Productivity is notoriously difficult to predict.
G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers. Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.
But tending machinery was one thing; defining what we were trying to do and why we were doing it, and developing ways to measure how well the job was done - this was something else again.
There is nothing like visiting a facility to get a sense of how companies work.
You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.
Just because an employee does things differently doesn't mean he or she won't do the job right or as well. If you establish expectations of the goal and the standards to follow, then methodology shouldn't be an issue.
Don't get caught up in how many hours you work. Judge success based on having goals and measuring your results. Hard work, and lots of it, is certainly needed, but focus on what you get done.
It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed while I was at work. That's the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.
We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.
How do we judge whether technology is making us more productive, or just lazy and impatient?
One of the secret benefits of using remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone's performance.
