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Measure results, not hours

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Re: Measure results, not hours

#71

Post by PakG1 »

Apreche wrote: post #16

This seems to be common sense to everyone who is not a "boss" and unheard of to anyone who is. Find me a company that actually follows this philosophy, and sign me up. I have yet to find one real example. Here's the real problem companies face with people like me. If I only had to get the work done, I could be in the office for maybe one day a week. With all that free time, I would be able to do something on my own s…

You basically ran into Parkinson's Law. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law

Re: Measure results, not hours

#72

Post by tehwalrus »

My old company had this down to a T.

First, you only had to complete your EU mandated 37.5 hours per week. If you went over (without a good reason like an urgent project deliverable,) they would ask why you were being inefficient, and if you needed more managerial support or more resource on your team.

Second, you had to account for every one of those 37.5 hours against tasks and their estimates - and you often didn't write your own estimates (and when you did, it was with manager review.)

Your results, therefore, were based on slip and gain against quite realistic estimates, and if there was serious slip on an estimate (e.g. 2 hours work took you a day) there would inevitably be a review (although, generally, one focussing on how you could improve next time.) Hours worked were measured too, though, and if there was a lot of work and not enough resource and you stayed late to fill the gap, you were rewarded (especially if this was sustained over a long period of time.)

If I procrastinated some of my time away at this place, I had to catch up the time later in order to make my weekly status look acceptable. As I worked there, I got better at getting my assigned stuff done during standard office hours, and avoiding working late evenings and Saturdays (which I hated more than resisting procrastination, it turned out!)

Oh, a final point - they also had flexible working hours (one guy would start at about 3pm and work until midnight! I tended to fall into a 10-6 or 11-7 pattern..) so if people weren't in at 9am, noone raised an eyebrow. Indeed, I was told not to arrive before 10am on my first day, as there would likely be noone to let me in.

I think ultimately this is about organisational culture - something you have to concentrate on defining early on in a new company, and which is almost impossible to change. This is one reason I want to start my own company when I finish my PhD, rather than working for someone else's which doesn't get my work style and punishes me for not fitting in. This is partly why I left that old employer, although it wasn't to do with their perception of how hard I worked, it was a different aspect of their culture.

Re: Measure results, not hours

#73

Post by vonmoltke »

wilfra wrote: post #22
tkahn6 wrote: post #6

The hourly rate thing has always bothered me. At my internship at Bloomberg the maximum amount of billable hours per week was 40 and usually they'd expect you to put in 8 hours a day. More often than not, I'd finish an assigned task before the day or week was through or I'd be 'direction blocked' where I would be waiting for approval in a design/architecture decision from my mentor or manager while they were busy wit…

Was it like that for people who had been on the job for years, or just interns? If just interns, they probably had issues in the past with not doing it this way. You've got to earn trust etc.

Can't speak for Bloomberg, but its like that at any company that words on US Government contracts. USG accounting always requires time and materials records for every contract, even fixed price ones. That means everyone who works on USG contracts must keep a time card showing what contracts they worked on and how may hours they worked, completed daily. Every company expects their employees to bill an average of 8 hours per day for some period; at my former employer that meant 40 hours per week, while at my current employer it means X hours per calendar month (where X = 8 * workdays). Underbilling for salaried employees is covered out of company overhead.

Billing additional hours is a little complicated and varies based on the specific projects and company accounting practices. My current employer pays hour-for-hour for extra time billed, and we record all time worked. My previous employer had a hard cutoff at 40 hours (unless overtime was authorized), with the first 40 billable hours worked being what got recorded. If overtime was authorized for a given contract, one needed to work at least 48 hours per week on it to get paid extra, at which point you got paid hour-for-hour. I don't know why they did this, because the USG's preferred method for recording work hours by salaried employees who are not being paid extra is to record all hours worked but reduce the hourly rate accordingly.

Re: Measure results, not hours

#74

Post by MattRogish »

rpwilcox wrote: post #66
jonathanwallace wrote: post #2

Wow, this sounds like it came directly out of the ROWE playbook, http://www.gorowe.com/ , something we practice at my job to much success.

I also would be interested in a blog post about this. Seems to me (and some other commentators) on this thread, that very often there's an "infinite" amount of work to do, and I don't see how that squares with "we pay you for results". A team I was on a few years ago did scrum (poorly). We had a list of tickets the product owner wanted done for the sprint. Except, more often than not, additional tickets would be adde…

I work with Jonathan as a client - and my organization also does ROWE. I can say for a certainty that it works great for Rails projects. It comes down to intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation.

Hours, made-up deadlines, etc. are all forms of extrinsic motivation which have been proven to destroy creativity, problem solving, and productivity.

