91–100 of 109 posts
When your company culture is authoritarian to the point of installing tracking software on all employees' laptops and monitoring all their activity you might not be the best-suited organization for remote work.
I find the discussion around "remote work" mostly uninformative. What kind of work? The idea that remote work either is, or is not, productive has a hidden assumption that this is independent of the kind of work. I don't mean just that some kinds of work are impossible to do remotely (at present, anyway); I'm talking about differences among those jobs that can be done remotely. It's also so clearly dependent on thing…
They used the enforced remote work period caused by COVID in a company with little-to-no experience in remote work, then took the results of the company's quickly devised approach to remote working policy and used that to draw conclusions.
Basically, this study is worthless.
... Except that someone at the Economist figured (correctly) that this would be a good way to get traffic.
At my company this is for-sure true, broadly across teams. Management has explicitly taken advantage of this by booking a lot of recurring meetings that start 8/8:15/8:30am in the morning when in the "before times" it was generally a 9am start. Management also feels comfortable sending Slack DMs at 6-7pm as well, knowing people aren't commuting so they can get an answer. Regardless of setting boundaries, the noise ju…
It's a bit annoying that some employers think that somehow they own the commute time you've reclaimed.
I'm lucky enough to be able to switch off my phone as soon as my working hours finish, but even in my (fairly laid back) environment I had to remind my manager about those boundaries.
What pisses me off a bit is that these things happen when they can be completely avoided, e.g. there is no fire to put out, the question could wait till the morning.
Economist's distillation is borderline disinformative, especially since it runs with overgeneralizations without qualifying what the "work" in question was. This study was based on a single IT services company in Asia.
As a rule of thumb, when someone makes generalizations about "remote work" the first thing to ask should be "what is the work", because there is a complex, non-linear interaction between the remoteness and the job description. This is important because I think there is some effort to subsidize remote productivity losses in certain ladders *cough* managers *cough* by lumping all remote work together and setting policies based on averages.
This is the same study that was on HN a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27467764 Economist's distillation is borderline disinformative, especially since it runs with overgeneralizations without qualifying what the "work" in question was. This study was based on a single IT services company in Asia. As a rule of thumb, when someone makes generalizations about "remote work" the first thing to ask should b…
If companies really believe that they are tracking productivity with automated metric collection, then they should tie compensation directly to the metrics. If, on the other hand, they believe that the metrics are only reliable when done in a secretive/clandestine manner then they must, by definition, not correlate very well to actual productivity. If this is the case, the "trackers" have some explaining to do in ter…
I doubt most people, even the trackers, believe that tracking these automated metrics is high-fidelity enough to be linear with value created. See also Goodheart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Naturally, many metrics can be gamed, but to the extent that can be gamed is also a good indication of the actual value of the metric. For example, a sales person's compensation is typically tied to a metric: the revenue they brought in in a particular quarter. I'd suggest that metric is pretty important and hard to game. Similarly, a CEO's compensation is often tied to EPS, again pretty valuable and hard to game. A factory worker's compensation could be tied to the number of widgets that they create. Tying a software developer's compensation to mouse clicks and keyboard entry for example, is a very gameable and thus low value metric.