this case, simply because I do not think most managers can be trusted with the information. You get a warning from the system that Joey is about to blow a gasket, so you inform HR and inquire as to how to best get rid of Joey.

Re:Intagibles

[war4peace]

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!"

Re:Intagibles

[swb]

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.

Yes, a thousand times this. Nobody understands the penalty of the context switch.

I work as an IT consultant/contractor and some of the people who are what I call "desk-biased" don't seem to understand the context switch penalty. On more than one occasion they've kind of griped about why task X wasn't done. "You left the client at 3:30, you got home by 4, why wasn't it done by 4:30?"

Even though the task itself takes about 30 minutes (if everything goes right), It's not like you can just walk in the door, sit down, and just start step 1 of task X. There's both the practical side -- setup laptop, get signed into the right VPN, bring up the right system, start the task" but a mental shift required to just get started on the task, some of which might be substantively identifiable (ie, look up documentation, etc) but some of it seems purely psychological and hard to put into words. And then there's pure distractions of coming home, dealing with the dog, the phone call that happened, the text message, the urgent email, and so on.

I find as I get older my prime window of focus is when I first get up. Maybe it's the caffeine, but I think it's a certain distraction-free clarity I only get in any quantity in the morning. Once the day gets going, it's hard to get the time necessary to get re-focused enough to be as productive.

So what.

[kqc7011]

Where management has decreed that there will not be any thing other than work on the company computers, the heads of those workers will be down looking at their smart phones.

Re:So what.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Depends on what you do with the data

[allquixotic]

It all depends on what you do with the data. The mere act of passively collecting the data is relatively benign, assuming that no action is ever taken with it and that it's securely stored away so that it can't be exfiltrated or abused. There ARE privacy concerns with this, of course, but most corporate networks explicitly state that users should have no expectation of privacy.

If your boss receives an email for every 5 minutes you spend on Slashdot or Reddit or Anandtech, and marches down to your cube and sternly tells you to get back on task, that solution will only improve productivity in the very near term. The worker will fear for their job, so they'll do their work more and go off-task less. But that will stop being effective as soon as the worker can leave to find another job, or come up with an alternative way to go off-task while avoiding detection, or half-heartedly do their work in a way that appears to show progress but isn't really (e.g. gaming the metrics). The end-game of "cracking the whip" is almost never a worker who willingly spends less time doing whatever they really would rather be doing besides working and suddenly enjoys their work more.

If, however, you collect all the data in aggregate and then discuss it during their annual performance review, and have it play a factor in their compensation, that could definitely be a strong motivator for people not to be off-task: if they associate slacking off with getting lower raises / bonuses / etc. and steady work output with higher compensation, most people will probably try to slack off *less*, at least. It also has the side effect of saving the company some money by being able to justify not giving a raise to someone who spends most of their time slacking off.

Either way, though, there is always going to be a way to game the system. If they track you at the network level, just use a proxy or VPN to an address that looks like it's on-task, or is too vague to get a sense of what exactly it is (e.g., since many sites use EC2 or S3 to serve content for all sorts of purposes, there's not a lot you can say about whether traffic to an EC2 box is business-related - maybe they're doing actual research for their white collar job?). If they're keylogging, set up a VM and plug in a USB keyboard straight into the VM. If you have decent cellular data at your desk, you could do your thing on a smartphone, assuming you can tolerate the display and input device limitations. Or of course you can just take frequent breaks into a hallway or empty conference room and use your own laptop/tablet/smartphone.

The only way to truly keep white-collar workers on task for 8 solid hours per day is to assign one supervisor per worker bee, but the overhead of that proposition is so high that no one will do it, because the costs will far outweigh the benefits.

Or there's Manna, http://marshallbrain.com/manna... which could be a possible future if AI or a close-enough approximation thereof turns out to be feasible.

Re:Depends on what you do with the data

[LokiSteve]

I see a lot of these comments assuming that there is an infinite workload. Many knowledge based jobs are task driven and there is downtime while you're waiting for the next task. As long as that time isn't spent doing something detrimental or offensive, I don't see why it should be looked down on.

Example being, if I spend the time while waiting on a quote from vendor reading about technology trends or just the news, I don't see a big deal. If I'm reading MLP fan fic, well, then, I can see my manager taking a walk down the hall.

If you (or your software) needs to do this...

[QuietLagoon]

... something is wrong in your workplace.

.
If you need to have software that constantly looks over employees' shoulders and cheers them on, then you need to treat the root cause of your employees' dissatisfaction with the workplace. The software will only dump salt into a festering wound.

Re:If you (or your software) needs to do this...

