Markverhyden
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The Eye of Sauron is alive and well..........
Digital slackers be warned.........
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Sky-Knight
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This is an incentive issue.
You don't need to monitor employee productivity via input devices. You need to monitor them based on actual metrics.
Tickets handled, documents generated, something...
Producers will produce, and perhaps they aren't producing for all the hours you want but you have to ask yourself if they are producing ENOUGH for the investment made to get them to do so.
Salaries are earned remotely via monitored piece work. Hours per day worked doesn't matter, actual production does.
You don't need to monitor employee productivity via input devices. You need to monitor them based on actual metrics.
Tickets handled, documents generated, something...
Producers will produce, and perhaps they aren't producing for all the hours you want but you have to ask yourself if they are producing ENOUGH for the investment made to get them to do so.
Salaries are earned remotely via monitored piece work. Hours per day worked doesn't matter, actual production does.
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GTP
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No more watching pron at work...
britechguy
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Every bit as true as it was in the late '80s or early '90s when I snagged it from the Letters to the Editor in the Washington Post:
. . . American business has yet to learn how to measure the productivity and effectiveness of professional and technical employees. As a result, employees who get little done, but spend a lot of time doing it, are often rewarded more than those who fulfill or exceed job requirements while keeping reasonable hours.
A job that routinely requires 60 to 80 hours per week is mismanaged, understaffed, or staffed with the wrong person.
A badly managed firm isn't a good place for men or women, parents or not.
~ Sophie M. Korczyk
I absolutely agree that productivity should be measured against some metric/goal. But how the employee meets or exceeds it should also be entirely up to them. I witnessed that "employees who get little done, but spend a lot of time doing it" method of reward more times than I can count.
. . . American business has yet to learn how to measure the productivity and effectiveness of professional and technical employees. As a result, employees who get little done, but spend a lot of time doing it, are often rewarded more than those who fulfill or exceed job requirements while keeping reasonable hours.
A job that routinely requires 60 to 80 hours per week is mismanaged, understaffed, or staffed with the wrong person.
A badly managed firm isn't a good place for men or women, parents or not.
~ Sophie M. Korczyk
I absolutely agree that productivity should be measured against some metric/goal. But how the employee meets or exceeds it should also be entirely up to them. I witnessed that "employees who get little done, but spend a lot of time doing it" method of reward more times than I can count.
SAFCasper
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Metrics/goals/targets whatever you want to call them should only ever be used as an indicator. One small part of a much larger equation. So ridiculous when companies set them as a hard target.
Provided an arbitrary target of say 30 tickets per day what generally happens is staff begin rushing through tasks making mistakes and providing poor service just so they can close tickets faster and move onto the next. Also your lazy staff snipe the easy tickets leaving the good staff tied up in more complex tasks and struggling to reach targets. Eventually your lazy staff look good on paper and get rewarded while your good staff are stressed out and end up leaving.
By all means look up the stats every so often and compare the averages for your staff. But it should never be given as "you need to do X number of tasks every day"
Provided an arbitrary target of say 30 tickets per day what generally happens is staff begin rushing through tasks making mistakes and providing poor service just so they can close tickets faster and move onto the next. Also your lazy staff snipe the easy tickets leaving the good staff tied up in more complex tasks and struggling to reach targets. Eventually your lazy staff look good on paper and get rewarded while your good staff are stressed out and end up leaving.
By all means look up the stats every so often and compare the averages for your staff. But it should never be given as "you need to do X number of tasks every day"
HCHTech
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Back when I was an employee, my most-hated task was always filling out timesheets. Slave Drivers! Having to account for each 15-minute period of my day. The phone would ring constantly, so you could never just focus on one client's work. It was maddening and despised by every employee. In retrospect, it was one of the only measures available for the managers and owners to look at productivity. "Reports out the door" would have been a metric they could have (and maybe did) use, but since each one was different and some took wildly more time than others to generate, review, approve & assemble, you couldn't use that metric at face value.
One place where I was in management, I remember quantifying every possible item of overhead for each employee. Salary, benefits, insurance, square footage of office space, vacation time, average PTO, calculated share of administrative staff, etc. It was all an attempt at getting a true measure of profitability of everyone. My boss was not impressed. "I can see you spent a lot of time putting this together..." - not exactly a glowing reception. She was a "bottom line" person - total revenue - total expenses was all that mattered. I didn't stay long there, but I've certainly learned in my own business that it's easy to get buried in minutiae.
