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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

> 85 percent of bosses say hybrid work makes it hard to be confident that employees are being productive

If they can't be confident employees are productive because they can't see them working, how on earth did they measure productivity before? Weren't they merely measuring how many people they could see working and not whether they actually produced anything?

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That's because of lot of people were not productive even before, but they looked like they were. Remote is revealing how much BS todays' workplace has became.

Well you could have just popped over to someone's desk and caught up on their status. You could see, at a glance, whether they were blocked, or struggling or not. Remote requires much more formal process for that kind of synchronous feedback and you're guaranteed to interrupt someone.

Fully async is possible but it's really hard. You get much slower feedback and much longer iteration times. Instead of ad hoc collaboration and course correction, you're dealing with playing tag and over the fence throws.

> Well you could have just popped over to someone's desk and caught up on their status. You could see, at a glance, whether they were blocked, or struggling or not.

This is about as good as deciding George Costanza must be working hard because he's always angrily furrowing his brow.

If you're in a sitcom and only dig that deep, perhaps. In real life its easy to read body language and see if a junior is struggling. By the end of sprint one, you look at actual output and if it doesn't match your interpretation you adjust and get to know them better.

Yes. They don’t know how to measure output when the work is abstract.

Exactly, they were never confident in that workers are productive. This is understandable in many cases, but it almost nothing to do with remote work then. They could only measure that employees were busy before, not that they were productive.

And some workers, in their efforts to appear busy at all times, end up interfering with the productivity of others.

Maybe we should schedule a weekly meeting to discuss this problem further.

Sure but who should attend and what should the agenda be? We should probably have a meeting beforehand to plan the meeting.

On the flip side, there are people on my team that I know for a fact do effectively NOTHING all week. And one of them was promoted from intern to FTE.

You can at least tell at a glance that someone isn't smoking joints and napping all day

and if the work is still getting done does it matter? is mgmt my boss or just the cops?

But the work is not getting done

Oh, so you do know that without having to see them smoking joints and napping all day at a glance.

Is that really a problem though? If someone appears to never be busy but always delivers I’d give them a raise, not ask why they are slacking.

If someone looks like they are slacking (not busy( but I can’t tell if they are delivering enough, then the problem isn’t that they aren’t busy.

Your question sounds rhetorical, but measuring productivity is intrinsically hard. I can sympathize with people who have trouble doing it.

Measuring BITS/h (butt-in-the-seat/hours).

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