I had a consulting firm that was doing ok from 2021-2022, but ended it do to personal circumstances. At the peak of it I had 10 small business clients. About half of them were absolutely paranoid about their employees slacking off. They would just constantly be worried their employees weren’t working and would try to figure out ways to monitor them.
When I stopped my business, I only kept an ongoing relationship with my biggest client. He is the worse for this. He puts cameras all over his warehouse, production facility and office. There are three office employees, and everyone of them has a camera pointed at their computer screen in the front corner of their office. He also makes it very clear to them that he has “bossware” which monitors every activity on their screen and constantly takes screenshots.
I don’t get this at all. I worked as a financial professional for 10 years prior to starting my consulting company. I only had one company that had this type of software and it was really offputting. I didn’t like it all. I do my thing, it makes me really uncomfortable knowing everything I’m doing on the company computer is strictly monitored in detail.
While I had my consulting firm, I had two employees. I had a private office in a co-working space, and whenever they worked a shift, I would let them in to the office and just let them do their thing. I would often not even be present. I knew I could evaluate them based on the results they provide. If I pay them for a 4 hour shift and they get done what I want to get done, I don’t give a shit if they spent half the shift browsing their phone or even social media on my laptop.
Since I’m getting back in to it, I’ve had a meeting with a client that owns some properties and he is the exact same way. He insists on installing this bossware on his employee’s computers. He pays $700 a year for it. He is a very small property manager that only does about $1mm a year in revenue. I told him it was a waste of money, but he said he needs it to make sure his employees aren’t slacking.
I guess I just don’t get this attitude and find it counterproductive. You either have people you can trust, thus you don’t need to monitor them, or you have people you don’t and they should be fired. I’m interested in hearing other entrepreneur’s perspectives.
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I’d guess these types of managers/bosses just don’t get the bigger picture. They think this is what bosses are supposed to do and if workers aren’t actively working, they take it personally. And/or they get greedy. They want to maximize labor to get more profit.
I don’t think this works because some use downtime (on their phone, breakroom, etc.) as a reward for getting their work done. If given more work, they’re no longer motivated work quickly or efficiently.
Personally i agree with you, you hire talented people to do a job, when they accomplish it, no worries. you evaluate based on quality and speed of output, not adherence to process (obviously process is important e.g. safety), the results that matter are the outputs, not the time.
this being said, i think it also depends, like some work needs to be monitored, for quality, and related - especially if its low skill menial work, where precision is still important. and example of this would be like AI image tagging which first has to be cleaned manually before its fed into the AI model for processing.
Gotta keep dem niggas in check
There are really only two ways to make profit in a business.
- Do what you do, better (Controls/Efficiency Gains)
- Do more of what you do (Sales Gains).
If the employee can’t realistically achieve sales gains, then it makes sense to get efficiency gains from them–and that is what monitoring purports to achieve. If a company has given up on sales gains, efficiency gains are something they can target.
You’re so wrong that it’s hard to explain it without being insulting.
You don’t improve efficiency by making sure that employees are not slacking. You improve efficiency by retaining your best employees and figuring out what motivates people.
I’ve had a ton of jobs where me being half-assed and not really trying was still getting the work done of literally any other two people. Spoiler: if I’m putting out 75 with you today and the next guy is putting out 40 I’m not going to go up to 80 when you bitch at me because I got on my phone. I’m going to go sure boss I’ll get right on it and then you’re going to be lucky to get more than 60 out of me for the next week. And if I hear another damn word about it then you might get your 75 back but I’m just going to go get another job and you’re going to be stuck with the guy doing 40.
What about doing new things?
Have you ever heard of the concept “the world is your mirror”. It’s where everything in life reflects back your inner beliefs, doubts, anxieties etc.
The business owners you describe have trust issues. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in business or other areas of their life, their ‘poo coloured glasses’ will show them the worst in people.
