BuzbyTimeRead the requirements guide

Remote and hybrid ยท 6.1

Availability against output

Availability against output. What decides it, what it costs, and what usually goes wrong. For a practical comparison point, see Monitask's payroll time tracking.

The green dot problemWhat actually changed

Remote work removed the visible cue managers had relied on without noticing: people being present. What replaced it was a status indicator, and a status indicator measures whether an application is open.

Because presence is measurable and output frequently is not, presence becomes the thing managed. Everything in the entry on measurement follows from there.

The predictable consequence

Devices that move a mouse cursor exist, are cheap, and sell well. They exist because activity monitoring exists.

Nobody buys one to avoid working; people buy them to avoid having to look available while thinking, reading, or being away from a keyboard for the ordinary reasons anybody is. The market for them is the clearest available evidence that activity measurement measures the wrong thing.

Not offered

We do not record activity, idle time or status, which is why there is nothing here for such a device to defeat.

What to agree instead

  • A response-time expectation, stated in hours rather than minutes for anything that is not an incident.
  • Core hours, narrow, when people are reachable.
  • What counts as urgent, and the channel it arrives on.
  • What happens outside those, which should be nothing.

Four agreements, written down. They replace the anxiety that status indicators were being used to manage, and they are checkable in a way a green dot is not.

The manager's anxiety is the real subject

Behind almost every availability requirement is somebody who cannot see the work and is worried. That is a reasonable feeling and it is not addressed by making people visible.

What addresses it is a short written account of what happened and what is coming, weekly, from each person. It takes ten minutes to write, it answers the actual question, and it works whether somebody is at a desk or not.

Where availability genuinely matters

Support rotas, call centres, anything with a service commitment, and roles where a colleague is blocked without an answer.

In those cases availability is the job rather than a proxy for it, and scheduling it explicitly is entirely legitimate. The distinction is whether somebody is being asked to be reachable for a stated reason or to be visible for reassurance.

What a time record contributes here

Not presence. Where hours went, which answers a different and more useful question, and which is available whether somebody worked from a kitchen or an office.

An organisation that has that record has less need for the green dot, and organisations that adopt both usually have not thought about why they wanted the first.

Where the requirement came from

Almost always a specific incident: somebody was unreachable when it mattered, or a piece of work was late and nobody knew. One event produces a permanent policy applied to everybody.

Address the incident. A response-time expectation for the situation that arose is proportionate; continuous visibility for everybody is not, and it costs more than the incident did.

Status as a courtesy

There is a version of this that people volunteer: saying when you are heads-down, out for an hour, or finished for the day. It works because it is offered rather than collected, and because it carries information a system cannot infer.

Ask for the courtesy and do not build the surveillance. The first is generally given freely once the second is off the table.

Measuring responsiveness, if you must

At team level, on things with a stated commitment, as a distribution. Not per person, and not on everything, because responsiveness measured per person produces people who answer quickly rather than people who answer well.

What to do this week

Write the four agreements from the section above with your team and switch off whatever status reporting you have. Most organisations find nothing happens, which is the answer.

The cost of being visible

Somebody who must appear available cannot do the work that requires not appearing available: reading, thinking, drafting, or sitting with a problem. Those are the parts of most knowledge work that produce the value, and they look identical to idleness from outside.

An availability requirement therefore does not merely fail to measure output; it displaces the work that produces it.

A short summary

Status measures whether an application is open. Agree response times, core hours and what counts as urgent instead. Ask for a written weekly account, which answers the manager's actual question. And recognise that the anxiety behind the requirement is real and is not addressed by visibility.

The trial that settles the argument

Switch off status reporting for a month and see what breaks. In most organisations nothing does, and the month is more persuasive than any argument about principle.

Where something does break, you have learned what the requirement was actually for, and can address that specifically rather than by watching everybody.

What to say to a manager who wants it

Not that it is wrong. Ask what specifically they are worried about, and then propose the narrowest thing that addresses it. Usually that is a weekly written update and a response-time agreement, and usually they accept it, because the underlying worry was never about presence.

Where to start

Write the four agreements with your team this week. They take twenty minutes and they replace the thing the status indicator was standing in for.

A last note on trust

An organisation that needs to see people working has told them something about how it regards them, and they hear it. Every measure in this entry is cheaper than that message and none of them carries it.

Also in remote and hybrid