God Bless You. I was in a meeting recently where an executive said that a C-Suite person told them that we need to increase productivity. When I asked what outputs needed to increase, they had no idea what we needed to increase or even what the current outputs are. I explained that I can't increase productivity with absolutely no information, but I can do something to make the C-Suite individual think we've increased productivity since that was all he/she seemed to care about.
Yes - this org does promote itself as a data-driven organization.
Well said. It's a concept that most should figure out- there's work that needs your physical presence. But that's usually a network admin back in the server racks or someone working a LINE JOB where you're hands-on assembling something or managing the operations of one or more industrial automation robots. Do I need to be in the office? Nope. And my current employer actually understands the concept. I either do the needed work and do it well, or I'm walked.
I only have one objection to this analysis. As I have said before, I have observed the public sector for a long time, and seen many people be promoted from line staff to management. They know perfectly well how to do the job, and exactly what it entails. This doesn’t stop 90% of them from turning into morons within a few weeks. It’s as if promotion is a form of hypnosis that induces amnesia.
The only thing I believe would make a difference is the Mondragon model, where managers are elected by workers. For most of us, there is only the hope of getting lucky enough to work for someone who cares as much as you do.
People can pull all the pages of the populist propagandizing playbook they want. It might thicken the corporate water and make it take longer for workers to traverse the medium.
It will not ultimately change a thing.
Cults are awesome to all adherents until the kool aid comes. There is no kool aid-less cult option here. The majority of the more competent people prefer to be remote and I doubt they prefer to work with incompetent people who don't give a shit. Broad brush, sure, but if you wave a big magnet over a bunch of iron it all orients similarly, no matter how it started.
The great resignation? That was a whole bunch of people pouring the kool aid into the nearest toilet while grinning at its maker.
The great resignation was the gathering of steam in the boiler of the great stratification. All aboard!
Having worked for multiple companies, I can tell that there are, absolutely, a bunch of people who slack off constantly and who fake being busy.
A casual browse across reddit will reveal a plethora of people who work a couple hours a day and otherwise slack off.
The first real job I was ever hired for had less than an hour of work per day. For two people. The person who was there previously had been faking being busy, and was alarmed when I sent out my results immediately after getting them, as it would seem like I was already done with my work (even though I was).
There are some jobs where you have to be there and there's not enough to do and it sucks. A lot of highly automated factory jobs fall in this category. There was, in fact, a literal guideline at one place that I worked that if people were spending more than 60% of their time working that you were understaffed. This might seem bizarre, but the actual reason for this was that if two bad things happened at once, you needed to fix both to prevent downtime, and it was worth more to hire an extra person than it was to have process be down for an hour or two becuase you couldn't do two things at once.
The problem with measuring productivity is that it's hard to gauge how much time went into producing that product. This is especially hard if a boss is managing people who are doing things that the boss themselves doesn't know how to do, which is common in a technical environment. And frankly, even if you CAN do your coworker's job, unless you actually DO it, you often have little idea of how busy they are. I had to cover for a coworker whose job seemed very easy - there were minimal outputs, and minimal inputs, so I assumed that she didn't have to do that much, so I could spend a couple hours a day covering for her and then do my job the rest of the time.
Instead I basically ended up doing her job more than half my working hours and everything was constantly on fire. Sometimes it ate up my whole day. And I had to let things in her job slip, and things in my job slip, because I was doing the job of more than two people.
Meanwhile, my own output is hard to gauge for outsiders. I deal with information systems, so it's hard to monitor my work unless you can use them well yourself, and the entire reason why I'm there is to be one of our two experts. Some things I do are really easy, others are horrible and hard, and it's not at all clear to outsiders which it is.
