I respect the intent behind the article, which as I understand is that managers should work closely with their teams and know first hand how they are adding value, instead of depending on a chart to know that.
However, there are a few problems here:
- There are more manager positions than there are qualified managers. So you will always have people who are simply bad managers. This is generally more true in larger companies where productivity of an individual team is easy to ignore.
- Even good managers are humans and are subject to emotions and biases that they don't even realise they carry around. The only things which bring objectivity is data and good processes.
- Hybrid or remote work is a larger trend that began much before covid, and while back to office mandates might make it seem that the trend is loosing steam, it is not. There will be more remote work in coming years, and that makes understanding your peers' work even more difficult.
So what is the solution? I believe that:
- You should measure events, but you should have the intent that you want to "understand" what is going on, instead of policing people. Data can reveal a lot, like conflicting work patterns, burn-out indicators, problems in communications etc. Not all metrics are bad.
- You should combine objective data with subjective feedback, as well as more context such as life events (marriage, becoming a parent etc) to understand how people work.
- Processes should enhance focus on outcomes, rather than activity. Frameworks such as OKRs are hard to implement correctly, but they do let you focus on business outcomes. The problem with knowledge work is that you cannot measure it with activities alone. Trying to bridge OKRs with activity metrics as well as subjective feedback can be helpful.
For disclosure, I am founder of a platform called Crewnetics, and we are building tools for measuring performance of knowledge workers.
> There are more manager positions than there are qualified managers.
So? Let companies fail, let the world rot. If people want to live indoors they need to learn how to be good at something.
> Even good managers are humans and are subject to emotions and biases that they don't even realise they carry around.
Data doesn't solve this it codifies it. Tracking commits is PERMANENTLY codifying a commit frequency bias to work performance.
> There will be more remote work in coming years, and that makes understanding your peers' work even more difficult.
How? Did managers only understand what was going on by looking over peoples shoulders? What data did they get by people sitting near them? Looking busy and getting stuff done are two things that look the same from the outside.
However, there are a few problems here:
- There are more manager positions than there are qualified managers. So you will always have people who are simply bad managers. This is generally more true in larger companies where productivity of an individual team is easy to ignore.
- Even good managers are humans and are subject to emotions and biases that they don't even realise they carry around. The only things which bring objectivity is data and good processes.
- Hybrid or remote work is a larger trend that began much before covid, and while back to office mandates might make it seem that the trend is loosing steam, it is not. There will be more remote work in coming years, and that makes understanding your peers' work even more difficult.
So what is the solution? I believe that:
- You should measure events, but you should have the intent that you want to "understand" what is going on, instead of policing people. Data can reveal a lot, like conflicting work patterns, burn-out indicators, problems in communications etc. Not all metrics are bad.
- You should combine objective data with subjective feedback, as well as more context such as life events (marriage, becoming a parent etc) to understand how people work.
- Processes should enhance focus on outcomes, rather than activity. Frameworks such as OKRs are hard to implement correctly, but they do let you focus on business outcomes. The problem with knowledge work is that you cannot measure it with activities alone. Trying to bridge OKRs with activity metrics as well as subjective feedback can be helpful.
For disclosure, I am founder of a platform called Crewnetics, and we are building tools for measuring performance of knowledge workers.