BuzbyTimeRead the requirements guide

What monitoring does to people · 7.6

What to do instead

What to do instead. What decides it, what it costs, and what usually goes wrong. For another implementation reference, see Monitask's reference.

What monitoring was introduced to achieveStart from the purpose

Usually one of four things: knowing whether work is happening, knowing whether somebody is overloaded, having evidence for a billing or payroll claim, and satisfying an external requirement.

Only the third and fourth genuinely require a record, and neither requires observing a person. For related guidance and industry context, see Zendesk.

Knowing whether work is happening

Answered by outputs and by a short written account, weekly, from each person: what was done, what is next, what is blocked. Ten minutes to write, two to read.

It answers the question better than any activity measurement, because it contains judgement about what mattered. And it produces a record of contribution that serves the person as well as the manager.

Knowing whether somebody is overloaded

Answered by asking, regularly, in a one-to-one that happens whether or not there is an agenda. Supplemented by the patterns a time record does show: out-of-hours drift, fragmentation, holiday worked through.

Those patterns identify who to talk to. The conversation supplies the meaning, and there is no substitute for it.

Evidence for a claim

Answered by recording time against work, which is the narrow thing this site sells and the whole of what it claims.

Where more is genuinely warranted

Regulated environments with specific obligations. Safety-critical processes. An active investigation into identified wrongdoing, conducted with legal advice and a defined scope.

In each, the answer is a narrow, documented, time-limited measure aimed at a stated purpose, not a permanent capability applied to everybody. The difference between those two is most of the subject matter of this blog.

The practices that replace it

  • Expectations stated rather than inferred.
  • Outcomes written down where anybody can find them.
  • Short, frequent one-to-ones.
  • Review on what was produced rather than on hours occupied.
  • A record of where time went, owned by the person who made it.

None is a product. Four require no purchase at all, and the fifth is the only part of this that software does well.

What this blog has argued

Forty-two entries, and the argument is one sentence: record where the hours went, and do not watch the people.

Everything else has been consequences of that. Make entry cheap so the record is honest. Read it for what it supports and nothing more. Meet the legal obligations, which increasingly require the record and constrain the watching. Choose software that cannot do the things you have decided not to do. Turn the record into money carefully. And accept that the questions that matter most are answered by talking to people.

Why a supplier says all this

Because the distinction between recording and monitoring is the product, and a company that would not state it in public could not be trusted to hold it in private.

If you needed the other thing, this site has told you plainly and early, which is worth more to both of us than a sale.

The external requirement case

Where a regulator, a customer or a statute requires a record, the requirement is generally for the record and not for observation. Read what is actually required rather than what a supplier says satisfies it.

Organisations routinely deploy more than the obligation asks for, having taken the obligation's scope from whoever was selling the remedy.

The weekly note in detail

Three headings: what I did, what is next, what I need. Written by the person, read by their manager, kept.

It is the single highest-value practice in this entry. It answers the manager's question, produces a record of contribution the person owns, surfaces blockers early, and costs ten minutes. It is also frequently abandoned within two months unless somebody senior keeps reading them and replying.

Reviewing on output

Harder than reviewing on activity, which is why activity is measured. It requires deciding in advance what good looks like for a role and revisiting it.

That is management work, it cannot be bought, and every alternative to it that has been tried is a proxy with the problems described throughout this blog.

A last word

If you read one entry from these forty-two, this is the one to act on: state expectations, write outcomes down, talk to people often, and record where the hours went. Everything else is detail.

A short summary

Four purposes, of which two need a record and none needs observation. Outputs and a weekly note answer whether work is happening. Conversation answers whether somebody is overloaded. Recording answers the evidential claims. Narrow, documented, time-limited measures cover the genuine exceptions. And the practices that replace monitoring cost nothing.

If you are the person being monitored

Ask what is collected, who sees it, how long it is kept and what it will not be used for. Those questions are reasonable, they are answerable, and in several jurisdictions you have a right to at least some of the answers.

An employer who cannot answer them has not thought it through, which is more common than an employer who will not.

One line to carry

Record where the hours went, and do not watch the people.

Where to start

Introduce the weekly note before introducing any software. If it answers the question, you have saved a purchase; if it does not, you now know precisely what the software has to add.

For the organisation that already monitors heavily

Removing everything at once is unnecessary and probably unwise. Remove the most intrusive element, say why, wait a quarter, and look at what happened.

That sequence is manageable, it produces evidence, and it is how every organisation that has unwound this successfully did it.

Also in what monitoring does to people