The notion that bosses must be able to do their subordinates work is only true in some situations. I'd say of the managers I've had, half of them were there to basically be the contact for the team with the compnay at large. I'd rarely see them and their job was mostly to deal with problems. Staff knew what they were there to do, and there was no place for a manager there; there was no role for them. The point of the manager was to deal with meta issues; if you had an issue with work, you went to your coworkers or an expert, not the management. In that situation, it's very easy to fake productivity - but the reality is that there's a lot of jobs that require minimal managerial oversight, but you need a manager so that you have some ability to interface with other parts of the company and have someone to come to with issues. You don't need MANY managers in this situation - you saw ratios of like 16 - 40 to 1 with these folks, because the manager's job is mostly to deal with admin stuff.
And that's fine, and it doesn't make someone a shitty boss. In fact, I thought they were pretty good, because they knew what their role was - facilitating our work and making sure that the company had some connection to us and we to the company, because you do need that meta structure.
They don't really get at the heart of the problem, which is that employees are productive but feel like their management doesn't see it because they only measure how much time you spend in Slack, when you answer e-Mails or if you attend meetings - all things that in most jobs aren't what creates value for customers. The question as to why managers want to use metrics like these (or the classic butt-in-the-seat measure) is because they themselves don't want to be judged on their productivity. If you put a price tag on every useless meeting, status check-in message etc.. one would quickly see that a lot of them contribute negative value. As an IT consultant I see a lot of organizations and it's staggering how much time the "leadership" spends talking, and conversely how little time they have to think, plan and digest.
As to the problem the tech recruiter alludes to: I've seen this as well, I've even heard stories where the person who interviewed wasn't the person who later shows up for the job. The fakers are quite obvious, if you are competent in the technology you're hiring for. The problem is tech recruiters usually have no idea what the job entails. They don't know the question to ask and are easily bamboozled. Having someone else in the room is pretty obvious, others were more sophisticated with having someone else watch the call through another screen sharing tool feeding and answers via chat.
The sort of garbage CVs from supposed tech recruiters that make it to through the technical staff (to be discarded immediately as unsuitable) is a pretty good indication that most tech recruiters are useless with the lion's share of the work being dumped on their customer.
God Bless You. I was in a meeting recently where an executive said that a C-Suite person told them that we need to increase productivity. When I asked what outputs needed to increase, they had no idea what we needed to increase or even what the current outputs are. I explained that I can't increase productivity with absolutely no information, but I can do something to make the C-Suite individual think we've increased productivity since that was all he/she seemed to care about.
Yes - this org does promote itself as a data-driven organization.
Well said. It's a concept that most should figure out- there's work that needs your physical presence. But that's usually a network admin back in the server racks or someone working a LINE JOB where you're hands-on assembling something or managing the operations of one or more industrial automation robots. Do I need to be in the office? Nope. And my current employer actually understands the concept. I either do the needed work and do it well, or I'm walked.
I only have one objection to this analysis. As I have said before, I have observed the public sector for a long time, and seen many people be promoted from line staff to management. They know perfectly well how to do the job, and exactly what it entails. This doesn’t stop 90% of them from turning into morons within a few weeks. It’s as if promotion is a form of hypnosis that induces amnesia.
The only thing I believe would make a difference is the Mondragon model, where managers are elected by workers. For most of us, there is only the hope of getting lucky enough to work for someone who cares as much as you do.
Excellent article. Much thanks for calling out the lame managers. Too many show up as if attending a fashion show instead of work.
...Hallelujah, holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?!
People can pull all the pages of the populist propagandizing playbook they want. It might thicken the corporate water and make it take longer for workers to traverse the medium.
It will not ultimately change a thing.
Cults are awesome to all adherents until the kool aid comes. There is no kool aid-less cult option here. The majority of the more competent people prefer to be remote and I doubt they prefer to work with incompetent people who don't give a shit. Broad brush, sure, but if you wave a big magnet over a bunch of iron it all orients similarly, no matter how it started.
The great resignation? That was a whole bunch of people pouring the kool aid into the nearest toilet while grinning at its maker.
The great resignation was the gathering of steam in the boiler of the great stratification. All aboard!
Having worked for multiple companies, I can tell that there are, absolutely, a bunch of people who slack off constantly and who fake being busy.
