Technology giveth; technology taketh away

A recent Harris Interactive poll found that employees with Internet access surf the Web on personal business for an average of 3.7 hours a week. But maybe workers are just trying to get back the time that e-mail has taken away. According to a New York Times article, “Dealing with e-mail — filing it, cataloging it, prioritizing it — has added hours of extra work a week, much of it done by people in the late evening and early morning.”
Posted by Melissa Cooley

3 Comments

  1. Brian
    Posted November 12, 2005 at 3:42 am | Permalink

    Judging a people’s work on the basis of their hours alone is just an excuse for poor management. People should be judged on whether and how well they accomplish the objectives set up for them and not on how long it takes them or where they spend their time.

    It’s easy to use electronic keys to record when workers arrive, network software to keep track of their every keystroke on the computer, punch cards to see which jobs they’re working on, etc. None of this has anything to do with the quality of their work output or the actual hours they may spend doing it (like at home, for example).

    Managers are there to make sure that objectives are accomplished on schedule and well. But their main job is to understand each worker’s job, how it gets done, and most importantly, to keep the worker motivated and productive. This is really hard to do. It’s much easier for the manager to just collect timestamp data and use it as a proxy for doing her/his real job.

    Certainly there are ethical issues…for example workers shouldn’t ber using company time and resources to run their own businesses on the job. But otherwise, managers would be wise to forget the timeclock school of management and actually manage. Hewlett Packard, for example, uses the MBWA (Management by Walking Around)model.

  2. Jed
    Posted November 12, 2005 at 3:25 pm | Permalink

    Brian,Ideas don’t just happen- they’re a result of new information and insights, and juxtapositions out of the ordinary. On the surface, most e-mail is just the usual jokes and junk, but you never know when one of them might lead to something valuable. Managers who cut off all outside communication are also cutting off a major source of information, insights and juxtapositions!

  3. Brian
    Posted November 12, 2005 at 3:41 pm | Permalink

    Jed, I hear ya and agree…

    tell that to my management.