One of the things I’ve never understood about the workforce is the tracking of time. That is to say, when you clock into the job with a card, pass, or something that says “my butt is in the chair, you start to pay me now,” this starts a magical effect where work is being done and productivity is ramping up, thus building fortune for the corporation, executives, shareholders, and so on. It has never made much sense to me, ever since I was told by a senior executive at club fed that if my butt wasn’t in a chair, he was losing money. How can such a thing be a measure of productivity or success?
Apparently in the working world, it means everything. You accomplish production goals, your quota for this quarter, the clients are happy, everything is great — but wait! You left 30 minutes early on this day! You arrived 5 minutes after start time! You took 30 seconds longer on break! Everything is falling apart now and it’s all your fault!
I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If objectives are being accomplished efficiently and successfully, then perhaps merely tracking time in seats is an outdated metric. For sure, it’s useful in some capacities, but it doesn’t tell the entirety of the story. After all, if someone follows the rules to the letter, clocks in at 0800 and is there til 1200, then exactly after that 1 hour unpaid lunch (we don’t pay you to eat, what are you, human?) you come back at 1300, and your butt is in that chair til 1700, does that really say anything beyond the individual simply being there at those hours? Was anything really actually accomplished?
By the metrics of the modern age, apparently everything is accomplished by measuring that time alone. That’s the way they’ve always done it, they say. Change is too hard. We’d have to think about other measures to quote a realistic figure for a job. We might have to pay workers differently. They might try to work from places other than the office or production floor where we can’t be certain if they’re actually working. Supervisors and managers might be redundant if we trust employees to get their tasks done!
But tracking goals completed, objectives accomplished, and work actually done is hard. It requires looking beyond butts in chairs and distilling the actual work from the mythical measurement of time. It means looking at individuals by their merits and own abilities, not by an equal passage of time on a clock. Everyone is different, which is anathema to a system that indoctrinates humans from birth to fit a mold for stamping widgets and obeying the factory overseer.
Clock in and stamp that widget, slave.