Measure results, not hours
mobile.nytimes.com
mobile.nytimes.com
"But your boss is likely to be receptive if you politely raise the question of productivity and show you’re willing to be held accountable for results, rather than hours worked."
Yeah right.
The problem is that it's extremely non trivial to deconstruct your assumptions and social behaviour.
Even if your boss/manager/whatever is clued up and knows his/her stuff, workplaces are a social gathering, and quiet introverted non-socialising members of the team will never get rewarded for their hard work. Especially if they're seen leaving early every day.
Where I work, we have a guy who leaves at 3pm every day; he gets in between 5-6am.
His own team gives him the 'ironic' farewell round of applause when he walks out everyday.
Why? Because he's leaving early.
He's a hard working dedicated worker, but appearances are important, and leaving early makes it appear that you're slacking off, that you're not there when you're needed for that last minute 5pm meeting.
The few people who actually know what he does completely respect him; but no one else gets it.
That's the problem: unless you publize not only to your immediate work peers, but the entire local work area, what you're doing and why, no one gets it, and they make assumptions.
This article would be more useful if it addressed that issue.
Simply saying: Work hard, leave early and get your boss to accept you for who you are... agh. Don't. It wont work.
Because somehow, no one sees you come in, but everyone sees you go home.
I'm a teacher, its outcomes all the way for us, and being there when the class meets.
I am curious for this guy whether he doesn't care. For me, I'm similar in some respects at my workplace. I don't do the things that I think are BS and a waste of time, even if they're mandated by various senior people. Though some things, I do if my manager talks with me privately, asking me to help him get it done for whatever political reason may exist (politics is usually the only reason why I do things that are garbage, and my manager has to convince me).
I don't do the best work in the world, but I am above-average at my workplace. I am given a lot of the high-priority and difficult projects. I recently have been first or second choice for various role changes, which I'd normally jump at if my current projects were not so critical and the fact that I'd already committed (I am one of the cheesy guys who says that my word is stronger than oak). The fact is, I have the respect of the people I deem most important, and that's proven out by who gets what projects, and how I'm given a long leash for various stupid things. I don't care what any of my peers would think, though the fact is that most of them do respect me and many come to me for advice about various matters.
I agree that it's possible it won't work. But I'd also say nobody should be cocky enough to start doing this until they've truly proven themselves through multiple hellfire crises (i.e. established track record when the chips are down). With a proper track record, there is no reason why it won't work.
And in that scenario, even if it's only a few people who respect me, that's enough. They are the ones I care about. If 95% of the company thinks I'm doing nothing or am worthless, that's fine. What matters to me is if I'm respected by the 5% who take care of my raises, promotion opportunities, and company strategy and budgets.
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 so that I wouldn't even need to work for them at all anymore. Then what do they do? By trapping me there for 40 hours a week and limited vacation time, it's very difficult for me to comfortably escape.
And then we were given more tasks. And more tasks. To the point that there was no way to get everything done on a deadline.
At some point I said to myself, I could pull an all-nighter, still have missed deadlines, or I could go home at 5, and have maybe one less missed deadline. It was an easy choice.
Unless you work in a place that only has need for a finite amount of work, no matter how effective you are getting things done, there will always be more things to do. If there is only a finite amount of work to be done, then an employee is not what you need - a contractor is.
(Of course a good manager will balance the number of engineers to the work load. Ours did say that he had enough to hire two more engineers -- but didn't know if he would have this much work for them next quarter.)
It sounds like your boss screwed the pooch on that one, though. Killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.
It's a hard negotiation, really, for both parties, as different people function differently at different stress levels. But yeah; most bosses optimize for but-in-seat time rather than for actual productivity, which, of course, does not increase shareholder value or employee happiness; It's bad for everyone.
Personally, I think it's a symptom of 'optimizing for appearances' - the managers run the companies, sure, but they don't own them, so they don't care about real productivity, only about the perception of productivity.
For example. A company goal might be to increase revenue 10% month over month. This might get broken up by each level of management into smaller and smaller tasks until it hits your desk under the guise of 'Make sure the website is internationalized since we're translating to 3 languages at the end of this month'.
If you are able to accomplish that task early, that doesn't mean your job is done, that just means that you can do more to help contribue to the company increasing their revenue by 10% month over month.
Also: Keep in mind that no one knows for sure if the tactics chosen to accomplish a goal will actually work. They are guesses. Redoing the website, starting the new marketing campaign, landing the new client, delivering a project on time, are all just things we do to increase the odds of achieving our goals.
Billing client for reading internet, paper or chatting by the watercooler is also a fraud.
Even the leading companies/leading people in our industry seem to look at 'hours spent at work' as a signal of overall productivity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/technology/dick-costolo-of...
It's really all about team dynamics and corporate culture.
See, successful entrepreneurs are, more often than not, binary beings that totally devote themselves to their company and expect other the other people in the team to do so as well. Someone can come and work for 5 hours and accomplish just the same as he would over 11 hours but it may send the wrong message to the group - that the company is secondary to personal life and that just meeting your obligations is really enough, no need to do beyond that.
