Help! I’ve been tracked!

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

The kerfuffle in the federal government ranks over Elon Musk asking you what you did last week has been laughable. The harrumphing around as if this is an indignity is hilarious. Basic truth: If someone is paying you, don’t they have a right to know if you did anything to deserve your pay?

I thought back over my career and have four illustrations where I was tracked. I don’t think these incidents did me any temporary or permanent harm.

The first was when I joined that little old soap company in Cincinnati. There, my boss preemptively tracked us in the following manner. He would go over our “to do” list a couple of times a week and make sure we were working on the appropriate tasks. That was a local effort on his part.

The other tracking we did there was that we wrote a one-page memo every two weeks that described what we learned from what we were doing. This was in the pre-desktop computer days, so these were duplicated and circulated in large, stapled groups so we could all read them. I am convinced this effort got me my first promotion.

When one works in a staff job like engineering or analysis, it is very hard to measure efficiency or effectiveness. These two tools were good for that.  

If you work on a production line, the rate of production is known and can be measured – a different story. I don’t think governments have many production lines, except license plate manufacturing in prisons (where a number of federal employees may end up; a place where they won’t have to fill out reports on what they did).

We’ll skip an employer in between and go to my third employer. In this case, the staff departments – and I ran one of these when I got there – had to write up the accomplishments of their group and get this, still printed, still no desktop computers, to the CEO every Friday by noon. We really started on this by noon on Thursdays because I had to gather the information from my team, compile it, and send it on to my boss and so forth.

The next place I had to do this was when I was running a paper mill. In this case, we had daily checkout sheets (still no desktop computers) which our boss had prepared for each department. At the end of each day, you had a brief meeting with him to go over your checkout sheet. You couldn’t go home until he was happy with the conditions in which you were leaving your areas of responsibility. Since he did not have a family, he did not care how long this took. Many an evening, some of his direct reports were there until 9 pm.

I have only described two companies here. The one in between these two has gone out of business. Coincidence? Perhaps not.

To be offended because the people who pay your salary want to know what you do is arrogance of the first order. Ask at least every week, Mr. Musk.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press. He can be reached at jthompson@taii.com.