Employee productivity and remote work

The first question is: how does one know that employees, working remotely, are in fact working?

It's not a trivial question, and the answer is far from simple. Too many managers, I suspect, think that their remote employees are "goofing off" during the time they claim to be working. Some managers may believe that employees are working only part time (yet getting paid for a full time job). A few managers may suspect their employees of working multiple jobs at the same time.

It is probable that all of the above scenarios are true.

The second and third questions are: Do managers care? And should managers care?

Managers probably do care. One can hear the complaints: "Employees are goofing off!" or "Employees are not working when they should be!". Or the shrill: "How dare my employees work for someone else!"

All of these complaints condense into the statement "That's not fair!"

Managers and companies have, naturally, installed mechanisms to prevent such abuse of remote work. They monitor employees via webcam, or -- in a particularly Orwellian turn -- use AI to monitor employees via webcam.

It strikes me that these measures assume that they can obtain good results (employees working) by eliminating bad behaviors (employees walking the dog or making a cup of coffee). They subtract the bad and assume that the remains is good. Theoretically, that sums.

But do managers want merely an employee sitting at a computer for an eight-hour shift? (And doing nothing else?) If so, I am willing to work for such companies. I am quite capable of sitting at a computer for hours. I can even appear to be busy, typing and clicking.

Managers will answer that they want more than that. Managers will (rightly) say that they need results, actual work from the employee that provides value to the company.

Can managers quantify these results? Can they provide hard numbers of what they expect employees to do? For some jobs, yes. (Call centers rate employees by number of calls taken and resolved, for example.) Other jobs are less easy to measure. (Programming, for example. Does one measure lines of code? Number of stories? Number of stories weighted by size? Does quality of the code count? Number of defects found during testing?)

It's easy to take the approach of "remove the bad behaviors and hope for the best". One can purchase tools to monitor employees. (It's probably easy to justify such purchases to budget committees.)

But perhaps some of the effort and expense of monitoring bad behavior could be redirected to measuring good results. Business is, after all, about results. If Programmer A produces the same results as Programmer B, but in 75 percent of the time, why not let Programmer A have some time to make coffee?

Another thought:

Lots of employees in the tech world are paid as salaried employees. Compensation by salary (as opposed to hourly wages) implies that the employee has some discretion over their work.

If employers push the monitoring tools, employees may decide that their compensation should be hourly, instead of salary. Companies won't like that arrangement, as they have been using salaried compensation to extract unpaid overtime from workers. But workers have some say in the issue. If employers focus on hours worked, then employees will focus on hours worked.