I wouldn't be able to handle the stress of that either. I think either you trust your employees to do the job they were hired to do and trust that they will do it well, or find someone else. I can't imagine good hard working people would put up with this. It seems childish to me.

Ridiculous! People will either look for a new job or just lie about their time.....and in both cases the company deserves what they get.

We went through a time management study like this a couple of years ago. It was stressful. But it did result in shifting some tasks around and it did cut back on some overtime. Upon review, management decided to get rid of some tasks which had no apparent value added. We found one analysis that someone had been doing monthly for at least 5 years that no one owned up to actually using anymore.

I agree but there must be a happy medium. It also used to be "quality" but they now go by "quantity". All they want is 'more' instead of being accurate the first time.

She says that now everyone gets through the project as fast as they can, then the next person to handle it (another department) has to correct any errors. They have a set amount of time that a project should take (God knows who sets these guidelines) and now they go over, putting their productivity down, because of corrections.

I feel that work studies like this force the employee to focus on their work habits and ensure productivity (or meltdown). Some of my co-workers need a nudge.

My understanding is that employees or contractors work on multiple projects. It's imperative that their work is charged to the correct project.

I would imagine that low productivity would result in a 'labor cost' overage that might push the project budget over.

Ludicrous. What these systems never seem to take into account is the huge amount of time the managers waste concocting and implementing such an idiotic scheme, or the costs of replacing skilled employees who will be driven off by this intrusive, accusative practice.

If the company wants to save money they should sack the moron manager who proposed this idea, and everyone above them that didn't quash the notion.

I did that at my last company. It's a pain to do but it's a useful tool. Managers can quickly see which projects people are working on, and how many hours it's taking in order to delegate new work to people with capacity. If people are working too many hours, we would hire additional people. If there wasn't enough work, that would be adjusted as well. Reports could be pulled in seconds when before it would take talking to each individual employee to see what they are working on.

It's useful to plan out how long future projects will take by looking at how long similar projects took in the past. We were able to accurately project client hours and bill them for it, when before it was just a guess. I was often working on projects for 5+ clients at once so it all needed to be tracked to the correct job.

It was a handy accountability tool in our case, but people weren't penalized for it. For instance if you only had 4 billable hours one day, no one would say anything unless it became a trend and you didn't have a reason to explain it. And I'm sure people did fudge numbers occasionally but that also becomes apparent if you know what to look for.

I work for the largest aerospace company in the U.S. and we're a government contractor. We're also the largest exporter of goods from the U.S. We do what Chi describes, for each project we work on, but don't have to report our time for breaks, lunch, etc. Just the time worked on each project. The government wants an accurate record of time worked on projects as they're are hundreds of government contracts issued to my company.

Sorta nice ...

... to be retired ... living on pension(s).

o j

When when this happened at my work it was not worth the effort time or money. The results were very skewed depending on the person doing the task. Some who didn't put in the effort to do the job well or to do everything that someone else doing the job properly would do. (noticeably part time staff not putting in the same effort. vs full time who care and are invested in their jobs) quality work vs quantity etc. It took more time to clock and record tasks then doing them. Everything little task had to have our name and the time for management to evaluate. People of course compared times and fudged, no one wanted to appear out of the normal or taking too much time. Or they forgot to time and made things up. In the end was of no use, good observation and inspection of work would have given a better understanding of time management and what actually took place, heck they could of shadowed each of us every day for a week or two and wasted less time and money.
But as much as I despised what they did, I also am irritated when employes take advantage consistently wasting time, taking personal calls or texting during work time, and not making up what sometimes is a lot of time. Office/management staff often will do personal projects surf the web. This is almost taken for granted now that its ok. Abuse of sick days, and disability really bugs me. This wastes the companies money, and hurts good employes who have to make up their work. And paints us all in a poor light. Wish there was more accountability all the way around. :(

Oftentimes, in the case of government contractors, the contracts require
a reporting of project time by person, by sub-project, etc.

Clerical and so-called "office workers" are notoriously unproductive. Many fool around, dawdle, and don't focus on being efficient in doing the tasks they're paid to do. Measurement and accountability for output produces results and identifies the top and bottom achievers. Bottom achievers can be coached to improve their performance or replaced if that doesn't work. Quality is measured in other ways. Chi explained it all well.

Big insurance and financial companies can have thousands of administrative workers. Imagine how much money can be saved if productivity is increased by as little as 10%.

