Some years ago Simon had a school principal that was obsessed with test scores, to a toxic degree that was certainly counterproductive to actual education. Wondering how far she went with this, I did a FOIA request with the district to get all of her email that referenced testing. The worst part of it wasn't just the testing, it was a single slide in her intro deck to her teachers. It said, in all caps, red, underlined:
I HAVE FOUND THAT WHICH GETS MONITORED GETS DONE. IF NOT MONITORED, IT BECOMES OPTIONAL.
Teaching is already a stressful, underpaid job that people are fleeing in great numbers. Can you imagine having this as well?
Micromanagement is already terrible, but I think the same group of people who think that it's necessary are the same ones that believe butts-in-seats in-office work with required hours are necessary for salaried people. I saw an interview a few weeks ago with Michael Bloomberg who insisted, "We pay people for 40 hours a week, so we should make sure we get those." There are other executives who have made similar statements in the press in the last year or so, and I think that they've become fundamentally disconnected with what typical white collar work entails. (They also, with no data to support the assertion, insist that people "collaborate better" when together every day, which sounds exactly like the kind of thing that Type-A extraverts who are executives say.)
I worked for a CEO at one point who asked me why there were so few people physically in the room one day where my staff worked. Quite a few were remote that day. He said, "How do you know that they're doing the work?" I asked, "How do you know your outside sales people are doing the work?" Naturally he said because they brought money in, and I told him that my people delivered working software. He asked if I knew if they could be doing more, and I said the same thing about sales people. He was clearly frustrated with this exchange, and my respect for this particular leader continued to dwindle. And keep in mind, this was not long after I let go of someone who was usually in office but not delivering a lot of quality work.
And if you really insist that the hours matter, then why is it that no salary job anywhere acknowledges working more hours, or pays more for it? Yeah, you can't have it both ways.
Salaried work does not pay for a number of hours doing work. Humans in their capacity to do these kinds of jobs generally are moving toward outcomes, not some arbitrary number of hours worked. We've all worked in jobs where people who came into an office every single day appeared to deliver almost nothing. It does not materially matter if someone is physically there or not. (Some research indicates that "productivity" is actually higher when remote.) There is often an ebb and flow, variation, in the intensity and volume of work necessary to deliver outcomes, and it is further influenced by the human's ability to do the work in the moment. Trust me, as someone with ADHD, I can assure you that sometimes I'm doing all the things at light speed, and other times it's hard to finish writing an email. Some weeks don't require 40 hours, but most do, and I have to actively watch to make sure that I'm not working a ton of extra time at the expense of my family and other interests. People are not inherently capable of linear execution rates.
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