[kmatthews812]

Full disclosure. I just built this for Google Workspace (www.gofasterhq.com). I built it because it's a tool I wish I had when managing teams in the past.

These articles are very one sided and there is a productive middle ground to be established using productivity management tools. As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive, especially in a remote environment. Replace the word "spy" in this article with "hold accountable" and it doesn't sound so bad all of the sudden. But with that visibility, the manager also needs to understand the context in which the data is generated. Whether somebody is productive isn't only a matter of metrics, but also their role, their seniority, and what it is they are expected to do.

As an employee, these tools can benefit you by weeding out teammates who present themselves confidently, but don't actually do much. With a good manager, you should be able to simply do your job and the metrics, in context, take care of themselves.

[JoBrad]

As a manager, I feel that using metrics from productivity tools to measure productivity is lazy and counter productive. If your team is so large that you can’t measure productivity without using these cheats, then your team is too large for you to manage. But you’re also ignoring the fact that people work in different ways, and may be just as productive without generating the metrics you’re looking for. And before you tell me you can just taper the metrics, why not just spend time with your team setting goals that can be measured in an open and direct way?

In my opinion, all these tools do is reward employees that work the way you do, which may improve stats on your metrics, but will encourage group think and diminish creativity.

Happy to be proved wrong, with some facts.

[kmatthews812]

"As a manager, I feel that using metrics from productivity tools to measure productivity is lazy and counter productive."

I agree, if that is the only way you measure productivity. These tools create a more holistic view of what a person does at work and should not be the sole measure of performance.

In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days. Graphs that shows no work for long stretches make performance conversations much easier. It's tough for a poor worker to argue their way out of that or fake the metrics going forward.

[Silhouette]

In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days.

I've worked in places where many metrics of this type would indicate I did little to nothing for 3+ weeks. Some of the most important projects I've ever worked on in terms of business impact have been in that category.

The difference in outcomes IME is almost always whether you're working with good management and good communication so everyone understands what's really going on and it's no problem or you're working with bad management and poor communications and something of great value is incorrectly assessed as having little value leading to worse outcomes for everyone.

[wizzwizz4]

> In reality, what they make visible are the people who do little to nothing for 3+ days.

I am that worker. I've been praised for "carrying the team" on more than one occasion. If I'm doing my job to a high standard, why is this any of your business?

[qwytw]

So an 'employee' who attending 4 meetings every day and edited 20 documents but didn't actually accomplish anything useful is better than the one who did nothing for 3 days but managed to produce a lot of actual value for the company in the other two?

> In reality

IMHO the tool would be most useful in dysfunctional companies where managers don't really know what their subordinates are supposed to be doing or are trying achieve besides "working".

[MicrosoftShill]

"As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive"

Successful managers figure out how to do their jobs without micromanaging or creating a culture of surveillance. Bad managers do what you're saying.

[throwaway2056]

Please don't give such justification. Power corrupts, misuse.

- Would you also allow your team mates to know same data about you to them?

- That would be a level playing field.

- Or at least MS tools should 'automatically' report to the User that an Admin did LOOK into their habits.

- This way you will not have intelligent people working in your team. I am saddened that Google does this.

- Are your teammates aware that you can do this?

[troad]

> With a good manager, you should be able to simply do your job and the metrics, in context, take care of themselves.

"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

[CuriousSkeptic]

> As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive

Is this a cultural thing? As a Swede I can’t even begin to imagine the scenario where this statement makes any sense

[heresie-dabord]

Yikes.

> As an employee, these tools can benefit you by weeding out teammates who present themselves confidently, but don't actually do much.

How many employers "weed out" managers who present themselves confidently but don't actually do much?

Not many, in my experience. The management hierachy in an organisation of non-trivial size will be populated by cronyism and Flynn Effect virtuosos.

[DANmode]

Benefit of surveillance over checking their deliverables, go.

[SkyPuncher]

Yep, management best practice is “Outcomes over Outputs”.

Nearly every performance tool I’ve seen only measures outputs. Now, outputs are critical to outcomes - but they’re not the goal themselves.

[Silhouette]

It's worse than that. A lot of these management tools don't even measure outputs, only inputs, and then only partially and with doubtful predictive value.

[SkyPuncher]

I guess I tend to consider inputs and outputs the same in the context of most of these metrics.

From the viewpoint of outcomes, everything beyond outputs is simply too obscured to make sense of.

[Silhouette]

From the viewpoint of outcomes, everything beyond outputs is simply too obscured to make sense of.

I don't think that's always true but you definitely have a valid point in a lot of cases. For inputs I was thinking about stuff like measuring time spent on specific activities without reference to whether the employee had been set up to make good use of that time or whether those activities were themselves worthwhile. That would contrast with outputs like measuring a software developer's productivity by the classic lines of code metric or some modern version like number of commits per day. A developer working 80 hours/week and producing 1000 lines in 20 commits in that time will look great by those metrics but I'd rather hire the developer who would write only the 100 useful lines that would survive into production in 20 hours and 5 commits because they thought before they wrote.

[midasuni]

> As a manager, it can be difficult to know what your team is working on and who is actually productive,

Literally your job. Yes it’s difficult, which is why they pay you rather than automate it. Or get someone on minimum wage to do it.

[jdbernard]

I'm in management, have been for about 5 years. I've never found it difficult to judge the productivity of my team members. Even in the 15 years I was primarily an IC it was obvious, to me, who the most productive people on the team were and who were the least. If you are actually involved in the work the team is doing, and if you take even a little bit of time to have an actual relationship with people, it is not hard. What to do about it (besides the lazy "fire them") can be very hard. Helping people grow can be very hard, depending on the people. But my team doesn't work "for me," they work with me. I'm as much responsible to them as I am for them.

As another comment points out, the people that use these tools would never give their reports the same data about their own "productivity." Employers try not to even let employees know about this kind of surveillance because it directly undermines any supposed "team culture." They have no place in an equitable relationship. When management uses these kinds of tools they make it clear that they don't care about those being managed. They don't care enough to be honest with them, to be accountable themselves for how they manage. The obvious message these tools send to those under this kind of management is that that management does not see them as respected colleagues and team members, but rather cogs in the machine, "resources" to be exploited.

[willcipriano]

> As an employee, these tools can benefit you by weeding out teammates who present themselves confidently

How do I benefit from this? In my experience the salary of a fired employee is kept by the company not distributed to the remaining employees.

[dudul]

That's not how you hold people accountable.

Even simple metrics like number of PR/code reviews can easily become so useless. They can be good indicators when taken with a grin of salt. But judging someone's productivity from these dashboards is stupid.

I really hope companies/managers who use garbage like that suffer the consequences and the industry learns from it.

[waiseristy]

You could also replace the phrase “hold accountable” with “micromanage” and be just as accurate.

If you hire slackers, be prepared to be amazed at how much work they’ll do to bypass your micromanaging. It’s a race to the bottom

[BlargMcLarg]

You can already do this in any decent devops system/management software without the surveillance.