At https://www.waiterio.com we are fully remote and we introduced 32 hours work weeks except for customer support which still does 40 hours a week.
We track hours with hubstaff.com which takes a random screenshot every 10 minutes.
It's been a mixed bag. Half of the team kept productivity up and logged those 32 hours stably. Another half of the team, when left unchecked went down to 14 hours a week and very low output.
I have still a lot to learn and I'm far from a great manager.
I know perfectly well I might be the reason why a part of my team is underperforming and not working while I don't watch.
I too have dreamt of giving autonomy and see the team reach great goals on their own. Those dreams seem naive now given the much harsher reality I've faced so far.
Given how all this announcement of reduce hours look more like self-advertisement rather than a justly curious trial in something new that might or might not work, I'm a bit skeptic the others are getting things done with the same budget and efficiency that I do.
What if the others have a larger budget and hiring more senior team-mates?
What if their efficiency is actually lower than mine?
What if they have already fired all the employees that were not absolute workaholics?
Frankly I'm not so confident of my ways. I'll keep hustling and crawling my way up in the mud though. At least I know I'm not sugar-coating it.
You assume everyone is self-oriented and wants to be autonomous and have a great work ethics and care about their privacy.
There are people like that. There are also people that want a lot of guidance.
There are also people that just wants to be paid and don't really care much about the current job goals. There are also people that will do the bare-minumum they can to keep the job.
Understanding who is who requires good management and a good number of managers.
How big is your company? What's the ratio of managers vs doers?
> You assume everyone is self-oriented and wants to be autonomous and have a great work ethics and care about their privacy.
No, they assume that people who are self-oriented and want to be autonomous and have a great work ethic are the people that you want to have working for you. You don't need to employ "everyone", you just need enough for your workload, and you will need fewer people if you optimize your company's structure for high performers rather than deadweights.
Your employee surveillance policies are beyond the pale (screenshots every ten minutes... really?!) and treat all your employees are completely inept, lazy, or both. With policies like that, you shouldn't be surprised when the only employees you manage to hire and retain are that way.
The number of people on the planet is limited.
Maybe you work in a venture backed startup and you hire people with a yearly salary of 100k or more.
The rest of the startups from other locations and less funding will choose less talented people with a lower budget salary.
The people you are hiring with great salaries have been educated with great effort and cost and rules previously by someone else.
I work at a bootstrapped startup with two engineers, only one full time (me). I'm paid well below my market rate, but I stick around because the CEO treats me with respect and gives me the flexibility that I need to be productive and happy.
When you don't have money, you can compensate in other ways, like autonomy and work-life balance. You may not get the best of the best, but you'll get loyal employees who appreciate the flexibility you give them.
Alternatively you can try to build a company on the backs of people who you have to micromanage and who will be gone in a year (and if not, only stick around because they have no other options). I'll leave it to you to decide which is more likely to succeed.
I've watched the screenshots 3 times in 2 years when someone has been missing deadlines and failing to explaining why for several weeks in a row.
I employee people from all over the world. Some of them have real problems.
A guy from Venezuela got his computer fried from an electrical surge.
I asked him a lot of proof and he did provide it immediately. It was all true and I bought him a new laptop.
Another guy from Mexico said he could not work because a hail storm had damaged his computer. When asked for proof turned out that it was all completely made up.
He did not wanted to provide a single photo of his damaged equipment.
He played the "You don't trust me??" card.
In my experience people that do the "You don't trust me?!?" card are at the last rope and have buried theirselves in a huge pile of lies.
So no, I don't trust employees from the other side of the planet that I've never met in person that I just started to work with last month. Trust need to be earned over time with actual proof of being worth of trust.
I give them the benefit of the doubt and I ask for proof.
I will just talk in general terms and not say anything personal since I don't have any personal knowledge of your situation.
But in general, the problem with surveillance is that it is just all about appearances. People usually learn to "look" busy instead of being productive and that is counter-productive to actual productivity when people are just pre-occupied with appearances.
Another problem is that it creates an atmosphere of low trust in the company. When there is an atmosphere of low trust, people will be less motivated to work hard and to give their whole effort since they will feel they are just expendable since the manager doesn't trust them.
Please ask me questions rather than assuming I simply do things.
In Waiterio we do not have managers at all so far.
We are 6 people and there isn't a single manager. There you go!
How many got wind of your surveillance policies and never bothered to apply? How many sensed your attitude towards your employees in the interview and took a different offer? How many spoke to one of your employees after the interview and then ghosted you?
You can't measure the potentially wide-ranging negative impacts of your attitude and policies.
We are a startup of 6 people and we do international hires from different countries. So practically certainly no 2 candidates we've ever interviewed knew each other. You assume we are a big startup with a big budget and all problems that come with it. Ask questions next time.
I didn't assume anything. Everything in my original post was a question. The point wasn't that any one of those hypotheticals was real, just that you can't account for all of the downsides to treating your employees like toddlers.
If you need to take 10-minute screenshots while your company only has 6 people, you've got the wrong 6 people and you're going to fail. At that stage you can't afford to have anyone who isn't pulling their weight.
If you're taking 10 minute screenshots with six people and don't need to do so, you're still going to fail, but it will be because you drove away your founding team.
Some people don't have a strong enough work ethic to be productive when left without direct supervision, but there's hardly a more obvious and intrusive way to say "We don't trust you" than to take a screenshot every 10 minutes. That would absolutely demolish my desire to work.
In fact, I don't trust my employees to a full 100% degree. I didn't have time or ways to build trust (yet).
They work on the other side of the planet, I've never met them in person. Many of them are literally missing the few goals I've managed to set.
> That would absolutely demolish my desire to work.
I've watched probably the screenshots 3 times in 2 years when someone was underperforming and it turned out s/he was just not working at all.
If you had the desire to work to start with, I would have never checked your screenshots because you have hit goals or showed me you could do awesome stuff.
This is not an argument. You are literally saying you don't want to believe in something that is actually happening. I'm telling you of a real problem with real people. You are saying it's not possible to believe it (unbelievably). You called me immature. Yet the problem stands and you have no idea of my actual maturity. You only apply correlation with the fact that other people you know that would do that surveillance would be immature. You don't know about my situation. Ask questions.
