NYT story on the rise of productivity tracking software

[The Ex-Factor]

If there's a story that'll turn you into a leftist raging at the dehumanizing nature of capitalism this is the one:

Ms. Kraemer, the finance executive, thought she had seen it all. Years after working at Enron, the energy giant turned business blowup, she and former colleagues still held reunions to commemorate what they had been through. But she had never encountered anything like the practices of ESW Capital, a Texas-based group of business software companies.

She and her co-workers could turn off their trackers and take breaks anytime, as long as they hit 40 hours a week, which the company logged in 10-minute chunks. During each of those intervals, at some moment they could never anticipate, cameras snapped shots of their faces and screens, creating timecards to verify whether they were working. Some bosses allowed a few “bad” timecards — showing interruptions, or no digital activity — according to interviews with two dozen current and former employees. Beyond that, any snapshot in which they had paused or momentarily stepped away could cost them 10 minutes of pay. Sometimes those cards were rejected; sometimes the workers, knowing the rules, didn’t submit them at all.

Hospice chaplains are not immune either:

Rev. Margo Richardson of Minneapolis became a hospice chaplain to help patients wrestle with deep, searching questions. “This is the big test for everyone: How am I going to face my own death?” she said.

 But two years ago, her employer started requiring chaplains to accrue more of what it called “productivity points.” A visit to the dying: as little as one point. Participating in a funeral: one and three-quarters points. A phone call to grieving relatives: one-quarter point.

And of course there's that one brown-noser in there who is totally on board with employer monitoring:

Sara Cooksey
Operations Associate

Ms. Cooksey craves greater tracking, she said, because she suspects that a colleague on her team is doing far less than she is. “There’s no accountability when we’re working from home,” she said.

Of course, there is discussion in the article that this sort of thing has been happening at places like Amazon for years, but now it is striking white-collar workers as well. Have any of you worked at a company that does this kind of thing?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/14/business/worker-productivity-tracking.html

[Kamala's side hoe]

Sounds very 996-esque

[Aurelius]

Baumol's cost disease is merciless.

https://patientrevolution.org/whywerevolt

[xavier110]

The tracking software makes some sense if you’re paid hourly. Less so if for salaried workers.

[DaleCooper]

If a person's productivity can't be measured simply by looking at their accomplishments and whatever work they submit throughout the day/week then their job is likely an unnecessary, fake role. There are many of those in the corporate world.

[Del Tachi]

If a person's productivity can't be measured simply by looking at their accomplishments and whatever work they submit throughout the day/week then their job is likely an unnecessary, fake role. There are many of those in the corporate world.

This is the most uncomfortable aspect of the post-industrial, white-collar economy:  most 40-hour-a-week jobs could be done in 15. 

[DaleCooper]

If a person's productivity can't be measured simply by looking at their accomplishments and whatever work they submit throughout the day/week then their job is likely an unnecessary, fake role. There are many of those in the corporate world.

This is the most uncomfortable aspect of the post-industrial, white-collar economy:  most 40-hour-a-week jobs could be done in 15. 

It's so true.

To play devil's advocate though, a lot of the salary comes from paying someone to essentially be on-call at the office. If you're the guy who helps clients fix problems with their payments or whatever, and none of that is happening at the moment, it doesn't make any sense to invest in productivity monitoring just to make sure they're doing busy work every second of the day, since it'd be obvious without such software if that person was neglecting his responsibilities and ignoring calls or something like that. And then of course there are a lot of white collar jobs that revolve around completing tasks rather than hours worked. Ideally these companies would set some expectations on the minimum amount of accomplishments they expect to be completed each week and then make sure that people are complying with those expectations, but then employers will think they're missing out on something because there's always more work to be done.

From my experience, employers being cagey about what they expect to be completed and by what time has probably hindered productivity more than anything in the white collar environments I've been in. This obsession with doing something, whatever it is, just to appear productive every hour of the day gets in the way of actually channeling your energy into something important.

[sting in the rafters]

If a person's productivity can't be measured simply by looking at their accomplishments and whatever work they submit throughout the day/week then their job is likely an unnecessary, fake role. There are many of those in the corporate world.

This is the most uncomfortable aspect of the post-industrial, white-collar economy:  most 40-hour-a-week jobs could be done in 15.  

It's so true.

To play devil's advocate though, a lot of the salary comes from paying someone to essentially be on-call at the office. If you're the guy who helps clients fix problems with their payments or whatever, and none of that is happening at the moment, it doesn't make any sense to invest in productivity monitoring just to make sure they're doing busy work every second of the day, since it'd be obvious without such software if that person was neglecting his responsibilities and ignoring calls or something like that. And then of course there are a lot of white collar jobs that revolve around completing tasks rather than hours worked. Ideally these companies would set some expectations on the minimum amount of accomplishments they expect to be completed each week and then make sure that people are complying with those expectations, but then employers will think they're missing out on something because there's always more work to be done.

