Bias toward office staff will cost you: Your WFH crew could walk, say execs
- Reference: 1666341007
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/10/21/proximity_bias_workforce_productivity/
- Source link:
Proximity bias, when a boss assumes an underling is more effective simply because they are in the office, reared its head more frequently over the past two-plus years as people have worked from home during government lockdowns.
At the Canalys EMEA Channel Forum in Barcelona, Kirk Skaugen, executive vice president at Lenovo, said that during his recent travels in the US he encountered a CEO who was trying to head off trouble by enacting a new HR policy.
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"One company that I won't [name] is actually making their employees sign an agreement that they're less productive when they work from home because they're worried that there'll be a micro inequity bias in two years when everybody that's in the office gets promoted."
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Life for some in management was "easier when everyone was in the office," he added. "In Lenovo, we have flexible vacation. We have no vacation limits, some people love that, some people think it is incredibly stressful because they don't know how much to take."
Aongus Hegarty, president for international markets at Dell Technologies, said the biggest issue tech vendors and their customers are facing is the "industry-wide skills gap."
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"I think you have to offer choice and flexibility," he told the panel. "I think if you go down a path of 'mandatory in the office, you must be here' etc. you are going to see attrition even in a down economy, because there are lots of companies that are going to be flexible."
[5]People are coming out of retirement due to cost-of-living crisis
[6]Soaring costs, inflation nurturing generation of 'quiet quitters' among under-30s
[7]This always-on culture we're in is awful. How do we stop it? Oh, sorry, hold on – just had another notification
[8]Does the boss want those 2 hours of your free time back? A study says fighting through crowds to office each day hurts productivity
"By being flexible and giving that choice, you will attract a much broader geographic scale. If you open up your lenses from a diversity perspective, you'll attract a much broader set of people skills, competencies, experiences."
In a related topic, Microsoft recently published research showing that 85 percent of business leaders said they have a hard time knowing if their staff are being more productive when working remotely, even though 87 percent of staff said things were fine. So a disconnect remains, leading to [9]productivity paranoia .
Proximity bias indicates that some managers need to change with the world, said Kobi Elbaz, HP's global channels chief. "I think we need to look about how we measure performance outcomes in a different way, it's not about if you're in the office."
He claimed HP had learned to be more flexible in the pandemic.
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"We allow more flexibility about where they can attend, what time they can do the task… So I think there is a journey that we all need to take also in the way we manage, and leadership processes and HR processes, in every organization."
Gustavo Möller-Hergt, chairman and CEO at Swiss-based distributor ALSO, was blisteringly honest in his assessment of the situation, saying: "Proximity was the way I learned to manage."
"I believe we don't have today the KPIs and the ways to manage [in] this hybrid world. And maybe some generations, like my generation, do not understand that this is absolutely necessary for the future." ®
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/07/retirees_cost_of_living/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/27/under_30s_quiet_quitters/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/30/feature_always_on_culture_notifications/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/26/commute_work_psychologist_study/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/23/microsoft_highlights_productivity_paranoia/
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A possible factor?
It occurs to me that a possible contributor to the concern about remote working productivity is the general unproductive nature of many roles. At the lowest level, spending the day on manual tasks that could be automated (such as taking phone calls and responding from scripts), at the mid-level -- having meetings that decide very little or writing reports that nobody pays much attention to, etc. Consequently the obvious measure has for ages been "active time".
We need to move to a results based approach, but it will be very hard to do while so much "work" has no discernable results. There seems to be a critical mass at which organisations lose focus and become increasingly inefficient of time spent. What's needed is small responsive work units where it's obvious what everyone's contribution is, but as growth, consolidation and globalisation are the order of the day this is unlikely to be widely achieved in the foreseeable future.
So the primary need is not for new "KPIs" but for more intelligent ways of doing business whereby everyone's effort can be seen to contribute to the organisation's purposes.
Re: A possible factor?
Agreed. Leadership needs to decide what issues are important and put focus on those.
The disparity I find on display between what Senior Leadership thinks about most of the time, and stuff that we actually need to do on the ground has been growing in recent years. Lack of contact with people on the ground is part of that, but also so is playing the lip service game to the exec.
I do partly blame this on the irrelevance of most of the exec roles in the context of actual operations and the degree of leeching off society that has become.
Being a CEO used to be a respectable, professional job. Today, they are mostly bottom feeders in a PR role.
You can't manage what you can't measure
> 85 percent of business leaders said they have a hard time knowing if their staff are being more productive when working remotely
So basically they are admitting that they know nothing about what is probably the single most important parameter of the staff they employ.
Same ol' blame shifting
Gustavo Möller-Hergt, chairman and CEO at Swiss-based distributor ALSO, was blisteringly honest in his assessment of the situation, saying: "Proximity was the way I learned to manage."
"I believe we don't have today the KPIs and the ways to manage [in] this hybrid world. And maybe some generations, like my generation, do not understand that this is absolutely necessary for the future." ®
Looks more like a portrait of inadequate management® than anything else.
KPIs are always the same.
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