The Meat Machine

This was one of the most disturbing things I've ever read.

New York Times: The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score

Let's start with the brilliant move by the NYT to create a 'productivity tracking' experience as you read the article. Your 'active time' is tracked and you get constant reminders that you are 'being idle' or 'being tracked'. You live the experience you are reading about. Pure, terrifying genius.

I had no idea how far back down the road to Frederick Winslow Taylor and the nightmare of dehumanizing work in the era of Ford and Sloan, we were going.

There are so many disturbing things in this article I don't even know where to start. How about tracking the 'performance' of chaplains in hospice? Yes. Tracking the 'productivity' of those who minister to the dying. My limbic system explodes.

The most disturbing thing for me though is not the shocking surface revelations; it is the doubling down of organizations on tracking activity over value creation. I thought we were done with that. I really did think the world was coming to its senses and we were starting to use intelligent analytics to measure the *value* an employee was creating for internal and external customers.

I thought we were making progress in the right direction; away from what I call the 'meat factors': body in room, bum in seat, hands on tools, eyes on screen. Meat factors are easy to observe, easy to monitor. And as too often happens in human activity, we value what is easy to measure. Actual output, measured as real value created for a customer (internal or external), is hard. So we just don't do it. Maintaining the value of the essential humanity of the humans doing the work, front and center, seems harder still. So we don't do that either.

But, I thought we were moving away from that.

I thought the thinking of Louis Brandeis, Mary Parker Follett, Charles Clinton Spaulding, W. E. Deming, or Taiichi Ohno was finally going to find a home in the 21st century. A century of the re-humanizing of work.

Holy crap was I wrong. We are doubling down on measuring activity. Busy-ness. Meat factors. And guess what the employees are doing in response? Shifting their focus away from creating value and toward being busy. "Drive-bys" by chaplains (you'll have to read the article to believe it). 'Mouse wiggling' during meetings so the 'system' knows you are being 'productive'. Skipping bathroom breaks. Because when the meat leaves the room, we can't measure it anymore. A modest proposal: body motion detectors in bathrooms and Wi-Fi shielding so you can't take your device in with you, to 'waste time'. Good idea, right?

Anything to keep your 'productivity' score (which is actually NOTHING to do with productivity) up.

This is about as close as I've come to giving up on the human race in some time. I thought ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) was the worst nightmare emerging from the technophilic ooze of zombie management. I was so freakin' wrong.

What's the answer? There are a dozen pathways that will take us back to where we belong. Here are a couple of starting points:

• Where's the Revolution?
• The Progressive Roots of Management Science

#crossover #tracking #worksmart #surveillance #monitask #management #leadership #culture #hr #productivity #work #analytics #ats