Input, output and the Machine

By Brian Clegg

Two separate influences made me think back to a big argument I had when I was a senior manager at British Airways. One was Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales podcast, where he describes how an office enhancement intended to improve the life of knowledge workers ended up as the cubicle, and how ‘bossware’ – software to monitor what staff are doing at work – is making work life for some a misery. The other was the book Against the Machine by environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth, which argues that with the loss of our roots and culture we are instead in thrall to the Machine (in the most general sense).

I have to say I find the idea of software that monitors what you are doing at work repellant. I’ve been incredibly lucky. The 17.5 years I had an office job I never had to work in a cubicle and I was always in charge of my own time to some degree. In the (many) years since, I’ve worked for myself from home and it’s only my family that monitors my working hours. Yet the seeds of what was to come were already there when I was at BA.

We were just getting to the stage where some workers could do their job as easily from home. I was all in favour of offering (but not requiring) home working to those who could. But managers in the IT department said we couldn’t possibly allow it, because we couldn’t see what they were up to. Perhaps they’d spend all their time watching daytime TV or playing computer games.

I found this a pathetic argument, because I felt that my fellow managers were looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Their concern – and the concern that has led to cubicles and bossware – was entirely focused on inputs. How long people were at their desk, tapping away on the keyboard. But I was convinced what mattered was outputs. What did people actually generate? It didn’t matter how long it took them or when they did it, as long as they produced what was expected. Of course, there were specific roles where the time aspect could not apply sensibly. If you were in PC support, for example, you couldn’t decide you’d only take calls between 8pm and 4am. And if you were a baggage handler, working from home wasn’t an option. But most of the workers we were dealing with were writing and fixing code. And even the ones in support positions could be monitored on problems solved, not time sitting at their desks.

I lost the argument. The management/staff divide was too great for most of the (largely older than me) senior staff. They didn’t trust the people who worked for them, and, more significantly, they were too detached from the jobs their staff did to be sure what counted as good output. They had to stick to the easily measured but meaningless input. 

I don’t agree with everything Paul Kingsnorth says by a long shot. I like science and technology. I think the benefits outweigh the dangers presented by the Machine. But I do agree that we need to be better rooted in our culture and to think from the viewpoint of people, not the system. It can still be done, but it’s much harder in a world where bossware exists. 

According to a study Harford mentioned, such monitoring software has no productivity benefits but does make workers unhappy, less satisfied with jobs and less loyal to the company. Why do these sheep-like management teams continue to use it? Sadly, all too often it is to cover up management incompetence. Here’s a suggestion: if you are responsible for using this kind of software on your workers, prove that you know how to manage. Get rid of it.

This has been a Green Heretic production. I started calling myself a green heretic because Kingsnorth called me one in an article. I’ve used the term proudly since. It’s wonderfully ironic that my green heresy has come to incorporate some of his thinking. See all my Green Heretic articles here.

Image by Kate Sade from Unsplash

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.