Earlier this month, Jim Ratcliffe, part owner and operations head for the storied English football club Manchester United, announced an end to the flexible work-from-home policy that the club’s approximately 1,000 employees had enjoyed since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. “If you don’t like it,” he said in a recent all staff meeting, “please seek alternative employment.”
Ratcliffe is not necessarily wrong to view remote work with skepticism. Having covered this topic extensively for The New Yorker, I don’t align myself with the crowd that automatically associates telecommuting with a self-evident pro-labor progressivism. Though I agree that flexible work arrangements will play an important role in the future of the knowledge sector, I also think that they’re hard to get right, and that we’re still in the early stages of figuring out how to implement them well — so for the moment, wariness is justified.
My problem with Ratcliffe’s return to office plan is instead the evidence he used to justify it. As reported by The Guardian, Ratcliffe supported his new policy by noting that when he experimented with a work-from-home Fridays program with another one of his companies, they measured a 20% drop in email traffic.
Here we find a pristine example of the central villain of my new book: a management philosophy called pseudo-productivity, which leverages visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort.
Pseudo-productivity instantiates a double negative. Employers like Ratcliffe fear the idea of their employees not working at all; Tango dancing, so to speak, while still on the clock. If they see evidence that you’re doing something — anything, really — work related, then at the very least they know it’s not the case that you’re not working at all.
But in defending against this negative possibility, pseudo-productivity caps the ability to do something notably positive.
This follows because the easiest and most consistent way to demonstrate visible effort is to engage in rapid back-and-forth digital communication. This frenetic tending of inboxes and chat channels, however, makes it significantly harder to actually produce meaningful results.
Pseudo-productivity might prevent brazen slacking, but in doing so it impedes the type of results that ultimately matter most. It’s also exhausting for those caught in its twisted logic.
Ratcliffe’s goal shouldn’t be to increase his employees’ email traffic, but instead to find smarter measures of productivity that allow such a flawed metric to safely be ignored.
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Speaking of Slow Productivity, as well as storied British institutions, I just returned from a media tour in London, where, among other stops, I had a great conversation about my book on Chris Evan’s Breakfast Show (watch here).