Data-Crunching Could Kill Your Downtime At Work 170
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.
We need more carrot, not more stick (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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Exactly this.
They tried this at my work.Management decided to require 100% of our time be tracked in the ticketing system.
I'll be you can guess what happened, everyone employed the following formula: ticket time = tickets / 8
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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
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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.
Re:We need more carrot, not more stick (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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They know that if they make a tangible carrot that actually effects the bottom line of the paycheck... all people will do is game the metrics instead of doing their actual work. Why would anyone do anything else, if getting your actual job done no longer is what gets you paid.
Sure, they can tune the metrics so that things that for each individual actually doing the job properly gets the employee paid the most. But at that point we would be exactly where we were before. The supervisor or manager makes a deci
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They know that if they make a tangible carrot that actually effects the bottom line of the paycheck... all people will do is game the metrics instead of doing their actual work.
Except that this "gaming of the metrics" has turned into an almost 100% increase in US GDP per capita over the past 40 years, with real monetary compensation not exactly in line. So apparently their perceived inability to design the perfect carrot led to abandoning any kind of carrot at all.
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They know that if they make a tangible carrot that actually effects the bottom line of the paycheck... all people will do is game the metrics instead of doing their actual work. Why would anyone do anything else, if getting your actual job done no longer is what gets you paid.
Why don't they make the bottom line of the paycheck tied to doing the job? Instead of recording whether you show up at 9:00 on the dot or making sure you take no more than half an hour for lunch or making sure that facebook is not installed on your laptop, why don't they measure how you performed against the goals that you and your management agreed upon, and also consider whether there were additional non-agreed projects or tasks which were assigned during the time period?
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This is how it used to be. But only in general terms of pass/fail. Now that they can have metrics to account for every minute of time spent at the office. Nickel and diming each employee and accounting every moment they spend in the office will not increase productivity.
Also, employers don't want what you describe. When they find out that tompaulco gets as much done in 4 hours as nitehawk214 does all day, do you think they will be happy with tompaulco leaving after a half day... or paying you twice as much
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because management doesn't know what you do all day. they don't know what is an acceptable amount of work, and what is an excellent amount of work. they don't know how long a project should take, its easier to ask you to change then them.
Oh, well, then it sounds like we need to replace management with one that works.
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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 cheap
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Gosh, your text looks like it has been pasted from here: http://cbsg.sourceforge.net/cg... [sourceforge.net]
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No, it's advanced economic theory.
As in, beyond what's currently in modern circulation.
Unless you want to go back to Karl Marx, who pointed out that goods have "value" based on how much labor is invested, and so lose value when you make them more efficiently (with fewer workers), and so the key to a working economy is to make sure nobody does anything with any less labor (that is, make everything by hand, so it takes hours and hours of human labor to make stuff).
Do you remember when people stopped labor
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Then, for your $95,000 salary, you'll be busy as living fuck--for 40 hours per week.
So they are going to raise my salary and lower my hours? Sounds good to me.
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I have an ostensible 40-hour job at which I work maybe 4 hours a year. The rest of the time is Slashdot. This happened because I streamlined every process into automated scripts and shit, and removed shit that breaks a lot in favor of shit that produces the same results but has fewer complex and volatile components.
My next job will have me working for 15, 20, 40 different clients doing the same, and not hanging out on Reddit all day.
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I used to make that argument to my old boss.
The network manager who runs around busy all day is one who's doing a shitty job. The one that looks bored and takes long lunches? If you're network does what it's supposed to, that's the one who's doing his job right.
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Yeah, but if you have all day to be bored, you can do your job right for a bunch of other businesses, too. That means there's a market to charge 4x as much for contractor time, but contractors work 1/10 as much, so it costs 40% as much for the client.
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When my father was working, he used to bring home stacks of work every night to complete after dinner. Then, he'd bring home bigger stacks of work to do over the weekends. When I asked him why he did that, he said that his boss expected this level of productivity out of him and if he didn't deliver, he'd be fired.
When I got my current job, I told my then-manager that I wouldn't be doing work from home. When I left work, all of my projects and stuff would go on hold until I came back the next morning (Mon
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I worked in a call centre, I took the most calls per hour, had the best work quality and best attitude towards callers.
What did I get? Bitching about being unplugged for a few seconds more than average and a crap pay rise to go with it.
I do feel a bit vindicated, crappy supervisor and boss were both fired, but I'd resigned before that. They lost a good worker who got stuck in when it was busy.
