Yet, these findings also highlight the negative side of being there from an organizational perspective. That is, a focus on being there may lead to appraisal and promotion decisions that overreward those with good attendance (but perhaps poor performance), and under-reward those with good performance (but poor attendance). As such, the value we place on simply being there may lead us to promote the wrong people. The worst part is that these errors in judgment may happen without us even knowing it. A manager from a financial services firm put it this way: “I think the negative part is that when you are not in the office, it’s ‘out of sight out of mind.’ Your manager just doesn’t think about you as much. Whereas if you’re in the office, there is sort of this opposite perception that you’re doing work, even if they can’t see the work you’re doing. It’s probably not even a conscious process.” Now, as an employee you might be thinking— “Yeah, but for me this is great! I just have to make sure I’m seen at work, and I’ll increase my chances of promotion.” We suggest you think again. Because by attempting to be seen ubiquitously at work you may be actually hurting your productivity. We found that managers who were worried about their face time at work spent hours each week just making sure they were being seen—to the detriment of their work output. As one manager from a telecommunications firm commented: “There seems to be a norm that anyone hoping to move up in the management ranks needs to be here late at night and on the weekends. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re not going be seen as dedicated enough to get promoted. It’s definitely one of the tests of management material…. but it ends up wasting a lot of your time, and you often get little done because you are more worried about being seen than getting things done.” Further, we found that telecommuters, who felt disadvantaged by their lack of face time in the office, often engaged unproductive and time-consuming activities on a daily basis to make themselves look more reliable and dedicated (e.g., they sent hourly status reports, or woke up to send e-mails in the middle of the night).
Managing the Paradox
What should you do in light of these findings? Perhaps the most important implication for managers is awareness. To the extent that you can monitor and then check your assumptions that an employee’s physical presence means committed, while his or her absence means uncommitted, you may be less likely to make errors in your reward and promotion decisions. A second step is to do away with “trait-based” performance measures. Subjective, trait-based performance evaluations are still prevalent in many organizations where managers rate employees on traits such as “dependability,” “leadership” and “initiative.” Yet, our findings show that trait-based performance appraisals lead to an unfair disadvantage for employees who are productive but lack visibility in the office. In particular, hard-working remote workers often suffer unfair comparisons and poorer performance ratings relative to their in-office peers. Instead of using trait-based performance systems, gather your information about workforce performance using a combination of customer evaluations and objective output measures. In terms of the customer evaluations, figure out who the customer of each job is (internal or external) and then ask them at the end of key work cycles whether they are getting what they need and what could be done better. In terms of objective measures, work with job incumbents and get them to commit to some measurable outputs that they will accomplish on the job, and then follow up to see whether or not those outcomes were accomplished. Both of these tactics should cause you to focus your attention on the value created on the job rather than the traits of the person and whether they are regularly just “being there.”
Editor’s note: Professor Elsbach, Professor Cable and Professor Jeffrey Sherman of the UC Davis Department of Psychology teamed on this firstever academic study of “passive” face time—when workers are simply seen in the office without any interpersonal interaction. Their findings were published in the June 2010 issue of the journal Human Relations.
UC D av i s G r a d u at e S c h o o l o f M a n a g e m e n t • 1 1