Furthermore, some people wouldn't be able to accomplish the same over a short working day; how would that make them feel spending 11 hour days in the office, while their colleague leaves after 6 hours and still gets appreciated?
Hopefully like an unproductive lump who needs to learn how to turn off Hacker News and Facebook during the day so they can also get some work done.
So providing he doesn't burn out doing it, it is probably going to help the company a lot if he can put in the extra hours to be across some of the lower level stuff.
And, here, I assumed that by emphasizing results he meant getting home around 5...
I think this is very dangerous and tends to reward mediocre work. But it is probably inevitable too, because in the legal field a large client will usually eventually get what he/she wants.
This article actually shows a big danger about project based billing. Notice his second piece of advice (Reduce Reading). Can you imagine having a lawyer who thinks he does not have to read everything to the end? This will end badly for some poor client.
On the other hand, tracking hours can be really benificial too, if done correctly. I love using DeskTime.com for personal use (for company use it seems counterproductive) since it lets me easily track how much time I've spent on productive apps/web sites compared to unproductive apps/web sites.
Yesterday I had a great work day for example, I spent 14 hours in front of the computer screen. 11 hours of those were spent in productive apps/websites, like my text editor, FTP, terminal, API-documentation sites, CRM, admin backend etc and 1h 30m in unproductive apps/websites like Hacker News and Reddit.com.
I got quite a lot done, so I was really satisfied with my day. On the other hand I spent over 3 hours trying to fix what turned out to be a missing comma in a configuration file. If I had spotted the error faster I could have spent more than 3 hours less time working, while still being just as productive. If I had more experience with the things I did yesterday I could probably have done as much in half the time.
Just goes to show that even "productive hours" isn't the most important thing, the only thing that matters in the end is the results.
If programmers don't know up front how much effort a task will take, how should managers?
The problem with management types vs. individual contributors is that managers have more time in the org and usually have friends who can bail them out. So a bad worker will get fired, but a bad manager will get reassigned or even promoted.
Basically, we measure time worked because it correlates pretty good with effort made and that in turn tends to correlate with value produced. Unless you work in a field where the value is easily measured (Like sales), there really is no alternative.
There are places where you bill by the hour. This causes slacking off because you have financial incentives to work longer.
There are almost no places where knowledge workers are paid for results because you can't objectivly asses results. They must be assesed by a human. Manager most likely is too clueless to asses them. He also might be evil and just reward loyalty to him instead of the value of the work done.
I think that the most efficient environment is to pay for each hour but closely monitor what the people are doing and communication between them. You'll have to pay much more then the competition though because people factor in slacking off into their expected pay. So not many companies bother. They prefer to accept some degrees of slacking off especially because that enforces the illusion of company as one happy family.
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 added into the sprint (Either because us engineers found dependencies or because of additional bug requests).
Scrum doctrine says that you now have a broken sprint, and all bets are off. Did it matter to management? Nope.
This was a large Rails project (about 7 full time developers for a year+). It's possible it's different when you're working on many small projects.
I guess my worry about ROWE is situations where the result is, "Implementing all your tickets on your plate" and worries about what happens in environments where tickets get added to your plate such that the number of your tickets on Thursday == the number of your tickets on Tuesday. (Even though you implemented 6 tickets between now and then). I would certainly be interested in any comments/information/thought you have on a situation like that.
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.
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).
But as you mention Ryan, it is super easy for those being measured to game metrics and optimize so that they look good. Mitigating this effect is very challenging and one that we continually face but our approach, and it has held up well so far, is to focus on people over process. I.e., our results include questions like "Are developers happy?" and "Are clients happy?"
Nebulous questions with unquantifiable metrics like these keep us honest and communicative with our clients and focused on the process of setting reasonable expectations that satisfy all. We stay focused on the people and change the process to ensure results, and expectations, are met.
Results may change from developer to developer, client to client, and week to week! We expect them to change as we make progress on the project.
The way we work is that we have very focused week or month or quarterly results we are responsible for, and we have a very transparent way of seeing who needs to do what and what is getting done. Beyond that, it's a big part of our culture not to be negative is someone chooses to work different hours or out of the office. It's their results to complete, and they know how they work most effectively.
You've got a bunch of stuff up on our blog about ROWE as well: http://highgroove.com/tags/rowe
So, praise effort, measure results, but don't worry about time spent at a desk.
In a work environment, however, it teaches everyone that all that is valued is wasteful heroics.
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.
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.
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.
Back to the company, by the time I left the culture had morphed a bit, and people were encouraged to work extra hours to compensate for their slip, where necessary. Still much better than (what I hear of) the US, where stupidly long hours are expected (apparently).
Personally I think stories like this arise from the fallacy that jobs have a set amount of work. Entrepreneurs know that is not true--there is not some predetermined, set amount that an Apple laptop needs to better than an HP laptop. The truth is that any and all competitive advantage should be seized--it might be needed to survive.
