Measuring Performance

A post yesterday by Jason Calacanis sparked a bit of an uproar around the Internet. In it, Calacanis gives a pretty good run down of a bunch of ways to save money in a startup. Among them, fire people who are not workaholics. He posted a follow-up after getting slammed on TechCrunch, Signal vs. Noise and a number of other places. His follow-up seems moderate things a bit, in which he claims that by “workaholics”, he actually means “people who love their work”. Personally, I can’t see how he made the mistake in the first place.

I have a couple of real issues with the tone set by his original statement, and then his “retraction”. A workaholic != someone who loves their work. I could cite numerous examples of this from personal experience (I’m not talking about myself here, I currently love my work), but I won’t. A workaholic is someone who stupidly puts in a lot of hours because either a) they have no outside life, and hence work is their life, b) they fear losing their job if they don’t “go that extra mile”, or c) they hope to impress their boss by always being the first one there, last one to leave.

In a past life, I knew someone who fit perfectly into the “c” category — and it paid off! They were promoted ahead of everyone, not because their work was outstanding, but because they were always there. The sad part is, the rest of the organization started to follow suit in hopes of getting ahead.

I found that incredibly sad as individuals with families and young children at home were pressured to put in additional hours. Personally, I was wondering just what “the workaholic” did with their time every day to require putting in so many additional hours (I think browsing the web may have been a contributor).

The root of this problem isn’t with the “workaholics” though, it’s with the organizations that measure performance based on hours logged as opposed to objectives achieved (or surpassed). Often when I read discussions online over at Web Worker Daily and other similar sites discussing telecommuting or remote working, there is invariably someone who pipes up with “but how can you tell if people are working?” That seems like the dumbest question to me, does anyone have a job where they are required to produce absolutely no output?

On the team I used to manage, anytime anyone would come and ask me if they could have such and such a day off, my first question would be “how are you on your deadline for project XYZ?” If they said that they would be done early, then fine, take the day off (which was always the case). Everyone working for me was an adult and as such realized that they had responsibilities. No-one had to be reminded to clean up their room, or take the trash out - that’s guidance I reserve for my kids.

Things happen in life. The only thing you can be sure of is that if you treat your employees with respect, they’ll return the favour. That’s not to say that they won’t quit if someone offers to double their salary, but they will be more likely to give you plenty of notice, and offer to help you out in any way they can to ease their transition out.