In the first Macintosh commercial, Apple promised us that 1984 won’t be like «1984» (the famous novel by George Orwell).
Almost 40 years later and we, the tech industry, are failing this promise, monitoring software is becoming more and more a common practice every day in every industry, led by the tech industry, and in the democratic free world non the less!
Micro management is a symptom of a toxic culture of a dying company, it is not clever to distrust your employees, it is not clever to dehumanize them or treat them like robots. Humans built this world on creativity and imagination, that can not be measured by the «number of mouse clicks» or «random snapshots of the employee every 10 minutes»!!
Ryan Fuller - former vice president for workplace intelligence at Microsoft - said it well in the attached nytimes piece:
“We’re in this era of measurement but we don’t know what we should be measuring,” - Ryan Fuller
If you think about it, measuring mouse clicks or monitoring bathroom breaks really points to a manager who does not really understand his/her business, it suggests that the real goal here is not the work itself, but feeling superior, feeling empowered, or fooling stakeholders or the business owners with meaningless statistics that is irrelevant to their companies.
Yes it is fair that the management wants to measure output or eliminate favoritism from the work place, but measuring time spent accomplishing the work is not going to do that. Regardless of which industry we are talking about, we need to encourage people to imagine and be creative, to work less but produce more, to feel at home when going to work, to feel part of a bigger family.
Recently some companies and even countries are testing the idea of a 4-day work week, or a 5-hours workday, all measures point to less stress and an increase in productivity, happy workers equals more profits, a win-win for every one: work less but produce more.
Measuring output not time should be the goal, measuring the deliverables without treating workers as mindless tools and losing their loyalty in the process. the deliverables are what actually matter, not the time spent delivering them.
The rise of the Worker Productivity Score - The New York Times.