In my experience, it's funny how people who are doing poorly in their work, for whatever reason, often know it and know that a day of reckoning is coming. When it does, they're often relieved and happy that the stress of uncertainty has come to an end. In reality, there may not have been any uncertainty of outcome for their poor performance, just an uncertainty of timing. And funny how many who aren't doing well (and know it) often choose to do nothing about it.

At the other end, top performers also tend to know where they stand relative to peers and welcome measurement (as a way to ensure that management knows their contributions). People who find accountability stressful probably have reason to fear it.

"Clerical and so-called "office workers" are notoriously unproductive. Many fool around, dawdle, and don't focus on being efficient in doing the tasks they're paid to do."

I dunno about that, Snidely. That's quite a broad generalization. Lots of engineers that I work with are unproductive and are protected by a union. I believe you're in California. I'm in Washington, and work for Boeing. Hundreds of engineering jobs are being transferred to a newly created "Design Center of Excellence" facility in Seal Beach. It's just not "office workers" that are notoriously unproductive.

What evidence do you have that supports the notion of office workers being "notoriously" unproductive?

Oftentimes though the managers will decide upon a metric for "measuring performance" because it is something that is easy to measure, irrespective of whether what they are measuring in any way correlates with good or bad performance.

My brother started working as a programmer at IBM during the 5th year of a three year project to redesign the air traffic control system. The idiot managers decided to implement a lines-of-code-written metric to measure the performance of the programmers. He found multiple sections of nearly duplicate code, and created a single function that performed the same actions, and then replaced each of the duplicate sections with a single line calling the new function with the differences abstracted out as parameters passed to the new function.

He removed thousands of lines of code making the result easier to understand and easier to maintain which anyone who understood even the first thing about computer programming would deem to be the right approach. Instead the manager summoned my brother to his office for an official reprimand since his lines-of-code-written for the week was several thousand negative.

The next week my brother decided that for every line of code he wrote, he would add carriage returns at every location allowed by the syntax of the language he was writing in, making each line count as 2, 3, 4, 5 or more lines of code written as measured by the metric. His manager included this increase in productivity by a member of his group in his report to his manager as an indicator of his management acumen.

So while I've never been subjected to a environment that used a method "measuring performance" that was that demeaning, wrong-headed and actually counter-productive, I do find "accountability" stressful because it often will result in someone with only the vaguest idea of what I do deciding that work "meets expectations". Meanwhile the managers never direct their measures of accountability at themselves, and preside over one failed project after another, seemingly without the slightest cognizance that their management decisions (or lack thereof), directly led to the project failing. Whether it is failing to define the requirements for what the project should accomplish, or technology decisions they mandate without any rational justifications, or sub-contracting out a portion of the project, paying large a large sum of money to these external developers, and then when the money is exhausted and the project they've created is a non-functional mess, saddling us with the mess and expecting us to bring it to completion and maintain and extend it thereafter -- even when told that it would be easier, quicker, and better to discard the mess and start from scratch.

bob, software development is notoriously hard to manage. I worked with many software companies over the years. An exec at one used a clever story to illustrate his view of development. He said that in a way, producing new software was like producing a new human. If it takes a woman 9 months of gestation to give birth, if you put 8 more women on the task, it will still take 9 months. With software, if you have a properly sized group with people of the right skills, if you expect them to complete a particular project in 9 months, they may finish sooner. But if you add more people to the group, it will take longer.

Counting lines of code to assess work productivity will lead to the type of behavior you describe, bloated code. Which, in and of itself, will unnecessarily complicate future work on the code and will devalue the work that is done.

sephia, my evidence is what I experienced during a 35 year career as part owner of a professional services firm. I managed a number of administrative people in my company and interacted with others at companies we worked with and at clients. While a normal distribution (of anything) is usually the infamous bell curve, I believe the competence distribution I saw could be perhaps called a steep V or a U. Really excellent performers were rare but worth their weight in gold, too many others cared little about what they doing and were mediocre or worse as a result. Here are some telling factors - did they view their work as a career, or as a job? Were they self-motivated and self-starters, with eyes open for improvements or suggestions in the processes they handled? Did they require periodic prods to keep moving forward? Could they work with a minimum of supervision and always express eagerness to take on more?

Too many unionized workers who can't be rewarded for excellence nor punished for being sub-par tend to have low motivation. Oftentimes it's mostly those who desire to rise in the ranks for better paying jobs of greater responsibility that will push themselves and always try their best.

That's what I've experienced.