Comment by clarkmcc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clarkmcc | Hacker News Reader

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This is a naive take imo, especially in a small business where you're signing checks from your personal bank account to your employees. When I'm paying someone for work out of my own pocket, I'm going to make sure that they're reaching peak productivity. I don't know why this expectation wouldn't exist at a larger company as well.

Two things can be true at once: my employee can be delivering good results, and my employee can deliver even better results. Just because an employee is delivering results doesn't mean that is their maximum potential.

The other thing you're not considering is the fact that management has a responsibility to maximize productivity with the workforce they have. Where you see management failure, I see managements responsibility.

Now, none of this means there aren't poor managers (I've had those), nor does it mean that the solution is straight up surveillance. What I am saying is as someone who does manage, and as someone who does pay employees, this issue isn't nearly as cut-and-dry as you're making it out to be.

I don't understand your objection. I also run a business. I also pay people to do things for that business. The amount of money that eventually reaches my personal bank account does depend on the performance of the business and that in turn does depend on how much we pay people and how good a job they do for us.

So I care very much about whether they get those jobs done well. But I couldn't care less how much time they spend with their backside in a chair or how many messages they sent last week or whether they took a 1h30 lunch break yesterday because they went out shopping for a birthday present for their kid.

I default to trusting people working for us to be honest and do their job to an acceptable standard. I'm only interested in intervening if that isn't happening. In that case the kind of metrics under discussion here aren't going to help me figure out the real problem and how we can fix it. They aren't even likely to be worth much if as a last resort we do have to lose someone who can't get the job done properly and later we have to defend that decision in some kind of dispute proceeding.

This isn't to say we can't give feedback and provide training to help anyone working for us to perform better. But I don't see what relevance these kinds of metrics have to that either. I've always found talking with people openly about how things are going to be far more effective. YMMV.

Hey good on you if you’re signing over paychecks to employees that leave work to go shopping or take extended lunch breaks. Apparently I just don’t have that kind of cash to spend on non-productivity. I care very much how much time their backside is in the chair as that is significantly more correlated to productivity than shopping.

I care very much how much time their backside is in the chair as that is significantly more correlated to productivity than shopping.

I guess this is where our perspectives differ. I want the time when people are working to be productive. People have other things going on in their lives - sometimes very important things - and someone who is sitting in the chair with their mind on something else probably isn't going to be very productive.

Of course they are there to do a job and it's important that the job gets done properly and the rest of the team shouldn't have to pick up the slack if someone is abusing the relationship. But the most reliable way to keep the work on track IME is to make sure there's a decent work-life balance and build the mutual respect that any good relationship needs. Sometimes that means trusting people to get things done without imposing too many rules on when or how they do it.

I find the recent trend for experimenting with shorter working hours fascinating because so often the outcomes are counterintuitive - at least if you expected that shortening the hours would lead to a proportionate loss of productivity. One of the most interesting results I remember - I wish I'd thought to bookmark the paper but unfortunately I didn't - was working 9-3 every day with a half-hour allowed for lunch or something like that. It turned out that the company's performance actually went up during the period of the experiment. Participants reported that because everyone knew they had only that much time in the day to get things done the level of focus improved and there were fewer distractions and more awareness of not interrupting colleagues who were trying to concentrate. They managed to sustain that for something like 3 or 6 months and it's hard to argue it was just a novelty effect after so long.

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