“What companies need is better management”

The title of this newsletter is a sub-heading in an article written by Rani Molla for Vox called “Your boss is obsessed with productivity without knowing what it means.”

Molla elegantly captures what I have been writing and talking about since the pandemic started. Even though many organisations made record profits during the pandemic when many of their employees worked from home, many bosses are demanding employees return to the office citing productivity as the driver.

The problem is that these bosses do not know how to measure the productivity of their workers, especially knowledge workers.

“Some 71 per cent of business leaders say they’re under immense pressure to squeeze more productivity out of their workers, according to a new Slack survey of 18,000 knowledge workers, including managers. But most are measuring what workers put in, rather than what they put out” writes Molla.

Thanks to Sakari Kyrö for bringing the article to my attention.

The first signs

The first signs that bosses had become obsessed with productivity were evident in March 2020. I first reported on the dramatic increase in the global demand for employee surveillance software in February 2021.

Top10vpn first reported on the increase in June 2020 and has continued monitoring demand since then.

The global demand for employee surveillance software increased by 75% in March 2020 compared with the 2019 monthly average. The demand the following month was also 61% higher than in 2019.

The most disturbing revelation is that the demand has continued to increase post-pandemic. Employee surveillance software has become the new normal, logging keystrokes and mouse movement, capturing screenshots, tracking location, and even activating webcams and microphones.

Demand increased by 75% in Jan 2022 - the biggest increase in demand compared to 2019 since March 2020.

There has been sustained demand – 54% higher from March 2020 to June 2023 compared to 2019. Employee monitoring software demand has been 49% higher on average since the start of 2023 than in 2019.

This chart shows the month-by-month increase in demand for employee surveillance software compared to the 2019 monthly average.

It is worrying that bosses decided they needed to install surveillance software to track employee activity to determine productivity. Firstly, activity does not equate to productivity. Secondly, bosses worried about employee productivity as soon as they could not see them at a desk in the office, but they had no idea if they were being productive when they were at a desk in the office.

Theatre

When bosses decide to monitor employee activity, it results in “productivity theatre.” Productivity theatre is engaging in an activity that is not productive but gives the appearance of working.

It has become an ongoing game of cat and mouse. As bosses introduced new methods of surveillance, employees responded with innovative ways of thwarting the “bossware”.

When employers started to monitor keyboard strokes, the random keyboard input device was invented. When employers started to monitor what was happening on an employee screen, a tool was invented that cycled through a prepared list of web pages at regular intervals.

When an employer found a way to block the use of mouse jigglers, an employee tied his mouse to his desk fan which moved the mouse back and forth. Block that one boss!

In this newsletter from May 2022, I listed many of the covert devices, apps, and practices being used by employees to simulate activity so that the boss thinks you are always on. They included simple ploys such as the paper clip in the keyboard insert key to keep the keyboard active, to more elaborate tricks such as the Lego robot mouse mover, the toy train, the upright fan, and the mouse mover video.

Before the pandemic, mouse jigglers were niche devices used by the police and security agencies to keep seized computers from logging out and requiring a password to access. Plugged into a laptop USB port, the jiggler randomly moves the cursor, faking activity when there is no one there.

According to ABC Science, sales boomed when the pandemic hit. James Franklin, a young Melbourne-based software engineer, mailed 5,000 jigglers to customers all over Australia between 2020 and 2022. Often, he had to upgrade the device to evade an employer’s latest methods to detect and block them. He said, “Unbelievable demand is the best way to describe it. When Zoom became a thing (along with) activity status and employee tracking, it became almost an expectation for people to have them.”

In my newsletter in August this year, I referred to this behaviour as a new form of presenteeism. This is employees appearing “present” but not necessarily productive. They create the impression of being “always on” to gain favour from their bosses.

Slack partnered with Qualtrics to survey more than 18,000 desk workers – up and down the corporate ladder and across industries in nine countries around the globe, to find out what makes certain workers more efficient and productive. The State of Work 2023 report revealed that 63% of workers make an effort to keep their status active online, even if they are not working at that moment. On average, employees spend 32% of their time on performative work that gives the appearance of productivity.

They are focused on productivity signals such as keeping the status on Teams, Skype, and Slack, showing green, and responding to emails more quickly than necessary. When employees are focused on productivity theatre and signals, productivity decreases.