Don't bother working
Yes, this is how it can be useful (Score:3)
> 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
Intagibles (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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My contract (and I think just about all the permie ones I've ever had) say things like "...will keep abreast of current technological trends and advances...". I'm sure one could argue that /. is neither technological, nor a trend or an advance, but in some part at least, it's relevant learning about the industry. How do the analytics calculate the worthiness of the sites (or better - the specific pages) I'm looking at in my supposed 'downtime'?
When I was a lad, they brought in itemised phone billing. Suppos
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On another note, I find it weird that companies seem to want to manage their peoples time so closely, when trends suggest that people should be working less (presumably for less money).
Wanna drive a bean counter nuts? :
"Should I charge overhead or the project number for using the restroom?"
Puts 'em in a divide by zero situation.
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Overhead comes from billing a certain amount over the actual labor cost on projects anyway. All you're doing by billing overhead instead of the project directly is eating into the funds that pay for people who prepare invoices, etc. The money still comes from the project,
ever worked for anyone who was blessed by an overzaealous bean counter, eh?
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In contrast, monitoring software could also be used to sp
Re:Intagibles (Score:4, Interesting)
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!"
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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.
This × 1000
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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,
So what. (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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Depends on what you do with the data (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [marshallbrain.com] which could be a possible future if AI or a close-enough approximation thereof turns out to be feasible.
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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...f they're keylogging, set up a VM...
The problem with gaming the system is that you become over-confident and careless.
I think that as an employer I would be profoundly wary of the geek who seems to be drawing on his bag of tricks to gain access and privileges denied to others in the workplace.
Bad for morale, bad for disvipline and security.
I don't think I would wait for an annual performance review to deal with the problem.
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Yes, there is potential to become over-confident and careless; but someone who's serious about this type of behavior would constantly work to step up their game and make their behavior harder to detect. Also consider that a worker who's doing a job that is actually, genuinely easy for them to do, and has time to spare after completing all assignments on-time and *properly* (not even half-assedly), can legitimately slack off for the remaining time and the bosses shouldn't have a reason to say anything bad ab
Gaming aside it would probably be harmful (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Depends on what you do with the data (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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This entire discussion (not just responding to you) has completely missed one really critical factor here in measuring "productivity" - Hourly vs salaried employees.
As an hourly employee, yes, your employer has a reasonable expectation that you will spend a fair portion of
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This is a good point, and certainly makes a lot of sense.
As a more concrete example of how this can affect salaried IT workers -- for those who are not familiar with how we operate -- there was a time, a little over a month ago, where I worked 10 hours solid, and barely stopped for 10 minutes to nibble some lunch while working (I was less productive typing with 1 hand, but otherwise was still getting work done even during lunch). I never even checked my personal email the entire day, let alone visit Slashdo
If you (or your software) needs to do this... (Score:5, Insightful)
.
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.
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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 managemen
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Next time, be the first to go, not the last.
Re:If you (or your software) needs to do this... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3)
https://xkcd.com/303/ [xkcd.com]
Although... the bastards keep giving me faster computers.
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And now we know the real reason for software bloat
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LOL. Have a fast computer and fast connection, however the security filter reduces that to slower than home DSL for internal sites. What good is a 100+ meg connection verifiable by DSL reports when the corporate VPN appears to be on a bank of 56K dial up modems?
Slashdot is what you do while waiting for Remote Desktop to refresh.
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Although... the bastards keep giving me faster computers.
That's why we have continuous integration...
Cracking the Whip (Score:3)
"... 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.
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Can you refocus that fast?
Wow.
Productive workplace activity .. (Score:2)
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Most windows apps can be automated. I'd spend a week writing a 'busy worker' script then never work again.
Just another clueless metric to be gamed.
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You can deliver in hours what it takes most people days with any of a number of tool suites.
Because 'most' are fucking morons.
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Which is why I don't like BYOD (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Previous studies (Score:2)
stoopeed hoomans... (Score:2)
Counterproductive (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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It's impossible to force people to use their minds only for work 100% of the time they are at work. People do not function that way. If it's an easy repetitive job that allows you to think about something else while completing your tasks, so that can be a higher percentage of productive time, but tasks that require mental focus especially on things nobody actually wants to focus on require a degree of freedom to maintain one's sanity. If I were watched every moment of the day my internet time would be repla
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Evil software for evil people... (Score:2)
One company I worked for implemented monitoring software to allow supervisors to keep closer tabs on their workers. On the very first day, my supervisor came running over to my cube to tell me that I shouldn't be browsing Amazon on company time or I would be written up. Except for one small problem: I had a breakfast burrito from the roach coach in hand as I was on my break. According to company policy, I can browse the Internet on my breaks. So I told him to bugger off.
