Shawnee Love   •  
May 10, 2011

One of the struggles I see many companies and managers dealing with right now is where to fall on the spectrum of attendance vs. output.

People strongly in the attendance camp value bums in seats. They want to see you at your desk when the bell rings to start the day and they want you still there until the bell rings at the end of the day. They specify office hours or shift hours, and they usually know how long your breaks should be to the minute. Companies that are strongly attendance based have wage increases tied to hours worked and time clocks to track ins and outs.

Managers that are strongly attendance focused tend to reward people who are at their desk for long hours and will often praise employees for being “such hard workers”.

Managers in the output camp, don’t care much about when you are at your desk and instead are all about results. What did you accomplish today? How much, how many, but not how long.  These guys abhor time clocks and clock watchers and instead focus on goals and objectives. If you finish your work “early”, they won’t care if you go golfing, and in fact they might be right there with you. Their companies give bonuses and salary increases tied to achievement of goals and accomplishments and they often find the requirements of the employment standards to track employees hours, vacation time, sick time, etc. to be restrictive, because they trust their employees to work till the job is done and take time off when they can. Obviously, this could be problematic if there is so much work that it never ends, but I find that time worked usually balances out because these are the same companies that don’t question sick time or if an employee comes in “late”, support employees who need to leave to pick up their kids mid day, and are inclined to run with a skeleton crew on Fridays all summer long because the lake beckons.

Attendance based is the traditional way we have managed people, and it shouldn’t escape notice that the organizations that are wholly in the attendance based camp are more traditional organizations, often unionized and usually more bureaucratic.

Output based management is a product of more recent times, and requires talented managers that can create goals and employees capable of being accountable as well as a degree of organizational sophistication when it comes to tracking and measuring results.  Not surprisingly, people and companies in the attendance based camp are often uncomfortable with new fangled metrics and accountabilities and as such, are happy to enjoy the security and clarity that comes from knowing they are measured based on when their work day starts and ends.

If you haven’t guessed, I reside closer towards the output based end of the spectrum. I like to reward people who accomplish their work successfully with time off and recognition. Although I think people need to respect each others’ time and thus be on time for meetings, etc., I generally believe people want to do a great job and thus don’t need me to manage their time for them. Instead, my job is to help them set their goals and then to get out of the way.

One final note is to be careful not to confuse output based managers with people who think the ends justifies the means. The spectrum of attendance to output is merely a way of managing work done, not managing how the work gets done. I will save the “how the work gets done” topic for another column.