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The Futility of Attendance

 2 years ago
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The Futility of Attendance

Attendance at the office is one of the least-indicative proof points of someone’s efficacy at a job

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Photo by Gez Xavier Mansfield on Unsplash

In one of my early jobs, I had a particular manager that I quite literally never saw leave work. They were always there, always typing, always frowning, always dealing with something ranging from a slight annoyance to a full-blown crisis that they could never quite articulate. They were always making arbitrary demands, and I cannot remember in the time that I worked there any time when they were not some monstrous form of “busy.”

The person in question was also the least-productive human being I’ve ever had the misfortune of running into. Despite all of their demands of the lower-level staff, they continually failed to actually produce anything of their own beyond approving long, meandering and pointless documents. From my rough calculations, they “worked” over sixty hours a week, but I cannot to this day point to any specific thing they created.

I’ve met plenty of people like this person, and I’ve realized that they exist not to do anything, but to prove to do-nothing executives that work resembles the work that they believe got them to where they are today. Many executives simply don’t do any of the work that actually makes the company money, and they face a deep-seated anxiety as a result, which makes them desperately search for things that resemble what they believe “good work” looks like.

I wrote about this phenomena yesterday as it relates to “cyberloafing,” a term that means “doing stuff on the computer at work that isn’t work,” a thing that literally everybody does. I believe that the only people that think that “good work” comes from being in the office for exactly 8 hours and only working are those that haven’t done any actual work for years (or their entire career), and are thus can only relate to work in a kind of abstract pantomime. If someone isn’t working exactly what they believe work should look like — even if their work is good and delivered on time — the ignorant manager or executive will regard them as “bad” because it reminds them that they, themselves, have no idea what’s going on in the workplace.

Appropriately, legendary executive moron David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, has created an internal tracking system to see who’s in the office — one that says that you were absent if you’re not in by 10 am. Solomon, a grown adult man that also DJs, has been a staunch anti-remote work ghoul since the pandemic began, claiming that you can’t run a business remotely while also, confusingly, running Goldman Sachs remotely.

It’s also important to know that the conditions at Goldman Sachs have been described as “inhumane” by junior bankers.

In any case, the idea of attendance-taking in a modern organization is one of the more bizarre and condescending ideas I’ve seen in the last few years. Attendance at the office is one of the least-indicative proof points of someone’s efficacy at a job — going to a place and being at a place is only proof that you’re able to move your body, and I can’t think of any good (let alone “top”) performer I’ve worked with that had flawless attendance.

What Goldman is actually doing is proving that they lack the intellectual capacity to create a system that actually measures people’s contribution to the organization. Despite revenues in the tens of billions, Goldman Sachs somehow lacks the resources to try and understand what people are doing versus where they’re doing it, all because of distant and ignorant management.

It also says a great deal about how little Goldman values its talent. If you’re taking attendance, it’s because you don’t trust people enough to do the thing you want them to do, or you’re tacitly admitting that the thing you want them to do isn’t valuable or enough for them to do it on their own. And it’s going to drain talent from the organization as people realize that their bosses don’t care about them, or their work, or their production, but their meaningless attendance in a big building in a city that costs a lot of money to live in.

It’s all so depressing.


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