[HornWumpus]

And because the workplace sucks so bad, they also no doubt have a workforce that also sucks and would need this kind of software to force them to be 'productive'.

If I were in that situation I'd close the doors and start over.

You will never have a good team working under such conditions. You will never turn the group that works under such conditions into a good team. If you somehow inherited a good team and used these management methods they would be gone in a week.

This is a case of clueless management trying to get to a local productivity maximum. They don't even know what a good team looks like.

Re:If you (or your software) needs to do this...

[gstoddart]

And at a certain point you have to realize the people in these jobs are humans, need to stop and catch their breath, think for a bit, stretch, pee, and interact with their colleagues.

Any corporation trying to achieve 100% engagement all day every day has no concept of the kinds of tasks their employees do and will only make productivity worse by trying to do it.

My general belief is the more a company uses metrics the worse it is to work for.

Oblig xkcd

[pr0nbot]

https://xkcd.com/303/

Although... the bastards keep giving me faster computers.

Cracking the Whip

[srobert]

"... does cracking the whip more often actually increase productivity?"

Maybe it does, if you're supervising low skilled workers with no discipline in an environment where it will be difficult for them to find a comparable job. Otherwise, no. Cracking the whip creates a miserable environment that productive employees don't wish to work in. So they will probably wind up working for competitors, who may be implementing workplace practices that involve strange concepts such as trust, loyalty, stewardship and so forth, leaving the whip crackers with only undesirables.

Bootstrapped Startups

[ranton]

Bootstrapping a startup is a common way to start down the entrepreneurial path. And I doubt it is uncommon for these founders to spend no time during their 9-5 working on their new company. This may be as obvious as coding or answering tech support emails at work, or as subtle as reading articles on LinkedIn about angel investing.

Re:Bootstrapped Startups

[ShanghaiBill]

It's a fantastic way to get fired for gross misconduct

At some point you need to leave your day job, and it is better to get fired (rather than quit) because you then qualify for unemployment benefits.

... and possibly sued too.

Highly unlikely. Lawsuits are expensive and time consuming for the plaintiff, and a lawsuit against an individual would require strong evidence, with little chance of collecting much.

Re:Bootstrapped Startups

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Which is why I don't like BYOD

[Virtucon]

These kinds of systems are great for bean counters but lousy for workers. We're not digging ditches or plowing fields. Breathing room is expected with white collar positions and beware of companies with intrusive systems in a Bring Your Own Device bargain. Bring your own device gives them flexibility but also the same kinds of tracking that can be used on a desktop. So now your private tablet or smart phone can be used by your employer to track you as well, fuck that. Bring your tablet,bring your own 4G network connection and do your browsing on that device. Don't let your company put it's crap on your private device under any circumstance. You can access e-mail through web portals, they can send text messages and that's all they need to do and all you should be able to need.

Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[NatasRevol]

I solve half my problems by taking a short break & letting my brain work on it in the background. Not to mention finding out all kinds of new & interesting info, a fair bit of which is applicable to my job.

Re:Work everyone 70+ hours a week

[Z00L00K]

It's actually not the number of hours worked that matters - it's the knowledge needed to solve a problem quickly that matters. If person A uses one week to solve a problem while person B uses one hour it may look like person B is slacking between the tasks solved. On idle periods person B may have room to slack but when the shit hits the fan person B may be the one the company needs while person A instead goes into mental block unable to proceed.

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:Not again

[__aaclcg7560]

I worked on one company that required us to document our hours to justify hiring more workers because we were too busy trying to justify our hours to hire more workers. A vicious cycle that resulted in more people leaving than being hired.

Gaming aside it would probably be harmful

[Sycraft-fu]

People just cannot remain 100% focused and productive 100% of the time. It doesn't work that way. Never has in human history, never will. Thus if you try to force that, all you'll do is burn people out. So in the long run, it'll just decrease productivity over all. Better to have people able to goof off, take breaks, and then get back on task then just getting frazzled, working at low efficiency, and staring off in to space.

Re:Work everyone 70+ hours a week

[war4peace]

But person B gets fired instead because *drumroll* the stats say he slackin'.

Re:Second job question

[ShanghaiBill]

Does anyone use their downtime at work to essentially work a second job?

I hired a guy in India to do my primary job, and I use the time freed up to work on a second, more interesting, job.

Yes, this is how it can be useful

[raymorris]

> However, honestly, half of the downtime I have at work is due to the inefficiencies of the workplace. Waiting for slow servers. Waiting for queries to run. Waiting for people to get back to me. Etc.

Exactly. Measuring this type of thing is what can actually improve my productivity, and those of my coworkers, significantly.

