If a company I worked at implemented this, and I knew about it, I'd quit. Despite the tagline about nobody liking micromanaging (not to mention being micromanaged), this is software that explicitly encourages micromanaging.
None of the metrics they track are directly tied to productivity, they're just ways for managers who don't trust their employees to be Big Brother with fewer uncomfortable personal interactions.
I agree. This product is mislabeled. It doesn't help you avoid micromanaging - it allows you to do so efficiently.
I think we can agree that this would be useful in low skill jobs. But would be perceived as insulting at most respectable companies who respect their employees.
Concurred. "William has been coming in early this week." (first tooltip/person on homepage header), irrelevant and borderline creepy to actually log this into some monitoring software that someone is supposed to frequently use. I can almost hear Mr. Burns saying 'Excellent' while tenting his fingertips.
I never understood this pessimistic sentiment. It's just more data. Of course when evaluating the data you get, you have to consider the context -- people work on all kinds of things that may or may not be measured. Without it you don't have those metrics anyways.
Once upon a time, I was working lots of all-nighters and really busting my gut. Yet my boss was getting angry at me for no reason. Wtf? So eventually I sat him down and asked if there was a problem. Turns out he was tracking the wrong user when monitoring my after hours data, and he thought I was lying about my overtime. He was fuming and thinking about firing me.
Oh, you say. But he was just misusing the data! He should have collected more or different data! Look, the takeaway is that many managers will use this kind of data as a crutch, not a supplement. The employees will suffer and the biz will lose good staff. How about treating your staff like fucking adults, and if they are hitting the agreed delivery milestones, save your whip for the bedroom?
The most effective management system I have used was at Yahoo. You would fill in a daily and weekly TODO list on a wiki page, and the deltas were automatically emailed to your PM. Simple, respectful and effective.
> the takeaway is that many managers will use this kind of data as a crutch, not a supplement. The employees will suffer and the biz will lose good staff. How about treating your staff like fucking adults
I guess you have to ask yourself with what kind of people you want to work. Good/decent people (including managers) will use whatever data they've got to improve the lives of their co-workers and the prospects of the business. Where I work I have so much faith in the intentions and intellect of my co-workers I welcome sharing this kind of thing as I'm confident it will help me improve.
Not every workplace is filled with nefarious bosses out to spy on everything you do!
I love RescueTime - for myself. I'd absolutely recommend that my employees use it, but with the caveat that I would never ask for the results. They can use it personally to improve their productivity, but it's just not right for someone else to be analysing their reports.
There's a lot of backlash here against the idea that managers will use this to micro-manage. That's possible, sure. Bad managers will be bad.
The reason I'm interested in Peak is that it may be a good tool to implement the "trust, but verify" approach to management. I feel like I under-manage my team (7 people) because I really dislike interrupting people. I generally assume everybody is doing something productive, and understands the goals and priorities of our products.
However, when a team member gets stuck or goes off into the weeds, they may not realize it themselves. Before they've spent a days doing unnecessary work or spinning their wheels, it would be great to have a non-interrupting way to notice this and give them the support they need to get back on track.
Of course you need to take the numbers for what they are - if you directly incentivize people to get their dropbox files changed numbers up, you're gonna have a bad time. Still, I see this as a potential tool to help me understand what might be going right and wrong with my team without bugging them, and that's a good thing.
The key issue is what you just described in your last paragraph. Micro-managing by metrics without thinking in side-effects is actually harmful to the team. There is a reason measuring productivity by LOC is considered a bad practice (which was actually very common in the past).
I completely see the need for metrics, but they are very easy to gather by specialized tools for the job (software engineering, customer service, etc...). It seems that Peak is just a glorified dashboard, and by assuming that the product is actually "automatically tracking work" (referencing their slogan) one would be damaging the team's productivity and morale, and not increasing it.
A less intrusive alternative might be to start using something like https://idonethis.com/. That way you can start offering help when you see, "Still trying to find that bug; didn't get much else done."
So if I spend an hour at my desk with a pen on paper while I sketch out a few pages of notes, designing a new system before I implement it, I'm unproductive?
So you take a picture of each sketch, and upload them to Dropbox, perhaps automatically with that "upload photos from my phone to Dropbox by default" feature.
It seems to me that one of things this app might enforce is the idea that your work isn't really done until you've documented it and/or shared it. Pushing for measurement of using tools like Dropbox, Gmail, Basecamp, Google Drive, etc. might enforce this ethos. Yes, it's definitely not perfect: it's not tracking that time when you lean over and ask the designer next to you for feedback, and so on. But it seems worth an experimental try.
