New York Times on Worker Productivity

This is something I worry about: excessive use of employee tracking that forces them to work at a high pace without let up of a break to ease eye and brain strain (for white collar workers). Sometimes one has to take a break to ease their shoulders, wrists, eyes or even their brain, in order to bring their energy levels back up.

The New York Times had an interesting article titled Workplace Productivity: Are You Being Tracked? (or “The Rise of Worker Productivity Scores”). The article brought up some very good points about how certain real productive activities are not being measured, especially those pertaining to managing or mentoring employees. Most of the software mentioned in the article tracked keystrokes, but mentoring does not involve keyboards.

(This article may be behind a paywall.)

There are also indications of screenshots being taken which may occur during periods of bathroom breaks or out talking to your peers (especially if you work on site) or you are somewhere trying to find information that might reside in a book or paper.

Wouldn’t taking screenshots be an invasion of privacy, especially if one were working from home? It seems to be a peeping Tom aspect to this which makes me queasy.

It appears that these productivity trackers are not just for the remote workers, as I had originally thought, but are increasingly being deployed in the offices.

I would think the outcome of this would be that one would be constantly stressed to appear “on” for longer periods of time without real breaks.

No wonder I keep reading articles that engagements are still low. If companies are using these tracking programs, then engagements will not be high because of the stress of being “on” constantly without break. Humans are not robots and cannot sustain such pace.

Also, creativity or problem solving may not happen in front of a screen. For me, it happens when I’m driving, jogging, taking a bath or lying in bed. I get those ideas that propel me forward during those non-productive moments. Those ideas never come in front of the screen or even early, early in the morning. They just don’t.

I’m talking ideas that helped me wrap up “barrel balancing” five hours earlier than everyone else during financial close.

Ideas that helped me generate 100 project reports in one go, every week while everyone else were doing selected reporting once a month.

Ideas that helped me figure out how to convert Excel into xml and then speed up the conversion process from hours to split seconds.

I do a lot of playing around on the computer to try things, but I also peruse through the internet to get ideas or tell myself stories when jogging that sometimes end in a flash of insight. The time tracker will never capture that odd spurt of insight or creativity.

It’s going to be like “teaching to the test”. I remember reading stories that teaching to the test didn’t really improve students learning capabilities. So by that analogy, workers will be “working to the tracker”, giving it what it wants (more keystrokes or more emails) but not the real valuable productivity.