The slippery slope of distrust
Andy Hunt (one of the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer) blogs about how Ford Motor company is explicitly logging the amount of time their employees are spending in the bathroom. This tells their employees that they are not trusted, and it saps the morale, creativity, and eventually the productivity of their workforce.
Clearly this initiative required IT support, and while I don’t suggest that IT Departments make it their practice to regularly second guess business decisions, I do think somebody should have thought longer and harder about how reasonable it was to spend time and money installing key card readers, writing a system to track time in the bathroom, and provide nice reports to management.
Besides this kind of micro-management is pure waste. Does your customer care how much time your employees spend on the toilet? I seriously doubt it. They want products that are cool, reliable, and reasonably priced — all the activity you spend tracking other things is wasted time and energy.
And, if you happen to have an employee who gets more done in a week than any of your other programmers, but for some reason spends more than the average amount of time in the bathroom, is that a problem?
Tracking the wrong thing can get you focused on “solving” non-problems, and that’s another common form of waste.