Of course not everyone is a founder; most people are employees. But employees have an interest in their company's success too--it keeps them employed. In addition, high performance offers them opportunity for promotions, raises, advancement, publicity, etc.
I think that if you are a talented enough employee to get the "expected" work done in less than the expected time, the thing to do is to fill the remaining hours by doing work that beats expectations. Increase quality even more; put that gold leaf on since you have time. Or, spend that time thinking and inventing an unexpected addition or improvement--or even a new product.
Because the 'well-known demands' are mostly socially constructed myths rather than reality. Because people are really bad at tracking stuff-done and find tracking hours-worked and looking at stuff-to-do much easier to think about. Because people a really fucking awful at figuring out how productive they are.
I have been a team coach multiple times where I have demonstrated by, weirdly, actually tracking the amount of work done that teams working fewer hours were producing more work. The amount of push back from these sorts of results from management and the team is incredible.
People know that if they only stayed a bit later they would get more done despite lots of evidence, by our tracking stories completed, bug reports, user satisfaction, etc. all went down the more hours people worked.
Tired people make mistakes. Tired people work slowly. You can be tired without 'feeling' tired. In anything but the very short term (and I'm talking days, maybe a week or two tops) trying to do hard intellectual, creative work for more than 30-40 hours a week will make you slower overall - not faster.
Hell - Ford promoted the 40 hour week as the maximum productivity point for physical labour on a production line... and we somehow imagine that working 60 hour weeks is going to make us do more.
People still seem to conceptualise 60 hour weeks as 40 normal hours + 20 extra. In fact it's 60 hours of being knackered where you're probably being half as productive as you would be if you were fully rested - but you're too damn tired to realise it.
And while start-ups often require extreme hours due to the fact that building a successful business is hard, an established business should not demand extreme hours as part of normal business. If you do, you're risking employee burn-out, and probably not taking into account the costs that can lead to. If you need 60-80 hour work weeks to keep your business competitive, then you need to realize that your business is as close to the brink as any start-up, and is probably not sustainable in that state.
There's a mistake in your reasoning in this sentence. An entrepreneur who has to work long hours for years on end is by definition not successful. At least using my definition of success.
I consider myself a very successful entrepreneur, even though my 'preneuring only brings in the equivalent of a modest developer salary. The important part is that it only takes up a few hours of my time each month, leaving the rest open to do what I want.
And, of course, being able to do whatever you want is the core reason to become an entrepreneur.
With that in mind, if you've set off to be your own boss, and you somehow find that you're working longer hours than ever, regardless of the payback, you've failed.
Because there's a lot to do and very few people around to do it. One of the distinguishing aspects of a startup is that the initial team is very nearly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of things that need doing, but don't yet have the revenue to hire people and distribute that load properly. No founder is sitting around at 3pm going, "Well, now what do I do for the next two hours?" They're going to sneak in ten minutes of product development, answer a dozen emails, wash dishes in the office kitchen, whatever.
Once a company stabilizes (meaning that its revenue stream is mostly predictable and dependable), it can ramp up employee count to the point where the load is more sanely distributed and there's no longer a reason to work very long hours because everything is properly parallelized.
Upvotes for the person who can come up with a good come-back!
(Note, this is not a problem where I work at the moment. And even at places where it's been said, I just ignore it. Just leave at 5 people!)
I can't begin to tell you how much this bugs me. It's not about how many hours it takes to do something, it's about the value created from the service or product. Is the answer the author has given worth more or less because his knoweldge and expertise allow him to provide an answer quickly? With hourly billing, it's always less. The client sees it as trivial and the employer sees little or no value.
I see it the other way. Being able to provide an answer or solution quickly shouild be rewarded. Being held accountable for correct and timely results are much more important than simply clocking hours.
Billing hourly, paying employees hourly, etc. are all counter-productive to incentivising knowledge workers to excel. Even the honest ones.
Tracking, pace, small class sizes, and excluding disruptive students makes ALL the difference.
It's the difference between a bespoke education delivered by an excellent teacher, and a shit cookie cutter education delivered by a scantron machine.
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 a bit like measuring lines of code or similar things. I kinda wished everybody could be his own boss and be actually be responsible.
What constitutes as enough work/value for a day?
I would find side projects to work on, a form of '20% time', but I always felt really uncomfortable with the whole situation. Was I expected to forgo pay when there wasn't enough work for me? It was a really weird experience. It wasn't like I was a student working part time, I was living alone in NYC over the summer and had rent and food to pay for.
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.
It's a risk of the model. Part of why freelancers cost more per hour.
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 want, nobody questions their methods nor cares about how 'committed' they seem - the only thing that matters is how much more money they are bringing the company than everybody else.
I've never worked at a Google/Facebook/Amazon class tech company but I would imagine it is similar with 10x engineers and designers there.
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!