> Focus on output, not hours. It’s virtually impossible to track how employees are actually using their time. Instead, managers should focus on the quality of their work.
This was the most important change to the workplace since 2020, and it should have always been this way in the first place.
Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs. Many were laid off and the rest of the office is better for it.
The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity.
> Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt.
Bean counters want their cake and eat it too.
I guess their brains go something like this: "if you're done already then work some more, I pay you for 8 hours!!!11" (when you're done early) and "we're not hitting deadlines, work more than 8 hours! I pay you for output, not for hours!!!11" (when you're not)
> The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls.
Written communications skills are a superpower in a remote working environment. Unfortunately, very few people have it.
Lack of typing skills, ESL, Gen-Z slang, and internal acronyms makes for the perfect storm.
All of those problems you mention are infinitely worse when there is no record of the conversation.
Luckily people are capable of learning skills. Being so addicted to Gen-Z slang and internal acronyms that you are unable to effectively convey information to your colleagues isn't a disability to be accommodated.
This doesn't explain "Theory of the firm" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm.
Employees shouldn't theoretically exist - everything should just be subcontracted, but for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs).
Companies don't have perfect plans, contracts, and KPIs, and never will, unless someone like Jeff Bezos manages to turn the extraction of profit from human assets into an exact science in the company.
Fixed time employees have to hit their deadlines and also have some slack time to use their initiative. KPIs effectively means a much more rigid adherence to a plan, rather than trusting employees to invest their time at work on things that the employee (not their boss) thinks is valuable, with minimal friction. I guess this will be changing though, since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.
> since employees with slack time can no longer be trusted to hopefully work on something that's beneficial for the company.
This is firmly the fault of the company(ies). When raises are so few or so little that the only way to help yourself is to change companies, or when despite your "dedication" to the company you are afraid of layoffs at anytime, you aren't going to care about the benefit of the company and are solely looking after your own interests.
Companies expect loyalty but give none back in return anymore, and employee attitude now is a direct result of the company's behavior.
> for some reason firms that employ people (with fixed time contracts) usually do better than some kind of virtual company that just subcontracts everything out (essentially managing by KPIs)
I think you'll find plenty of real world reasons if you listen to the experiences of employees and contractors.
> Time spent on tasks was never as relevant as hitting deadlines without backtracking or building up technical debt. Managers and their employees alike only ever focused on hours because they hated their jobs.
Where I work, the budget people like to have at least some idea of how much different projects actually cost. And they like to know time spent on capitalizable vs not things, which I guess has something to do with taxes.
Where I work, we still log hours towards jira tasks and those end up in projects on timesheets somewhere in servicenow.
I'm not saying that hours aren't relevant at all. I'm saying that tracking hours towards tasks is a totally separate concern that should be decoupled from the workday and individual time management in general. This is especially true if your employees are on salary and often on-call as well.
You've gotta have some kind of secret sauce if text or recordings produces the same or better output than real conversation. I haven't seen it happen, though I'd love it if I did.
Text works best when everyone involved in the chat is on the same level of deeper understanding. You're correct that this has pushed some forms of management away from the discussion, and I'm saying that's a net productivity gain for most workplaces. It accelerates the discussion towards results instead of constant hand holding and other unproductive social pressures.
Also, text and recordings hold people accountable and give reason to think more deeply about what is said. It's a huge improvement. If someone needs more time to focus on what to say or to understand what was said, they can now take it.
Written text tends to eliminate all the backhanded insults because there's a record now :)
> The other massive improvement has been moving most conversations to text or recorded calls. It has been a chainsaw to the sociopaths who used to get in the way of real productivity.
This is probably the biggest productivity shift I seen in my career, async communication is just so much more normal these days and it is enough for ~80% of the cases.
And this is not only about text chat, but the tools and practices like issue tracking, PR reviews, shared file drives, collaborative editing (google-docs/ confluence/notion/etc).
Issue tracking has always been there since I started but it feels it has gotten a lot better compared to back then. Even Jira is not nearly as bad as some of the tools we used to use.
Since most employees are now using LLMs for most tasks, we have a more standardized way now for tracking who is working, based on LLM usage. No need to vaguely measure “output”, which doesn’t give you realtime info until a task is delivered. This is why we are now pushing LLM tools across the entire org.