A casual browse across reddit will reveal a plethora of people who work a couple hours a day and otherwise slack off.
The first real job I was ever hired for had less than an hour of work per day. For two people. The person who was there previously had been faking being busy, and was alarmed when I sent out my results immediately after getting them, as it would seem like I was already done with my work (even though I was).
There are some jobs where you have to be there and there's not enough to do and it sucks. A lot of highly automated factory jobs fall in this category. There was, in fact, a literal guideline at one place that I worked that if people were spending more than 60% of their time working that you were understaffed. This might seem bizarre, but the actual reason for this was that if two bad things happened at once, you needed to fix both to prevent downtime, and it was worth more to hire an extra person than it was to have process be down for an hour or two becuase you couldn't do two things at once.
The problem with measuring productivity is that it's hard to gauge how much time went into producing that product. This is especially hard if a boss is managing people who are doing things that the boss themselves doesn't know how to do, which is common in a technical environment. And frankly, even if you CAN do your coworker's job, unless you actually DO it, you often have little idea of how busy they are. I had to cover for a coworker whose job seemed very easy - there were minimal outputs, and minimal inputs, so I assumed that she didn't have to do that much, so I could spend a couple hours a day covering for her and then do my job the rest of the time.
Instead I basically ended up doing her job more than half my working hours and everything was constantly on fire. Sometimes it ate up my whole day. And I had to let things in her job slip, and things in my job slip, because I was doing the job of more than two people.
Meanwhile, my own output is hard to gauge for outsiders. I deal with information systems, so it's hard to monitor my work unless you can use them well yourself, and the entire reason why I'm there is to be one of our two experts. Some things I do are really easy, others are horrible and hard, and it's not at all clear to outsiders which it is.
The notion that bosses must be able to do their subordinates work is only true in some situations. I'd say of the managers I've had, half of them were there to basically be the contact for the team with the compnay at large. I'd rarely see them and their job was mostly to deal with problems. Staff knew what they were there to do, and there was no place for a manager there; there was no role for them. The point of the manager was to deal with meta issues; if you had an issue with work, you went to your coworkers or an expert, not the management. In that situation, it's very easy to fake productivity - but the reality is that there's a lot of jobs that require minimal managerial oversight, but you need a manager so that you have some ability to interface with other parts of the company and have someone to come to with issues. You don't need MANY managers in this situation - you saw ratios of like 16 - 40 to 1 with these folks, because the manager's job is mostly to deal with admin stuff.
And that's fine, and it doesn't make someone a shitty boss. In fact, I thought they were pretty good, because they knew what their role was - facilitating our work and making sure that the company had some connection to us and we to the company, because you do need that meta structure.
They don't really get at the heart of the problem, which is that employees are productive but feel like their management doesn't see it because they only measure how much time you spend in Slack, when you answer e-Mails or if you attend meetings - all things that in most jobs aren't what creates value for customers. The question as to why managers want to use metrics like these (or the classic butt-in-the-seat measure) is because they themselves don't want to be judged on their productivity. If you put a price tag on every useless meeting, status check-in message etc.. one would quickly see that a lot of them contribute negative value. As an IT consultant I see a lot of organizations and it's staggering how much time the "leadership" spends talking, and conversely how little time they have to think, plan and digest.
As to the problem the tech recruiter alludes to: I've seen this as well, I've even heard stories where the person who interviewed wasn't the person who later shows up for the job. The fakers are quite obvious, if you are competent in the technology you're hiring for. The problem is tech recruiters usually have no idea what the job entails. They don't know the question to ask and are easily bamboozled. Having someone else in the room is pretty obvious, others were more sophisticated with having someone else watch the call through another screen sharing tool feeding and answers via chat.
The sort of garbage CVs from supposed tech recruiters that make it to through the technical staff (to be discarded immediately as unsuitable) is a pretty good indication that most tech recruiters are useless with the lion's share of the work being dumped on their customer.