Time is money, indeed. Increasingly that means that the time spent commuting is being viewed as time employers demand that we aren’t getting paid for, that we could be getting paid for from freelance efforts if we didn’t have to commute.
They point out a hypothetical situation where the employee looks at their “work” day to include the commute and maybe some other time, but the manager isn’t. That’s a huge disconnect. Speaking for myself, I will never volunteer to go back to an in-office or even a hybrid position because of how much time you spend going back and forth and the limiting factor of needing to be in that place for the entire time in between. Why? If the work can get done from anywhere, why would we expect anyone to spend so much time going somewhere else every day?
When you have that blurring, though, the idea that you can measure productivity the same way as you did when we spent 8 hours building a widget seems a little overly simplistic, doesn’t it?
The challenge is finding the thing we can measure to evaluate whether people are accomplishing the goals we set for them, but those goals can’t be the “number of things or hours” when the work is so much more than that.
I am convinced that the best managers are the ones who help remove obstacles to doing good work. Every organization has them. It’s a question of how effectively they can be navigated. In toxic environments, it’s not possible. In healthy ones overcoming obstacles is possible, and that is where managers focus their efforts. Monitoring every action of an individual employee does nothing to help them navigate the obstacles and does nothing to support them. It’s all a top-down case of the “gotchas.”
Herein lies the problem that many of our younger employees see and refuse to play along with. Why should our choices be between making a comfortable wage and living outside of work? Why do we live in a world where we have to “quit” being engaged in our work or decide against fully engaging in our families and communities? Moms have had to make this choice for years. Be a good mom and care for your children by lessening your career opportunities, or be a bad mom and focus on your career.
Why is that the choice?
I see article after article talking about the “loss” of productivity to companies when employees are not fully engaged. Still, no one ever calculates the loss in our communities from people who contribute nothing outside of their job. We don’t put a number on the damage done when fathers are uninvolved in kids’ lives or on the missed mental health benefits of being involved in hobbies, friendships, and community groups.
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