ROWE needs to be a part of a bigger whole at how we look at and motivate employees. If you just drop ROWE into your current organization without taking a systems-level view, you're likely to fail. ROWE is like Agile - it's not a panacea - but if you zoom out and incorporate the philosophy at a systems level, I think you'll get great results.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mG-hhWL_ug

Re: Measure results, not hours

#75

Post by wilfra »

Evbn wrote: post #41
wilfra wrote: post #20

"committed" "dedicated" "hard worker" None of these address intelligence nor even competence - and I think it is a mistake to assume a good manager wouldn't realize that. If a star performer showed up late, left early and never arrived to a meeting on time but they were doing amazing work, they'd be given a lot of leeway to do that - again, by a good manager. That is how sales works. Top salesmen do whatever they wan…

Being late for meetings is incompatible with doing good work. Either you are interfering with other people's work by stiffing them when they need to talk to you, or you are interrupting your productivity by showing up at all. 10x engineers don't do it on short hours. They do it by working harder in an environment where everyone is smart. Cf Claude Shannon ("achievement is exponential, working 10% longer has a compoun…

"10x engineers don't do it on short hours. They do it by working harder in an environment where everyone is smart. Cf Claude Shannon ("achievement is exponential, working 10% longer has a compounding effect, like interest in a bank account") or Randy Pausch ("if you want me to tell you the secret of my success, call me any Friday night at my office")"

That is some Gold. Thanks!

Re: Measure results, not hours

#76

Post by rpwilcox »

tehwalrus wrote: post #72

My old company had this down to a T. First, you only had to complete your EU mandated 37.5 hours per week. If you went over (without a good reason like an urgent project deliverable,) they would ask why you were being inefficient, and if you needed more managerial support or more resource on your team. Second, you had to account for every one of those 37.5 hours against tasks and their estimates - and you often didn'…

It's great that your organization is responsible about it. Sounds like there's a great deal of trust in your organization.

It sounds like there are numerous ways for this to go badly - ie: when it gets noticed that you went over 37.5 hours in some organizations that might start to be a blame game, or you'd start getting requests to "we need it done, but we also need you to do it off the clock so we don't get into trouble for breaking EU regs".

It's great that your organization sees that people might be in trouble and has a mature (aka: not blaming) attitude. I guess I always assume organizations will adopt ROWE without making the appropriate cultural changes.

Re: Measure results, not hours

#77

Post by rpwilcox »

MattRogish wrote: post #74
rpwilcox wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also would be interested in a blog post about this. Seems to me (and some other commentators) on this thread, that very often there's an "infinite" amount of work to do, and I don't see how that squares with "we pay you for results". A team I was on a few years ago did scrum (poorly). We had a list of tickets the product owner wanted done for the sprint. Except, more often than not, additional tickets would be adde…

I work with Jonathan as a client - and my organization also does ROWE. I can say for a certainty that it works great for Rails projects. It comes down to intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. Hours, made-up deadlines, etc. are all forms of extrinsic motivation which have been proven to destroy creativity, problem solving, and productivity. ROWE needs to be a part of a bigger whole at how we look at and motivate employe…

Yes, Agile in not a panacea: you can't just drop it into an existing org and expect things to be rainbows and kittens. It needs to be accepted both at the grass-roots level AND management level.

Then when Agile fails a person or an organization it's Agile's (or Scrum's) fault... when it's really a people problem.

I guess I'm just waiting for the blog articles, 10 years from now, bemoaning ROWE because it didn't save an organization with a toxic environment. :-) (And feeling sorry for the poor developers involved).

Re: Measure results, not hours

#78

Post by ijl »

mkempe wrote: post #63
Evbn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private schools are mostly the same structurally, they just have better tracking/pace since class sizes are smaller, and they can exclude disruptive students.

Montessori schools do not follow the assembly-line model of education. Montessori schools are all private because institutionalized educational systems aren't interested in switching their fundamental philosophy of education. There is one exception, the Milwaukee school system. I'm not aware of other places that have tried the same.

It's surprising, but I actually count 91 public non-charter Montessori schools. Often they're magnet schools or 'academies', and it looks like very often just elementary.

Re: Measure results, not hours

#79

Post by stretchwithme »

jacques_chester wrote: post #48
stretchwithme wrote: post #3

Carol Dweck says we should praise effort, not success, if we want people to love challenges and practice persistence. So, praise effort, measure results, but don't worry about time spent at a desk.

This is true for teaching children the value of persistence and effort. In a work environment, however, it teaches everyone that all that is valued is wasteful heroics.

Heroics? How is carrying through on things that take long term effort anything like wasteful heroics?

Re: Measure results, not hours

#80

Post by jacques_chester »

stretchwithme wrote: post #79
jacques_chester wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true for teaching children the value of persistence and effort. In a work environment, however, it teaches everyone that all that is valued is wasteful heroics.

Heroics? How is carrying through on things that take long term effort anything like wasteful heroics?

It's not. I think we're talking about different things.

Heroics are unavoidable -- sometimes there's no alternative. But it can slip into a pathological state where only heroic effort is recognised and rewarded; and so becomes the norm.

When you say "praising for effort", I thought you were making the same class of error.

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