From my experience, employers being cagey about what they expect to be completed and by what time has probably hindered productivity more than anything in the white collar environments I've been in. This obsession with doing something, whatever it is, just to appear productive every hour of the day gets in the way of actually channeling your energy into something important.

Can vouch for, I came back from vacation today and got halfway through a week and change’s invoices/statements in 8 hours. Why do we need any performance metrics other than past due statements for missed direct cost invoices/basic budget department variance analysis? Hell, how do you determine the break-even in a cost-benefit analysis of “productivity software” for a service-oriented company? Scientific management and its derivative management styles are so antithetical to contemporary office life.

[Aurelius]

Remember the Harry Truman quote that was in Averroes' signature for a long time?

[Meclazine for Israel]

I have had tracking software and all my corporate emails monitored I would say for the last 2 years. Some bosses just add another folder in their Outlook and all of your sent and received emails go in there. They own the network.

You just don't use email as much. Keep it tidy, joke free and short. And when you work from home, change to your home PC.

I have had keystroke loggers etc installed to see how much you type. Time monitoring to see what time you arrive at and leave work.

At the end of the day, if you get the results, companies will keep you.

But this style of software analysis will challenge the mental fortitude of some, if not most people.

[pbrower2a]

If a person's productivity can't be measured simply by looking at their accomplishments and whatever work they submit throughout the day/week then their job is likely an unnecessary, fake role. There are many of those in the corporate world.

Creative people cannot have their work measured by sheer volume. Some people can write ten pages of cr@ppy prose in a couple hours, and needless to say, their literary work will need heavy marketing to make any best-seller list. I have found that my best painting comes quickly and my worst is laborious. If you look at a Matisse or Picasso and say "I could have done that", then you don't know how those artists became so great. It takes just as much time to play the violin part in Mendelssohn's Concerto in E badly as to play it well.

With bureaucrats... the ability to shuffle paper is genuine skill, but that is mostly control of assets more than creation of wealth.

Much white-collar work is reading, which is hard to measure. Even so, we probably have too many white-collar workers producing nothing tangible and too few people using their hands to make, modify, or improve things.

[DaleCooper]

If a person's productivity can't be measured simply by looking at their accomplishments and whatever work they submit throughout the day/week then their job is likely an unnecessary, fake role. There are many of those in the corporate world.

Creative people cannot have their work measured by sheer volume. Some people can write ten pages of cr@ppy prose in a couple hours, and needless to say, their literary work will need heavy marketing to make any best-seller list. I have found that my best painting comes quickly and my worst is laborious. If you look at a Matisse or Picasso and say "I could have done that", then you don't know how those artists became so great. It takes just as much time to play the violin part in Mendelssohn's Concerto in E badly as to play it well.

With bureaucrats... the ability to shuffle paper is genuine skill, but that is mostly control of assets more than creation of wealth.

Much white-collar work is reading, which is hard to measure. Even so, we probably have too many white-collar workers producing nothing tangible and too few people using their hands to make, modify, or improve things.

I want jobs to clearly define what they reasonably expect their employees to consistently accomplish in a given amount of time, and then judge those employees based on their ability to meet those expectations. Most companies are never going to do this.

All the productivity tracking, the return to office, the HR team-building exercises (and anything else HR makes people do), the corporate all hands meetings, they're all heads of the same monster that is fake busy work. But too many people are making a lot of money off of that game for them to ever change, even though it would be better for business to do so.

[pbrower2a]

Certain employers (retail is especially infamous for this) are infamous for spying on employees. Security cameras can be turned away from potential shoplifters to employees that on principle management sees as thieves and slackers awaiting the chance to do what they want to do. Such employers typically want time between customers to involve sweeping and dusting with no talking between store clerks. Complete atomization of the workplace might have its faults as in creating a miserable workforce, but there is always someone available to take the job when someone leaves through a firing or resignation. I have always assumed that the employer listens into any conversations with outsiders -- and they had better not be lining up a job interview elsewhere.

Companies like this operate on theory S -- which can mean "serfdom" or "slavery" depending on your taste. You are getting minimum wage and while on the premises you owe your employer everything. (You have surely heard of Theory X and Theory Y if you are old enough).

An occasional pass through can show whether employees are doing something other than dusting, sweeping, or calling customers when no customers are around... but as you can tell this is a zone of low productivity. People able to do something else typically quit to work elsewhere. People take retail jobs because "I don't want to work in a stinking factory", and after a few weeks they realize that the pay is better and  there is some chance of advancement. They say "I don't want to be a secretary", and in a short time they are taking clerical courses to be a receptionist or file clerk.