As Tech Support on the phone (Score:2)
If after each call, I spent some time hitting the net, or reading a couple pages out of a novel, or whatever, just something to get my mind off that last call, my stats went up by around 20%-30%.
This wasn't a fluke either. I had a supervisor that made me take that time, and we had tracked the numbers for the days I did or didn't have that small diversion. According to him, it's like a mental palette cleanser. Well whatever is really go
What next? (Score:2)
Trying to sell data mining software I see (Score:3)
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.
Oh yeah? (Score:2)
Simply put, yes, I might be posting at /. at work, but I also sit here 50+ hours a week.
If you want to 'monitor' my productivity so that I'm working every minute of every day, damn sure I'm leaving at 5:00:01, and not walking in here one second early, either.
Two can play at the "bullshit minutiae game".
I would see this working in government positions (Score:2)
Forgot to post this also -- one place I could definitely see this being used is in government positions. I know a lot of state university employees, and the big downside they cite for their job is all the paperwork required for time tracking, timesheets, requesting days off, etc. According to them, you really need to balance this with the benefits and job security. Add in micromanaging bosses who are also scared about losing their positions, and it can really be a drain. One quote -- "I have to be in at 8:3
Time spent filling out timesheet (Score:4, Funny)
Curiously they didn't have any problem with this
Wasted time and effort (Score:2)
People just do facebook, porn and twitter on their smartphones, who needs the company computer with the man's spyware on it.
sorry , but (Score:2)
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?"
No conflict of interest here (Score:2)
> waste time while still appearing productive
Wow. Kudos to the new owners of slashdot. I would have guessed they'd have censored this story since it's clearly reminding all their users that we should probably close our browsers and get back to work.
Which is it capitalism? (Score:2)
One minute our advanced technology is going to give us more leisure time, the next it's extracting every last ounce of 'productivity' from us.
Make up your damn mind.
Quid Pro Quo (Score:2)
Joel Slatis, founder of Timesheets.com " “If you fill out a paper timecard and write down 8 a.m. when you come in at 8:02, no one is going to bat an eye. But if you do that when you leave too, that means you’re getting 5 minutes more a day. After a year, that’s a few days more vacation.”"
So, if I start at 757 and finish at 1702 every day then can I have a couple more days vacation? In the people's republic of Australia we do this, they are called rostered days off, basically we work
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine some people do this, especially given how easy it is to do coding work over the internet. You could easily work for 2 or 3 other clients via SSH while at your "actual" job.
Bootstrapped Startups (Score:3)
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.
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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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
It's the capitalist way! You are just demonstrating entrepreneurship - that most desirable of qualities.
Re:Second job question (Score:4, Funny)
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I've had two or three co-workers who have managed to do this. One of them did day trading during his "downtime", he was in charge of agent scheduling and call analytics at a call center so he probably had about 30 mins of actual work a day anyway. The other guy would grab contract work from Rent A Coder. He was in data entry and had scripted most of his job without telling anyone about it. The third guy had an addiction to on-line gambling. I wouldn't call that a job simply because he was so bad at it. In a
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Well, considering the way EvE works...
Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Thanks for the clickbait DICE! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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But person B gets fired instead because *drumroll* the stats say he slackin'.
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I find sometimes that I have to take a break and let my mind freewheel a bit. I suppose getting up and stretching my legs might be better for my health than staring at the wall or faffing on /. There are people who spend time playing around rather than working, but I suppose their work shows it or they've got a shit manager.
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Most companies (and people, and anything) are mediocre by definition. Since that's not acceptable to the stockholders, the managers turn to voodoo in desperation. Of course that simply makes things worse, both by wasting time and effort and by annoying the employees, but that's hubris for you.
A cynical, but possibly effective, solution might be for a company to buy and annul its own stock instead of paying dividends. That will cause the price to go up, thus simultanously pleasing the investors and getting r
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maximum POSSIBLE level of sustainable productivity
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I usually don't respond to ACs but hey, I'll bite.
Unless someone has the mad skills of typing on two keyboards at once and being productive on one machine while they relax on another, it doesn't matter where you surf the net from. The software would still show that you were unproductive on your work machine (because you busied yourself doing something else on another).
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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.