Friday, August 31, 2007  A few companies are not counting the
hours you take off  Companies' continuing obsession with
measuring their employees' input, rather than their output, is
one of my pet peeves. "If you're not at your desk, you're not
working," and its corollary, "If you are at your desk or at a
meeting, you are working," are among the most persistent myths
in white-collar corporate America. These myths ignore two facts:
1. Some people who aren't at their desks are, in fact working.
2. Some people who are at their desks are not, in fact, doing
anything productive. A related issue is accounting for vacation
time. In today's Times, reporter Ken Belson writes about IBM's
policy of leaving it to employees' and their supervisors'
discretion as to when they take vacation time. Peer pressure
certainly puts bounds on how much time can be taken, and IBM's
intense work culture, according to Belson, leads to workers
taking less time than they are allowed. Nonetheless, any move to
allow workers and direct m