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Comment by ff317 | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to see any convincing argument for monitoring employee behavior/attentiveness/time, for any job role or level, really.

The whole world needs to hurry up and learn that what matters is what your employees really accomplished. You don't need to track hours, or clicks, or chat lines, or documents opened. You need to track that they're producing the accomplishments they were hired to accomplish.

Did they fix the software bugs you asked them to fix this week? Did they sign up 10 new customers today? Did they write that research report yesterday? Did they flip all the burger patties they were supposed to flip today?

As a manager, if you can't define productivity in real terms like that, and manage employee performance based on real work outputs, you're just doing it wrong. Someone else that does it right at a competing team or org is going to eat your lunch eventually.

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>As a manager, if you can't define productivity in real terms like that, and manage employee performance based on real work outputs, you're just doing it wrong.

That's easier said than done for white collar work.

It is hard to detect liars, cheats, and saboteurs in workplaces with a baseline expectation of trust and low micromanagement.

The problem IMHO is not people who do a great job on time, but people who inflate timelines, and derail projects.

If you give someone a novel problem, and they say it is difficult and will take 80 hours instead of 20, the only way to catch them in the act is to duplicate the work yourself or with another employee. Similarly, if they raise lots of questions and involve other people, it is difficult to determine if these are valid complications, or manufactured complexity, without replicating the work.

Humans are pretty good at deceit. Opportunities for deceit increase radically once you have tasks that are more complex than pushing buttons or punching tickets

My retort would be:

If you have a singular employee doing a certain unique job, or a very small handful, then it's pretty trivial to instead manage them directly on a human level. You don't need Orwellian tech tools to have conversations with them and make a one-off evaluation as to whether they're giving it the effort and authenticity it should, and again: results matter. What were your expectations (in terms of accomplishments) in hiring this role, and are they being approximately met?

But if you have a lot of employees doing a similar job, then it just gets increasingly easier to be objective about it. Look at their actual outputs statistically, and find the outliers and focus effort on those cases. Does Joe's output sit two standard deviations below the median? Why? Maybe there's a good reason and you document it and move on, or maybe they're just being deceitful. I still don't think mouse/eyeball tracking or virtual timecards are going to help much.

welcome to a capitalist economy

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