Productivity versus activity

An interesting article recently came out about Wells Fargo firing more than a dozen employees who were faking their work. From the article:

“The staffers, all in the firm’s wealth- and investment-management unit, were “discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work,” according to disclosures filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.“

While those employees deserved to be fired, it makes me question Wells Fargo even more. How is it that they didn’t notice that work wasn’t be completed, and only found these people after (presumably) the IT department was able to detect the tools being used to fake the work?

As I was digging into this a bit more, I found a couple of comments on Reddit that summarized it quite well.

• Good managers measure productivity. Shitty managers measure activity.
• This is their metric for getting work done?? Mouse moving and keyboard taps? What kind of shitty company is this that doesn’t have a way of checking your work?

It makes me question a lot of what’s going on over there. As the second comment said, how does Wells Fargo not have a decent metric for actually tracking productivity?

This ties into a previous issue at Wells Fargo, where employees opened millions of fake accounts on behalf of their customers without authorization in order to meet sales goals from their superiors.

Goals or activity?

It seems to me that Wells Fargo previously had created goals for employees to hit, so employees did whatever they could to hit them (which is why measures are bad once they become a target). When that didn’t work out, Wells Fargo apparently gave up trying to track actual productivity and now just watch to see if their employee’s mouse and keyboard are active for a great enough period of the day.

Wells Fargo has over 200,000 employees, so I can’t begin to think of a way to properly motivate and understand what all of those people are doing. I would hope that the management structure would help keep an eye on things, but clearly that’s not working either.

This is by far my favorite thing about having a small team (there are nine of us as of this writing). I know roughly what people are working on, and we can all see what’s getting done and what gets missed. We don’t need to track their physical activity, and even if we did it would be of little value since I know a lot of our team references handwritten notes, lists, and sketches as part of their process.

Employees absolutely shouldn’t be using mouse jigglers and other tools to fake their activity, but if that’s the best measure you have for how much work is being done, that’s a far greater problem that needs to be addressed.