Their attitude will attract the worst behaviour in people, which will then confirm their view of life. And “Ha-ha! They are right!” And people who can be trusted will leave those companies because they won’t put up with that shite.
Frankly people want to right, more than challenging their own distorted views of people and the world
It comes down to managment style. Douglas McGregor broke it down into a framework called ‘Theory X and Theory Y.’ What you describe is an owner (or manager) who subscribes to Theory X.
https://educationlibrary.org/theory-x-and-theory-y-douglas-mcgregor/
The reality is there is most likely a Theory X or Y spectrum of employees on any team.
Based on the Pareto Principle, roughly 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes (the 80/20 rule). So the top 20% of your performers are going to produce 80% of your results. Unfortunately, some managers constrain the entire team (including that valuable top 20%) with micromanging to keep the bottom 80% performing at standard. This makes little sense. You would be better to ignore the bottom 80% and focus on helping the top 20% instead of holding them back.
Conversely, it stands to reason that 20% of the worst employees are creating 80% of the terrible results. What to do? We can see here is that it really makes no sense to manage the entire team as one homogeneous unit. You have to approach people as individuals and deal with their contribution, level of competence, and level of trust accordingly.
In addition, many managers have not figured out how to shift from quantifying inputs to quantifying outputs. What matters more? The amout of hours worked or the value created? The bottom line is if an employee is generating 10x sales at 1x effort, that is better than 1x sales at 10x effort. Profit and revenue should be more important than bums in seats. Process is important but the process shouldn’t encumber the business, it should free it.
Shortly explained by… Toxic work culture results in managers not firing bad employees causing the overworking of the productive ones. Fire fast, do everything you can to keep the good ones and the only thing you will do as a manager is keeping employees happy instead of managing mixed productivity with a crappy baseline.
Yep, to foster good working culture you need to fire bad one fast.
The Pareto Principal is even harsher if growth is involved. 80/20 is at a smaller scale, but the generalized rule is that the square root of the number of causes are responsible for half the consequences. So if you have 10 employees, ~3 of them are doing half the work. If you have 100 employees, 10 of them are doing half the work. If your business grows from 100 to 1000 employees, now ~33 employees are doing half the work. In other words, “competence” and “incompetence” scale differently.
From a management perspective, this is a nightmare. Most of the time you won’t know who is doing half of the work, and if your org grows too quickly, the conditions from incompetence become unbearable for the productive few. Since they are valuable, it’s likely they will just leave and go be valuable somewhere else if it gets too bad, leaving you with less productive output!
Let’s say half of your high performers leave. Sixteen out of 33 represents 25% of your company’s productive output with 1000 employees. So, now your org is running at 75% capacity with 98.4% of your employees (and salaries) left. But now there are 31 employees still to identify who are doing half of that remaining productivity, so it’s a moving target.
Peter Drucker and Norbert Wiener have some of the more practical solutions to this problem coming out of industrialized corporatism and probably still largely applicable in “informationalized” corporatism. In general, my understanding of it is to just ensure the “incompetent majority” are comfortable and stay and accept it as a cost of doing business, but heavily reward and support anyone sharing information or asking questions in your organization. They are most likely to be in that “square root” category.
On a long enough timeline the key is employee retention since the most likely reason for the imbalance of productivity is that information tends to distribute Pareto, but it also compounds over time. If you aim to keep your employees as long as possible, the more informed they will tend to be, so when there are staff changes and productive people leave, or unprecedented growth occurs, you have an informed enough staff to recover from the temporary decrease in productivity, or rapid, unstable increase in demand for productivity. You also generally want to keep your employees at 60-70% capacity in times of stability so that if there are rapid changes (either up or down), they have additional capacity to absorb the extra demands on their attention without stressing them so much that their productive output suffers or they leave.