One place where I was in management, I remember quantifying every possible item of overhead for each employee. Salary, benefits, insurance, square footage of office space, vacation time, average PTO, calculated share of administrative staff, etc. It was all an attempt at getting a true measure of profitability of everyone. My boss was not impressed. "I can see you spent a lot of time putting this together..." - not exactly a glowing reception. She was a "bottom line" person - total revenue - total expenses was all that mattered. I didn't stay long there, but I've certainly learned in my own business that it's easy to get buried in minutiae.
SAFCasper
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Been there with timesheets it's awful when you are constantly jumping between 4-5 different tasks at any given point. But so long as it's not a forced "you need minimim 8 hours billable time every day" I can accept them as a necessary evil. Absolutely priceless for reporting and calculating profitability of managed clients.
britechguy
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Which means, by definition, that you must work significantly more than 8 hours, as at least 40% of what most of us do every day would not be billable.
I have come to despise the whole "billable hours" thing along with (in health care, anyway) the 90% productivity (meaning, billables) thing. No one, and I do mean no one, achieves that in reality. It forces all kinds of fraud and bad practices, if not malpractice.
There are large chunks of any work day where you are getting absolutely necessary tasks done but where those tasks cannot be billed. That's reality.
Markverhyden
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Face it. The implementation and monitoring of metrics can be problematic. The problem is all too often benchmarks are defined/set and no one bother to determine the veracity of them. Meaning do they do what they were advertised to do.
I'll point out a couple that existed back when CompUSA was around and had service departments in all stores. Number of tickets. This was problematic because they had conflicting benchmarks. On one had there was a total number of tickets and on the other was number of line items per ticket. Part of the GACP, Generally Accepted Cheating Principles, was manipulating the numbers. Ideally you want one per serial number. But back when computers were expensive you had a lot more upgrades going on. So if they were short on total tickets they'd create a new one for each task. One for upgraded RAM. One for upgraded DVDRW. You get the picture. They'd also create a ticket for new OEM machines that had been returned. The admin can identify which parts they can order that are field destroy so don't get shipped back. So no QC.
Another GACP involved data entry into the tickets. They are all a database program so ticket displayed is just a template populated with the ticket in question. In the comments section we had different classes of comments. T for technician only, C for customer facing, etc, etc. Corporate policy was every ticket get touched every single day with a customer communication. Needless to say we all know that's a really bad idea for the most part. But the service mgr got a bonus on this. So every service manager touched every ticket with a C comment of Called. Of course there was no comms.
Another common was extended warranties, especially replacement. Every sale got the seller a spiff. Sometimes as much as $10. The BS we used to hear was amazing. Sold them on ink cartridges to get a new one when the old one is dry. Sell it on Office so they can get a new version for free when it comes out.
I'll point out a couple that existed back when CompUSA was around and had service departments in all stores. Number of tickets. This was problematic because they had conflicting benchmarks. On one had there was a total number of tickets and on the other was number of line items per ticket. Part of the GACP, Generally Accepted Cheating Principles, was manipulating the numbers. Ideally you want one per serial number. But back when computers were expensive you had a lot more upgrades going on. So if they were short on total tickets they'd create a new one for each task. One for upgraded RAM. One for upgraded DVDRW. You get the picture. They'd also create a ticket for new OEM machines that had been returned. The admin can identify which parts they can order that are field destroy so don't get shipped back. So no QC.
Another GACP involved data entry into the tickets. They are all a database program so ticket displayed is just a template populated with the ticket in question. In the comments section we had different classes of comments. T for technician only, C for customer facing, etc, etc. Corporate policy was every ticket get touched every single day with a customer communication. Needless to say we all know that's a really bad idea for the most part. But the service mgr got a bonus on this. So every service manager touched every ticket with a C comment of Called. Of course there was no comms.
Another common was extended warranties, especially replacement. Every sale got the seller a spiff. Sometimes as much as $10. The BS we used to hear was amazing. Sold them on ink cartridges to get a new one when the old one is dry. Sell it on Office so they can get a new version for free when it comes out.
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