At my old job, I time was spent like this:
Open a page from the dev web server and wait for it to load.
Make a small change to the code.
Refresh on the dev web server and wait for it to load.
Make a small change to the code.
Refresh on the dev web server and wait for it to load.
Make a small change to the code.
Refresh on the dev web server and wait for it to load.

Half of my day, and therefore half of my pay, was spent waiting for the dev web server to respond. If management identified that our computers spent half their time waiting on a response from dev.company.com, they could then decide it was worthwhile to spend $x,000 for faster response rather than paying me $xx,000 to wait for the server.

My current job is similar:
Run a 30-minute security scan.
Adjust a parameter to the scan, or some code.
Run a 30-minute security scan.
Adjust a parameter to the scan, or some code.
Run a 30-minute security scan.

Right now I have a scan running, and my next task is to change the code and see if that makes the scan faster. Blocking Facebook won't help that. Adding machines to our test network will help, so I can run two scans, with different versions of the code, in parallel.

Trying to sell data mining software I see

[ErichTheRed]

It's been my experience that implementing stuff like this only works if your workforce is totally undisciplined otherwise. Call centers operate almost exclusively in this manner -- relentless data obsession, micromanaging and basically providing the worst possible work environment. Some call centers I've had experience with actually make their employees ask a supervisor if they're allowed to go to the bathroom, rather than just making themselves unavailable. Maybe the Milennial twist of "gamification" makes it more palatable, I don't know. But I do know that employees in this environment who have a choice, are reasonably skilled, and have better employment available will take it at the earliest possible opportunity. I doubt even the most social media obsessed Milennial is going to be happy enough about earning badges for doing their job to keep them from seeking less horrific working conditions.

It's similar to introducing time tracking in a professional (salaried) environment. Professional services does need to track billable hours, as is common in consulting firms, but insisting that employees be warming their chairs for exact time frames and penalizing infractions just leads to a mess. Just like the call center workers, everyone who's good leaves for less abusive workplaces, and you're left with the broken people who can't get a job anywhere else.

I sound like a Luddite when I say this, I know, but the economy needs some inefficiency. Even factory workers, who are arguably performing the most robotic of tasks, shouldn't be expected to clock in, perform their tasks at 100% efficiency for the full shift and clock out.

Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[Anonymous Coward]

When you run out of working memory, you need the garbage collector to kick in, which requires a stop world. Which is why I'm on /. right now.

Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Grammar fail, dude! Your missing a comma.

Pedantry fail, dude! You're missing an apostrophe and an e!

I think you meant to say: You're missing a comma.

Re:Will they control phones too?

[tompaulco]

I notice people around companies who prevent internet access excessively use phones.

Exactly. At my previous company they blocked facebook on the laptops. I didn't do facebook anyway, but all of the entry level people who spent an hour of their day on facebook changed to spending most of their day on facebook on their phones since it takes 4 or 5 times as long to do stuff on a phone that it does on a laptop.

Time spent filling out timesheet

[mindcandy]

I worked central IT in a State Government job and we had a category in the time tracking system called "Time spent filling out timesheet" .. we were allowed to bill ~4hrs per month to it.

Curiously they didn't have any problem with this .. the beancounters don't seem to care what you waste time on it, so long as it has a label.

sorry , but

[ripvlan]

I have to type this quietly from under my desk - because *they* are watching.

Although having somebody remind me to get focused again isn't a horrible thing. How many watercool conversations have you been part of or overheard and thought "yeah - this topic has gone off the rails - back to work" --- and the gang somehow doesn't do that until a more senior person asks, "you folks work here?"

Re: Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[methano]

Somebody's gotta do it. Might as well be another AC.

Re:Productive workplace activity ..

[__aaclcg7560]

I was handed a blotched print server migration project and the server tech told me I needed to use the GUI wizard to verify that all 1,000+ printers actually work. Adding a printer with the GUI wizard takes five minute. I wrote a PowerShell that adds a printer every 30 seconds. The server tech was astonished that I completed the three-month assignment within one month.

Re:Second job question

[oyenamit]

That guy in India is scamming you by billing you while working on his second, more interesting, job.

Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE!

[silentpinewaves]

I've been doing this for years. Glad to hear it works for you as well. I tend to take many short mental breaks throughout the day. I naturally came to the conclusion that that is what worked for me after my first few years as a developer. Companies seem quite happy with my work, and I feel more positive doing these little mental refreshers than simply continuing to try to solve the problem, which often resulted in staring at the screen or going down a rabbit hole :P

Re:What's the point?

[davester666]

managers aren't interested in that.

they want you to give your all until you can't anymore, then it's next up.