Many companies now use software to track the productivity of their workers. Readers don’t like it.
To the Editor:
Your article about companies using software to monitor employee “productivity” shows how companies are focusing on the wrong factor: input rather than output. One can work a lot of hours and produce almost nothing, or work fewer hours, but very efficiently.
Productivity is not measured in minutes. Such a focus brings to mind the story about the Soviet bolt factory; workers were judged by how many bolts they manufactured. So they switched to making tiny bolts so they could make a lot of them with less metal.
That wasn’t useful, so the judgment was switched to measure them by the total weight of bolts produced. So they switched to making only very large bolts, for which there wasn’t much use.
When I was a banker, one of the lawyers from a law firm we hired bragged to me that he was in the office until 2 a.m. working on our deal. I asked if we were getting a discount on his time. He thought I was joking. I asked him how productive he was at 1 a.m., and why we should be paying him the same hourly rate when he was working tired.
Law firms also judge their employees by hours, not actual output, because that’s how they bill their clients. And that, whether measured manually or by computer, is also flawed.
At some point in the future artificial intelligence may be able to measure actual productivity. But for most jobs we’re not there yet.
Shaun Breidbart
Pelham, N.Y.
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