Earlier this month, Jim Ratcliffe, part owner and operations head for the storied English football club Manchester United, announced an end to the flexible work-from-home policy that the club’s approximately 1,000 employees had enjoyed since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. “If you don’t like it,” he said in a recent all staff meeting, “please seek alternative employment.”
Ratcliffe is not necessarily wrong to view remote work with skepticism. Having covered this topic extensively for The New Yorker, I don’t align myself with the crowd that automatically associates telecommuting with a self-evident pro-labor progressivism. Though I agree that flexible work arrangements will play an important role in the future of the knowledge sector, I also think that they’re hard to get right, and that we’re still in the early stages of figuring out how to implement them well — so for the moment, wariness is justified.
My problem with Ratcliffe’s return to office plan is instead the evidence he used to justify it. As reported by The Guardian, Ratcliffe supported his new policy by noting that when he experimented with a work-from-home Fridays program with another one of his companies, they measured a 20% drop in email traffic.
Here we find a pristine example of the central villain of my new book: a management philosophy called pseudo-productivity, which leverages visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort.
Pseudo-productivity instantiates a double negative. Employers like Ratcliffe fear the idea of their employees not working at all; Tango dancing, so to speak, while still on the clock. If they see evidence that you’re doing something — anything, really — work related, then at the very least they know it’s not the case that you’re not working at all.
But in defending against this negative possibility, pseudo-productivity caps the ability to do something notably positive.
This follows because the easiest and most consistent way to demonstrate visible effort is to engage in rapid back-and-forth digital communication. This frenetic tending of inboxes and chat channels, however, makes it significantly harder to actually produce meaningful results.
Pseudo-productivity might prevent brazen slacking, but in doing so it impedes the type of results that ultimately matter most. It’s also exhausting for those caught in its twisted logic.
Ratcliffe’s goal shouldn’t be to increase his employees’ email traffic, but instead to find smarter measures of productivity that allow such a flawed metric to safely be ignored.
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Speaking of Slow Productivity, as well as storied British institutions, I just returned from a media tour in London, where, among other stops, I had a great conversation about my book on Chris Evan’s Breakfast Show (watch here).
I’m betting that he used the email drop to justify his discomfort. Every time I read articles like this, I hear this between the lines: “If employees are at home, I’m certain they’re not working.” This is even when work gets done, reports are produced, people helped. It should be a *supervisor* issue, because they know their employees well. They know which ones will dive into the work no matter where they are and which ones will slack off the minute any boss is out of sight.
But there’s a huge trust issue, resulting from the business culture itself that mainlines productivity. Many companies view employees as tools to make the company money. I read Jenny Odell’s book and she talked about Amazon tracking their employees to the point where people got into trouble if they went to the bathroom too many times or took too long (both being defined by the company). A friend was laid off with no notice; the company decided to eliminate her department in a meeting, her boss walked out and told her that her job was gone, effective immediately. 9:00 a job, 9:15, no job. That’s a company thinking of employees as tools.
Productivity is reduced to the number of widgets. Meanwhile the companies thirst for creativity, for that great idea that will catapult their profits…and they won’t ever get itit because creativity is not a widget that can be measured.
Yup. This is just another case of arrogant old school micromanaging. Years a go I was fired from a medical electronics company because they claimed, “you’re not at your work station a lot.” This was despite the fact that I was far outproducing those around me. Some managers and sometimes co-workers are threatened by those who have a creative method to their productive madness.
Less emails are how I know I am doing my job. For context, I am a senior academic with significant admin responsibilities. So fewer emails mean my systems are working and everyone is updated so no emails asking for status reports. Less emails mean I am on top of things so no emails chasing me to do something. Fewer emails mean my instructions for courses are clear. And so the list goes.
I need to sign up for Tango lessons. Nice link to your buddy Tim!
Very interesting article ! Also I have recently bought your book, Slow Productivity, and I love it. I found it really human, sometimes moving, and also dense, and concise, with few but powerful examples. And The Marie Curie’s example really helped me relieving some unnecessary pressure. Thank you so much for it 🙂
So I read your book – So good they can’t ignore you.
And I get your point, about the craftsman skillset and having something better to offer to the world than the others before you set off on a new venture.
what I don’t understand is how you have simply skipped the part of covering millions of people who do what they love and are passionate about it, but are overlooked for promotion, progression and in turn are dissatisfied.
these people get more qualifications, practice their job, are good at what they do, but are still not promoted, because of politics, race, colour, caste and plainly the wrong passport in most cases.
what advice do you have for them ? shift their job? and start all over again? what advice will you give to those people?
I believe there is more here than meets the eye. Ratcliffe is a chemicals billionaire and I’m sure he’s intelligent enough to know that quantity of emails doesn’t equate to productivity by any measure. He’s been wading into making political (largely right wing pandering) statements lately and I feel this is just another trick to get him on the pages of the Telegraph (whose readership also is of the mode of the somewhat narrow thinking that would easily confuse effort and productivity by hours and graft). And most right wingers in the UK are rabidly anti-working from home.