I know many very productive people who seem less productive than they are, because they hate going to some project management tool and documenting what they accomplished. If we could semi-automate documentation of work being done, such as by hooking in to Github, that might make their progress more visible with little to no effort.
> So you take a picture of each sketch, and upload them to Dropbox
You just created an incentive for programmers to draw useless diagrams on paper and upload them on Dropbox just to "score one point".
Sure, we could go on and on suggesting metrics back and forth to minimize this problem, but my point is that metrics must be carefully chosen due to the unintended side-effects that they may cause. Maybe you can use the number of pictures on Dropbox just to get a sense of overall quality, but if you are going to hold individual people accountable using very exact metrics, then they must be chosen very carefully. This tool certainly does not help on that regard.
Agreed. Same would go for any stand-ups you held with your team, and whiteboard design sessions, and more. It's like you're out the lunch if you're not emailing or updating things on project trackers.
A lot of people are saying this would encourage micromanaging, but I think it has a more valid purpose:
1.) A great way for a CEO of a growing company to check in and see the pulse of their company. Someone who has a head on their shoulders would probably just say "great, things are moving along." An idiot who's primary job is to get in the way would probably do what people are talking about here.
2.) A deterrent for what they say on their site (and was even poked fun at in a comic on the front page earlier today): shoulder tapping. This looks like a great way to pacify the idiot mentioned above in #1 who's sole purpose is to make sure the cog (you) is spinning.
In the right hands this looks like an incredible tool and a great way to keep an eye on your business. In the wrong hands, well, yeah. If you work for a company where someone would use this to incessantly nag you and your fellow team members, it's probably time to pack up instead of saying the tool is bad.
We shouldn't be encouraging idiot CEOs to do virtual shoulder-tapping. All the CEO's I've reported never needed to ask "Hey, so... how's it going..." because my team and I are delivering. Constantly. More than expected. Every single time. Isn't this the way it should be?
I don't think whether or not people are "delivering" is the question. Consider the context of the messaging they've built into the site/app:
"Rebecca brought in two new contracts."
As a CEO, this makes me say "oh, no shit, I should send Rebecca a thank you or offer up a coffee for helping my business to grow."
Or another example:
"Luke is less active than usual."
If this popped up a handful of times, I'd probably want to make sure Luke was taking enough time off for himself or wasn't coming down with a cold. For example, "hey man, looks like you're dipping off a bit, want to take the week off?"
Again, it all comes down to the individual and how they use it. It's great that you're a powerhouse, but most people are not. Yes, it would be awesome if everyone was at peak performance all day everyday, but it's not realistic. Anyone who expects that is a bit crazy in my book.
I think what's presented here is confusing because it invites the opportunity to be a human instead of a robotic airhead who's obsessed with productivity. I'd say the majority of people out there today are too caught up in the game of life to realize that "employee" is just another way to describe "person who happens to work for/with me."
Is this some kind of April Fools joke but very, very late?
What a horrible product. As a team leader, I've always sought to do the opposite this product promotes: care not about what each person is doing but rather the total of each individual's contributions and what the team as a whole was producing.
This is awful bordering on offensive. Not only does it assume that "productivity" is an easy to quantify set of ticks on a scale, but it completely ignores any other work besides that which can be tied into the service.
This is evil but I predict massive success for this product. I actually wonder if companies could start choosing other products they use (such as their CRM) based on how well they integrate with peak.
I remember when I was CTO @ Zynga it was so hard to fire bad engineers. I wish I could have come up with cold hard data to get rid of them. Instead the best I could do was move them around. The company I worked for was broken but perhaps I could have made the good engineers lives slightly easier if I could have dropped the dead weight and filled their seats with other good programmers.
I can see use cases that aren't evil. Of course it's a similar line of reasoning that I'd use against government wiretaps. Even though it can be done for good reasons the temptation to use it for evil is so high that it should not be done.
It's only evil depending on the context in which it's used. I spent a year contracting on odesk.com remotely. They take random screenshots while you work. I actually grew to appreciate it and found my work ethic to be improved. In the context of our company, we all worked remotely, kept in touch via IM/cam and email, and the monitoring apps were a way to keep everyone honest and committed while having a very long leash day-to-day. Managers (I was one of them) had access to screenshots but we rarely if ever reviewed them, except in cases prior to a firing (and often not even then). A dedicated, small team reviewed the screenshots and asked for refunds from their pay if they were on non-work related things. Often the managers were never notified unless the violations were extreme.
A sidenote, we were all contractors and most of us were freelancers essentially, so we were all easy to fire on a moment's notice. It kept teams strong and kept people from resenting their co-workers who couldn't keep up. And re-organizing/growing teams was easy, because firing _and_ hiring were so easy. I could do both without any management or peer approval.