It’s also extremely important to be prepared to invest in training your employees since this increases the likelihood that you’ll have redundancy in the critical skills and information necessary for your org to be productive. A personal anecdote from my career is when I was working as a 911 dispatcher. I had a really interesting conversation with our head of training and her approach was that the department should be able to take any rando off the street and provide enough training that they could operate an emergency phone line/radio effectively. The training has to be that thorough for a legally critical position in such a high turn-over role. Unfortunately training is costly, takes a long time, and usually the first thing to be overlooked when setting budgets for the next 1-4 quarters, and most orgs do not have the resources to train in a timely manner. It takes 2 years to fully cross train a 911 dispatcher. Most companies will barely give their employees a week of training, if any.
The antidote to this is to allow your org to grow slowly, rather than at break-neck speed and invest in training by identifying and supporting your most productive employees and encouraging them to train others. Will this come with an initial reduction in their productive output? Absolutely, but it’s best to see it as an investment in redundancy of skills and information in your staff; that is to say, an investment in organizational resilience. Also another reason to keep your employees at about 60-70% capacity is so they have the bandwidth to formalize and articulate their processes to others and newcomers.
Chamath Palihapitiya (former Facebook Exec) has some really good interviews on youtube that discuss this idea that your company will last as long as the half-life of its growth. If your org grows slowly to 1000 employees over 10 years, it will last exponentially longer than a company that grows to this size in 1 year. I believe this is because it gives your employees time to absorb critical information for operating your company, and allowing that information to permeate through the org from the high producers to the low producers.
It is not sales people being monitored (whose results you can see without monitoring). It is normal workers where you can not know who is the top 20
I think the answer is poor leadership and the illusion of optimization.
I think it depends on the type of bussiness and “ type “ of employee . Educated employees working in a corporate environment should not need this degree of monitoring and should be measured on performance . Blue collar workers unfortunately need more management and rules and respond better to strict monitoring/procedures - in my experience and in our country this is the case
The transition to WFH has a huge impact on this. Everyone got used to working one way and now so much has changed and people are still adapting.
Managers used to be able to peer over cubicles on their way to get a coffee and see at a glance who is working, who is sleeping, who is chit chatting, who is watching Youtube videos, etc. Now, without them policing the workplace, they are paranoid that these behaviors are occurring unchecked during working hours and they aren’t getting the best bang for their buck.
While some studies I’ve seen showed that over-monitoring employees leads to lower trust which actually negatively impacts employees’ motivation, there is no shortage of articles written about how some people are holding down multiple jobs because they are getting by doing a fraction of what they can for each one and their management hasn’t adapted their methods quickly enough to catch them.
Some jobs are easy to monitor, but some are more subjective. If you pay someone and expect them to design 3 web pages in a week, that’s pretty easy to track. However, there are other jobs that can be harder to track and it becomes easier for employees to “fake it” saying they hit snags or had a string of bad luck. For example, if someone is architecting software or doing research to solve a problem, it’s not easy to track their progress day-over-day as you could with some other lines of work. This leaves some managers who can’t look over their shoulders like they used to scrambling to find tools and measures to fill the void.
Because their business sucks and they think it helps
To be honest isn’t it pretty standard now with tech that u can monitor and see every keystroke and everything someone does…
We should assume even the smart devices are recording everything being done
Yet, Europe is doing pretty well despite having regulation that allows employees to have their privacy in the workplace and doesn’t allow employers to monitor employees like that.
Can’t you consult them in doing it differently?
An owner of a private company is always gonna care more than a corporation doesn’t mean it has to be crazy like you described but where as a manager may buy everyone 200 dollar office chairs because its not their money an owner mayne will shop for a decent but economical chair and this extends to all areas of the business.
I’ve also worked at several companies where employees were ordering expensive ink cartridges and such and reselling them on eBay.
While surveillance doesn’t need to be intrusive and crazy there is a reason for it
because, at heart, people are lazy and will do an absolute minimum that can get away with. some of these lazy people have even convinced themselves that they work extremely hard.