Digital Journal has previously tapped into the productivity and working from home debate. There are some analysts who see productivity gains from more people working away from the office during the coronavirus pandemic, whereas other commentators see productivity has having taken a dip (not least due to variable technologies and interruptions with broadband service, which become additional factors to assess along with work-environment culture).
Whichever direction productivity has taken, it remains that supervisors need to assess how hard their workers are working and this becomes more challenging when the workplace are geographically dispersed. While some workers might find check-ins to assess their work rate intrusive, others welcome the assessments in order to provide focus and to help with target setting.
Different countries have different cultural norms when it comes to work. In the U.S., it appears that a target-driven approach centered on metrics is the norm and that most workers actually like being tracked and assessed for their work output. Here new data from Prodoscore shows that U.S. workers want their bosses to have visibility into their productivity (90 percent of surveyed workers were of this view).
The survey also found that if workers knew their employer could see their productivity, then half of respondents said they would structure their day differently. When specifically asked what they would do differently, the research found that 37 percent of workers said they would spend less time on non-work-related tasks (such as social media and chores); and 31 percent would spend more time using business applications related to their job. Furthermore, and 25 percent said would take fewer breaks.
This data comes as part of Prodoscore’s visibility survey, which looked into U.S. workers’ opinions on employee visibility. It appears that, in the U.S., the heavy-hand of managerial oversight is perhaps needed and generally welcomed.