In my last job, I was paid hourly wages, but the work we were doing was piecework. They could have structured our pay around how many pieces we finished during a shift.
It was indeed WFH and, during the lockdowns, more or less a dream job. The supervisors were lasseiz-faire and there was minimal surveillance of our activities. They repeatedly explained that the quality and attention to our work was more important than the speed or efficiency we could achieve.
However, I was operating at a rather advanced level, and my talents permitted me to absolutely burn through that piecework at an accelerated rate compared to anyone else. I could do dozens, hundreds in an hour if they were uncomplicated. And I could finish them with accuracy, attention to detail, and a personal touch in the feedback each time.
But going at the speed I did, there were mistakes made, and I tended to be a bit sloppy in overlooking things, when reading for comprehension would've improved if I slowed down. My colleagues offered gentle feedback about this between the lines, except the main feedback was focused on their KPIs and metrics, which I was far exceeding by every standard. But the haste took its toll on my intellect. I could barely catch my breath after some long sessions. I could fill a Slack channel before anyone else had a chance to chime in. I felt numb and drained, and I forgot every student's name, and they all blurred into one.
Thankfully, we rarely came together for meetings. They just weren't seen as necessary and it was true. Meetings were reserved for special trainings. At one point, some of the coworkers were putting together short self-care sessions, like yoga instruction, which was really cool of them!
But I was being paid by the hour! If I finished 50 pieces of work, I was paid the same as a guy who plodded through three of them! Was that unfair? I don't know. Because the time scale did matter; we were often slammed with a huge amount of work, and we did operate with deadlines. But other than kudos and verbal recognitions, there was never an incentive to clear backlogs or work priority tasks as they were publicized.
So in the end, I felt a little underappreciated, you know? But, I loved the company so much, and my colleagues and supervisors were great, and it wasn't really about the money at the end of the day for me; it was about the company's mission and my own fulfillment by doing something valuable for them.
Your own description of your work seems self-contradictory?
You have a paragraph that says you could work much faster than others and still "finish them with accuracy, attention to detail" and then in the very next paragraph you note that going so fast meant you were making mistakes and overlooking things.
This is only to say that I'm not sure how to interpret your own description.
It also sounds like the KPIs that had been set did not match the stated goals of your supervisors. KPIs focused on speed of output while your supervisors are telling you that quality and attention to your work is more important. I see this as a classic example of an organisation falling into the trap of just measuring what's easy to measure because they can't measure what they actually care about.
The KPIs weren't focused on speed at all; don't know how you came to that conclusion. Their KPIs were in-line with their spoken criteria and they were always calibrating for best outcomes.
The only time speed or volume was at issue was when we had a backlog. Sometimes we would begin to miss deadlines/time frames and sometimes there was priority work to be picked up. And AFAIK, KPIs weren't looking at those as a negative. It was just one of those productivity issues we encountered in staffing vs. amount of work vs. deadlines.
Basically my work was excellent by all objective criteria and I was receiving fantastic performance reviews. But I still had room for improvement, don't you see? Simply because of the high rate of speed, I could personally tell that it could've been better, more, nicer, with some TLC and some better pacing. That doesn't mean that anyone else noticed or cared. It was mostly my personal assessments of how I was doing.
But they did drop hints -- once or twice, an issue was raised and my mentor said "It's easy to miss if you're going quickly lol". It was just a hint and hardly even criticism, just a reminder that slowing down wouldn't hurt.
And it's true that the rewards weren't there. If I finished everything then everything was finished and sometimes I was forced to clock out without work to do. That was the drawback of hourly wages for, essentially, piecework.
Slowing down was fraught with complications. I type 100wpm, my thoughts operate at a certain pace, and I would get into a groove like playing a video game. Would you slow down in a video game to do a better job? If I slowed down, would I do better or would the artificial pace cause trouble? I often tried playing ambient, tempo-less or downtempo music to slow my pace, but I would typically just find a rhythm and go with it, rather than artificially slow down. Honestly, due to physical issues and the whole WFH distraction, it was often difficult for me to stay at my desk for a stretch.
I'm kind of confused by your writing. So your argument is that you didn't have incentive to do a shit ton of work compared to others, but by your own admission, your work was subpar because of the amount you pushed out.
Why would that get rewarded? I'm not trying to be hateful, I'm trying to understand your thought process.
Couldn't you just slow down and do really good work? Wouldn't that solve both problems?