How new data-collection technology might change office culture

&quot;The minute that you get the report that you&#x27;re not speaking enough and that you don&#x27;t show leadership, immediately, the next day, you change your behaviour,&quot;<p>This is a complete disaster that happens every time when someone uses wrong metric. Instead of incentives for productivity and performance they are motivating people to make a theater. Or rather circus. That&#x27;s not the performance you are looking for.

This isn&#x27;t leadership, this is fear. If you want to motivate your employees, you need to become a better leader. A better person. Talk to them individually. Ask them their honest opinions and treat their thoughts as worthy of your consideration. Don&#x27;t talk down to them. Don&#x27;t be dismissive. If they have negative thoughts or are afraid of something, honestly try to find out why that is and see if you can fix it through a real discussion about the issue. If they&#x27;re just shy, softly encourage them to speak about things they&#x27;re good at. Honest, positive encouragement works wonders.<p>But don&#x27;t put mics on them and then tell them that they need to speak up more, or be more assertive, or whatever bullshit this program is spitting out.

This calls to mind the office scene in Neal Stephenson’s <i>Snow Crash</i> in which Y.T.’s mother reads a directive from her employer. She self-consciously scrolls through the dull text — aware of her employer’s automated surveillance system as she does so — pausing and returning to an earlier section of the text to create the impression of careful reading.

The human resources paradigm of &quot;information economy&quot; is on very shaky ground. Most of what people do isn&#x27;t very visible, isn&#x27;t very quantifiable. The feedback to management is crappy.<p>Most people are not passionate about their job in the sense that they are really motivated to do their best. And.. often the most important bits of work require that kind of motivation. Having ideas or whatnot. The kind of work a modern cubicle jockey does (say an advertising account manager at facebook or a social media evangelist at HSBC) actually does require self motivation. All that horrendous &quot;passionate employees&quot; HR is not coming out of nowhere. They really do need passionate employees.<p>There&#x27;s this tension between discipline and information to managers and motivation. On one hand slacking, on the other useless passionless robots.<p>Orwell&#x27;s lanyard s just a symptom.

If you need tech to figure out what your employees are thinking, they are probably not thinking well of your management style.

THINKING HAPPY THOUGHTS IS NOW MANDATORY. UNHAPPY EMPLOYEES SHALL BE DISMISSED, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.