The danger with this hard data approach, though, is that you can end up with good engineers who hate to play the numbers game and bad engineers who realize they just need to hit average numbers to save their ass. And clueless HR departments won't know the difference.
Yeah, totally. Maybe there is no answer other than to fix the organization that made it so hard to get rid of bad engineers in the first place ;) Or quit (I chose quit).
Ugh... So suddenly I'm the least productive because I send out the least e-mails and make the least number of modifications. Yeah, I don't like these trackers.
This is a cute application that ties many services together and even looks nice. Standing alone, it's almost like having a timeline for the tangible things in your work; I'd actually love to have this summarized, but for no particular reason.
And that's the problem. It's not clear at all what problem this fun application solves. It clearly doesn't capture the flow of work in a team or any individual, simply because it only captures the tangible/digital artifacts of work. You can imagine adding self-reporting or something (ala Yammer), but it's still an incomplete record.
And as other commenters point out, an incomplete dataset is prone to faulty reasoning. An overzealous user might micromanage based only on these tangible artifacts...
In any case, I'd encourage the developers here to think about what specific problem is being solved, and whether this app communicates that well. The information captured might be useful, but I'm unconvinced a timeline presents it properly.
My gut says something about summaries and aggregation, looking not at what's in-flight but what has been done so far.
I want my company to use this just so I can write scripts to game the metrics.
For bonus points, can it integrate with WooBoard (http://www.wooboard.com/) so we can do ridiculous tracking and ridiculous recognition in the same place?
Gaming metrics could be tested during the interview process:
"That was a nice job solving FizzBuzz. Now, please tell us concisely how you would solve this problem: The purchasing department has a metric for buying in volume to get discounts. The manufacturing department has a metric for cutting inventory. There's a huge Dumpster next to the loading dock."
Haters gonna hate. I live in a work environment where I am micromanaged like crazy. Drives me nuts, doesn't let me do long runs on single projects, etc. This product seems like it would provide the information my bosses are looking for without interrupting my work nearly as much.
If people are upset at the idea of micromanaging, fine. Unfortunately though, it exists, and likely always will. If this lets the employee suffer less for it, I'm a fan.
Are the targeted customers managers or team members or?
Why do they need to know what others are working on?
Why are they interrupting each other to know what they are working on?
Is Peak going to help reduce interruptions or create more questions from people?
Interesting concept. Aesthetically pleasing. Certainly looks like this information would get the attention of managers.
That said, this is comparable to creating a "tournament structure" within the company. Where top and bottom performers are more visible.
There are some really interesting findings on this structure in labor economics lit. One finding is that it leads to higher rates of sabotage and cheating.
I would also worry that this structure could alienate those who work in... Different ways. I worry that this would encourage people to work in ways that helped their metrics.
Certainly a cool product. But I hope it's not used in an office I ever work in.
In the right hands (I'm thinking my ow or a PM's), this is great! In the wrong hands (COO, other departments), this is dangerous.
I immediately signed up. There are a lot of one-off tasks that get done that I like to know about so I can award upon the employee's next review, or handle if they go office the weeds.
Disclosure: I have a barely similar project in the works for our PM that may get released publicly, but it's less about the tracking (what most here hate) and more about the scheduling (which I think we all see as valuable).
I see two parts to this product. The one everyone's complaining about (metrics about "productivity"), which is really a bad idea because lines of code, commits, hours "active", emails sent, etc are not a good indicative of productivity.
But there's also this "feed" of work-related activity, which might not be bad, but I'm not sure how helpful it can be. I see it as Basecamp's "Progress" view, but for all your apps.
The information you could gain from this tool could be used for good or bad purposes. Personally I think it would give me an insight into what my team is working on, rather than being a negative 'big brother' tool. If you use this to track if your employees are working or not you already have the wrong attitude.
I'm a manager and I think this product is wrongheaded. I don't care about bums on seats, I care about hitting milestones.
If I was a worker bee, I would write a script (on company time) to dribble my commits in automatically starting early in the morning and finishing late at night. Because fuck 'em that's why.
I thought this might be like iDoneThis, but nope, it's full on spying. That can fuck right off. iDoneThis on the other hand is great, highly recommend (no, I have nothing to do with the company, just used it on my last startup).
See my comment. Figured this was this case. It's obvious - but it's empirically proven that this structure, tournament structure, rads it cheating and sabotage.
None of the metrics they track are directly tied to productivity, they're just ways for managers who don't trust their employees to be Big Brother with fewer uncomfortable personal interactions.