Want to know something kind of embarrassing - something I haven’t really told that many people? Some of my best ideas happen in the shower.
Others arrive just as I’m waking up in the morning, or after I’ve spent 20 minutes walking around my house aimlessly because I can’t seem to solve something sitting in front of my computer.
From the outside, none of this looks particularly productive. I’m not typing or moving a mouse. My Teams status, if I had one, would have long since switched to Away.
Yet that time can be the most productive part of my day.
I started thinking about this after reading about how sophisticated employee monitoring has become. Companies can - and are - monitoring keystrokes and mouse movements, alongside the more familiar indicators of whether someone appears to be online through the colour of their Teams status.
Sometimes I can’t help but wonder what we’re actually measuring. There’s a big difference between a performance culture and a performative one. And when organisations confuse the two, I think they’re in danger of encouraging employees to spend more time demonstrating they’re working, rather than doing their best work.
Activity as a proxy for performance
We hear a lot about performance cultures in the corporate world. Usually, the term refers to a workplace where people make a measurable contribution to whatever the company is trying to achieve. (I mean… really? Shouldn’t that be all cultures? But I digress…)
A performative culture is a little different. It becomes preoccupied with whether people look like they’re working or behaving in a certain way. Depending on the company, that might mean keeping track of how often someone is online, how quickly they respond to messages, whether they’re visible in the office or how much activity a piece of software can detect on their computer.
Of course, there are jobs where activity measures are important. If you work in a call centre or contact centre, availability is part of the job. The organisation needs people answering calls at particular times. The same applies to many operational roles, where physical presence or availability forms part of the service an employee provides.
However, what happens when companies take measures suited to activity or availability based work, and apply them to skilled knowledge work? If you’ve hired someone to develop a strategy, solve a complicated problem, write something or come up with an original idea, what do you really learn about what they’re doing by counting the number of times they’ve touched their keyboard or moved their mouse?
I’d argue very little.
When a company employs an experienced professional, it’s purchasing their skills and expertise. If you’re paying someone to think, then measuring how often they touch their keyboard tells you very little about whether they’re doing their job well.
When good work happens away from the desk
There’s research to support the idea that good work can happen away from the desk - and that in some cases, it may be necessary to be away from the desk for better work to happen.
In 2014, Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz conducted four experiments looking at walking and creative thinking. They found that walking enhanced the creative process. Interestingly, walking in the great outdoors and walking on a treadmill indoors produced similar effects.
There’s also a larger body of research into what psychologists call the incubation effect. Essentially, you work on a problem, put it aside for a period when you hit some kind of mental block and then return to it later.
A meta-analysis by Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod found evidence of an incubation effect in problem solving. The effect varied according to the type of problem, with particular benefits for divergent thinking tasks, where people are generating different possibilities or ideas.
This tells us something important about knowledge work. Productive cognitive work doesn’t necessarily look like continuous, machine-like activity. Sometimes stepping away from a problem is part of solving it.
Companies might have become very good at detecting activity; many are yet to understand how they can detect thinking.
What happens when employees know they’re being watched?
In some cases, surveillance could actually be detrimental to employee performance. A 2023 meta-analysis of electronic performance monitoring looked at 94 independent samples covering more than 23,000 workers. The researchers found no evidence that electronic performance monitoring improved worker performance. They did find that monitoring was associated with increased worker stress.
There’s also another problem with measuring visible activity. People tend to respond to what their employers measure.
If a green Teams light is treated as evidence that you are working, you have an incentive to stay green.
If immediate responses to emails and messages demonstrate engagement, you’re likely to interrupt focused work to answer messages.
If staying late signals commitment, people learn to stay late - even when they’re putting themselves at risk of burnout.
Unfortunately, none of these behaviours necessarily improve the work.
In this context, a performative culture becomes more than an annoyance. It also means the company can end up distorting the very behaviour it’s trying to measure. Management sees more activity, but some of that activity now exists only because employees know management is looking for it.
The performance of collaboration
I’m seeing the same problem in the current debate about return-to-office mandates. One of the most common arguments for bringing people back into offices is collaboration.
There’s undeniable value in working with people face to face in particular circumstances. Sometimes I’d much rather sit down in a room with someone and work through a problem than have another Teams meeting. But does office attendance itself provide evidence that collaboration is happening?
A company can bring 500 people into a building on any given day and record every access-card swipe. Ultimately, all it’s demonstrated is that 500 people came into the office. It hasn’t demonstrated that they collaborated more effectively or produced better work.
When the performance starts hiding the real performance
Performative cultures can be genuinely dangerous for companies. Once employees understand which signals management values, those signals become less useful as evidence of performance.
A full office might mean people are collaborating brilliantly. It could also mean they’re sitting in a different building doing exactly what they would have done at home.
A packed calendar might reflect important collaboration. It could also be preventing someone from getting their actual work done.
A green Teams light tells you someone is online. It can’t tell you whether they’re solving the right problem.
Meanwhile, some of the most valuable contributions people make are inherently difficult to observe. Maybe someone spots a problem before it becomes an expensive mistake, or challenges a bad decision. Or someone spends half a day thinking and finds a much better approach. None of those things fit neatly onto an activity dashboard, but for many professionals, it’s where we add the most value.
Measuring the work that matters
Companies need to know whether employees are performing, but they also need to get better at choosing measures that reflect the work itself.
Physical presence matters in some jobs, while others have meaningful activity measures. Skilled knowledge work is harder to observe because thinking and problem solving rarely happen in neat, measurable increments.
A performance culture focuses on the value people contribute. A performative culture rewards them for producing the appearance of work. Perhaps it’s time for companies to stop rewarding the appearance of work and start paying more attention to the value people actually produce.
One thing I’m thinking about this week
Last week I wrote about whether companies still value our time, including my discomfort with the idea of “reasonable overtime”. I questioned the assumption that employers should have an ongoing claim on employees’ personal time, particularly when additional hours become necessary because roles have been cut or workloads have grown.
One commenter responded to this on Instagram by pointing out that reasonable overtime clauses have been standard in employment contracts for decades and changing that would be difficult. While this is a mostly accurate statement, it really bothered me.
“This is the way things are done” has never struck me as a particularly compelling reason to keep doing something. Established practice tells us how the current system developed, but it doesn’t tell us whether that system still works.
And right now, there are plenty of reasons to examine some of our assumptions about work. People are unhappy, and the boundaries of the working day have become harder to maintain. Companies are cutting workforces while expecting productivity to increase. AI is changing how much work one person can produce. We’re still arguing about where people should be allowed to work.
Many of our current employment practices were developed in a world where the working day had much stronger physical boundaries. You went to work and, for the most part, you went home. We now carry work around in our pockets and can be contacted almost anywhere, at almost any time. If the conditions surrounding work have changed that dramatically, I don’t think “we’ve used this wording for decades” is a particularly persuasive argument for leaving the underlying bargain untouched.
A system under this much pressure deserves scrutiny. We should be willing to question the assumptions underneath it and ask whether they remain appropriate for the world we live in now.
Change can’t happen without those conversations. Someone has to question the thing everyone else accepts. People will disagree about the answer, and some ideas will prove impractical. That discussion is part of working out what comes next.
So when I hear “that’s how it has always been done”, I tend to hear the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one. I’m much more interested in asking whether we can do it better.
Things I’ve made (and you can buy)
If you enjoy my content and would like to support my work, here are a few things I’ve created.
🛒 Track Changes On Shop - Coffee mugs and drinkware for corporate rebels
📖 Do Give Up Your Day Job - Guide to corporate exits and transitions to self-employment
