"If your manager knows what you're doing all the time, you're not doing your job, and he's not doing his."

Hew Evans, Sony HR Director - Asia

I know, I've been merely pointing at Tony Schwartz's stuff lately, and again I found this quote in another great HBR article "Reward Value, Not Face Time" by Tony Schwartz.

Are you facing "presenteeism" in your company? Are people at work, but hardly working?
Might be time to leave as productivity suffers and workplace climate is impacted as managers try old-fashioned solutions such as checking people's desks for their presence.
This can start a death spiral and impact the bottom line.

Analytic Management is Impeded by Common Organizational Pathologies:

• A powerful conventional wisdom, often associated with powerful people, is allowed to sustain itself absent critical testing.

• Decision making, especially at high levels, not only fails to demand rigor and dispassionate analysis, but often champions the opposite as the scarce talent that identifies CEOs and visionaries from otherwise smart but less inspired people.

• The organization lacks people who get up in the morning eager to do analytic empirical work and are really good at it. Instead, analytic work is seen as the last resort, undertaken by those unfamiliar with proper methods.

• People tend to win over ideas rather than the reverse.

In "Competing on Analytics - The New Science of Winning",
by Thomas H. Davenport & Jeanne G. Harris

Face Time vs. Flex Time

Great article at HBR:

Attract and retain talent, display trust towards employees, save costs, increase productivity:

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbr/hewlett/2009/10/a_major_milestone_is_within.html

"[I]t's been proven that flexibility is a powerful lure in recruiting and motivating top talent. [...]. Eliminating watercooler gossip sessions — a significant time sink in a high-anxiety environment — is a huge boost to productivity. And knowing that an employer trusts and respects its people enough to help them do what it takes to perform better [...] pays back in greater appreciation and loyalty. "

How to formalize it:
"Eligible employees — workers with no past or current performance issues — propose their own flex arrangements; managers assess whether the arrangements will allow them to meet performance and productivity goals. Trial periods and semi-annual reviews gauge success and fix problems before they mushroom. "

"Formalizing flextime has one other unsung but important consequence: It takes the stigma out of asking for time off. Knowing that there's some give — and not all take — in the workplace does powerful things for high-performers on a tightrope. "

'Carrots and Sticks' - R.I.P

Parkinson's Law

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

C. Northcote Parkinson in The Economist (1955)