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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 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."
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.
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.