Molla sums it up 

“The Slack survey found that 60 per cent of executives were tracking activity metrics — things like emails sent or hours worked — as the main way to measure productivity. The problem is that doing so incentivizes things like sending more emails or staying at your desk longer, not making better widgets.”

What is productivity?

How do we define productivity? Molla rightly states that what productivity means can vary by job, industry, and even person.

“Does it mean making more widgets or better widgets? And what makes a good widget?

There are many parts of people’s jobs, especially knowledge workers’ jobs, that aren’t straightforward. Knowledge workers aren’t necessarily making widgets themselves. They might be coming up with new ways of selling those widgets, or improving those widgets, or writing about those widgets, or coaching others on how to spot new widgets.”

I firmly believe that regardless of the work you do, bosses who are measuring productivity on inputs rather than outputs are getting it fundamentally wrong. Productivity must be measured on the outcomes and value-added that an employee delivers.

If we put knowledge workers aside for a moment, consider call centre staff who are measured on the number of calls that they take during a given period. This is not a measure of the value that they delivered to customers. This measurement incentivises the wrong behaviour, that is, keeping call times as short as possible, to answer more calls. The call centre staff are unintentionally encouraged to get the customer off the phone which means that they may not be delivering the service that the customer expects. This is a paramount example of the wrong metrics driving the wrong behaviours.

If you are measuring productivity based on the number of widgets produced, employees will strive to produce more widgets than they did last week, often to the detriment of quality.

When we try to measure the productivity of knowledge workers, it gets far more challenging. Knowledge workers think for a living and therefore their outputs are often intangible and difficult to define. We need a mindset shift regarding how we measure performance and productivity. Take the example of a knowledge worker tasked with undertaking some research and producing a proposal paper. The process of producing a proposal paper is not reliably measurable in quantitative terms. You do not know that a proposal paper written in 10 weeks is better than one written in five weeks.

The value of the proposal paper is not in its production but in its usefulness. You must measure the outcome of its use.

We must also look at the drivers of productivity and measure the drivers. Research tells us that when employees are happy and engaged, they are more productive. Measure and increase employee engagement and you will increase productivity.

Better management

What we need is better management which can resolve these issues. We need management that can lead a distributed team and measure performance equitably regardless of employee location. We need management that trusts employees to do the right thing. Employee surveillance just shouts, “I do not trust you.”

My first newsletter of this year was called “Resolution or Resolve” and was a call to action for employers to change how they measure employee performance. This is a summary of that article and the changes needed in management.

Performance, not productivity

Employees want to be measured on the value they deliver, not the volume they deliver. Productivity is a poor indicator of performance. The number of hours an employee is at a desk does not correlate with the outcomes they deliver that contribute to the organisation. Performance must be measured based on outcomes and value-add.

Clarity, not confusion

When setting goals for employees to achieve, there must be clarity, collaboration, and alignment. Management must get employees to play back what they have heard regarding their goals to ensure understanding, and clarification can be provided where there is a misunderstanding.

Goals and outcomes should be co-created and agreed on. The leader and the employee should discuss:

·      Outcomes to be achieved

·      Timeframes

·      Perceived obstacles and blockers

·      Factors that will support the achievement of outcomes

·      Ways in which the outcomes will be measured

Equity, not exclusion

Every leader must be aware of proximity bias. Proximity bias is when managers place a higher value on the work they can physically see someone doing while discounting work that is being done out of sight. Everyone must be treated and evaluated equally. There must be a level playing field.

Regular, not random

Performance should be assessed regularly. Performance discussed once a year at the annual performance review is an absolute waste of time. Neither party has a clear picture of performance over 12 months, and it could often be too late for the employee to make a change in direction and/or behaviour. Informing an employee that they need to improve their communication skills based on an event that happened 9 months ago precludes the employee from making immediate changes.

Efficacy, not exception

Performance should be assessed regularly and frequently to look at trends. There may be variations in employee performance for many reasons, whether personal or professional or both. These variations should not result in an overreaction. Performance measurement is a process not an event.

Summary

Stop measuring what employees put in and measure what they put out.

Stop measuring outputs and start measuring outcomes.

When you measure the right things, you will get the right results.