#productivity

Why can't RV and KP just do it once a year. The uncertainty makes people unproductive and aggressive. The environment in PA is hostile

Treating people well isn't complicated. When you respect employees, they stay and contribute. Mistreat people and it brings everyone and everything down, including productivity. Why can't leadership figure this out?

Morale is in the gutter due to cuts and leadership couldn't care less. They don't seem to realize that stressed employees aren't productive employees. Or they don't care.

The Verizon Home app needs a full redesign rather than incremental fixes — it isn’t performing well as-is. Features like parental controls are overly complex; simplifying these and prioritizing customer-friendly usability should be a core focus of the rebuild.

We have managers who have no idea what they're doing yet they insist on micromanaging every step of our work. You can just imagine how well that works out. To say it's counterproductive would be an understatement. Lay off all the useless managers and see productivity skyrocket.

Tokenmaxxing is the Silicon Valley trend of maximizing AI token consumption as a proxy for productivity.

Management thinks they're being smart by continuing to replace older workers with younger, cheaper ones. But they're overlooking that young people have boundaries when it comes to work. They won't work nights and weekends or answer your emails 24/7. Productivity is going to take a hit, and I'm here for it.

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the body overseeing the implementation of United States monetary policy, has announced the creation of five task forces intended to evaluate and improve the Fed's operations. In a press release, Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh named the "external advisers" who will lead each task force, ranging from economics professors to AI investors and corporate executives—executives like Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who will preside over a task force on employment and productivity.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/us-federal-reserve-taps-xbox-ceo-asha-sharma-who-just-laid-off-3-200-employees-to-lead-task-force-on-jobs/

We are extremely frustrated with the delays and inefficiencies in processes involving Fiserv. Urgent issues require escalation, yet the communication channels themselves are creating obstacles. We are repeatedly asked to send emails, wait for responses, and then continue follow-ups, often with little progress.

As a result, critical deadlines are being missed, project momentum is being lost, and teams are spending more time managing communication challenges than delivering outcomes. The situation is impacting productivity, focus, and overall team morale. A more responsive and effective engagement model is urgently needed.

• FU*SERV

It's a new week, layoffs are behind us (at least for now), but the atmosphere still feels heavy. I have a feeling productivity is down as well. I certainly still can't concentrate fully on work. You can only push people so much before it starts influencing their performance.

As this is all going on, and with the stress, anxiety and uncertainty of will we have a job come a month or 2, my people leader is production! production! production! How are we to stay focused with these chats and emails going out about metrics and audits when inside all of us are stressed and nervous? Beyond frustrating!

Fiserv has an opportunity to modernize how it thinks about work, productivity, and employee accountability.

The return-to-office model is being sold as “collaboration,” but for many employees, the actual workday does not support that claim. A large amount of the work still happens through Teams calls, emails, shared documents, workflow systems, and digital handoffs with colleagues, subject matter experts, developers, reviewers, and leaders who are spread across different states and locations.

That is not true in-person collaboration. That is remote work being performed from an office cubicle.

The issue is not whether employees should be accountable. They absolutely should be. The issue is whether physical presence is being mistaken for productivity.

Fiserv is a technology and financial services company. If the company wants to lead in innovation, artificial intelligence, automation, client service, and operational excellence, then it should manage employees by measurable outcomes, not outdated assumptions about “butts in seats.”

A better model would be simple:

Set clear productivity benchmarks.Set clear quality expectations.Set clear deadlines.Track cycle time, accuracy, responsiveness, client impact, rework, missed handoffs, stakeholder satisfaction, and risk reduction.Hold underperformers accountable.Reward employees who produce excellent work.Require office presence only when there is a legitimate business reason for people to be physically together.

That is a more mature operating model than blanket attendance rules.

Many employees were more willing to give extra time and discretionary effort when working from home because commuting was not draining hours and energy out of the day. When people are forced to commute to an office just to sit on virtual meetings with people in other locations, they become more protective of their time. That is not a lack of commitment. That is a rational response to an inefficient work design.

The company should ask itself a direct question:

What business outcome improves when an employee drives to an office, sits at a desk, and collaborates with remote colleagues through the same digital tools they would have used from home?

If there is a real answer, define it. Measure it. Apply it only where it makes sense.

But if the answer is vague language about culture, collaboration, or visibility, then the policy is not really about productivity. It is about control, optics, and habit.

Fiserv should not confuse visibility with value.

The future of work should not be built around where a person is sitting. It should be built around what they produce, how well they produce it, how reliably they deliver, and how much value they create for clients, teams, and shareholders.

The new CEO has a chance to reset this conversation. Not by eliminating accountability, but by making accountability smarter.

Measure the work.Measure the quality.Measure the outcomes.Measure the impact.

Then let high-performing employees do their jobs in the environment where they produce the best results, within legal, ethical, client, security, and compliance requirements.

That would be a real innovation culture.

I am so beyond fed up with all the pins and different threads or channels whatever they’re called on teams. We have a chat for a weekly call but now we have to use a completely different thread to put everything so now we have two probably even three different threads with basically the same group on the same topic.. they’re telling us you can use the chat during the call but use the channel for everything else so all our details are consolidated in one place… how does this make sense?!? I’m so tired of having 50 different places to look for what I need and having my pin go off every 15 seconds throughout the day.. it’s beyond distracting and unproductive at this point.

And I don’t even see the notifications, despite the fact that I followed all the instructions to request that I’m notified about these channels. SO FED UP WITH THIS STUPIDITY. Obnoxious!

More than half of my team is not meeting productivity due to lack of work. We’re all getting verbal coaching done. Our PL just said in order to not be laid off we need to meet but it’s impossible. All of this is just crazy to me.

" spend time with your family take your kids to that soccer game"

Also DF: let's Implement "productivity" tools and surveil our employees.

How productive are you the last 2 weeks? Are you able to focus or get anything accomplished? Are they actually watching what we are doing at this time? In her email Tanya McNally wrote "For our people leaders, our ask is to afford your eligible team members the space and time to contemplate whether the VSP makes sense for them".

What is being said there?

I wonder how many of us is lacking motivation to be productive now. Personally I am just waiting on the outcome of the VSP. I have no motivation now since this has came up. I have tried to be productive up until this but I just can’t get motivated enough to go above and beyond like before. It’s a struggle to remain focused.

Our leadership is so inept, they can’t even do layoffs properly!

If they did a large round of layoffs, it would make the news and they would get a temporary boost to the stock price. They could then reassure the remaining workforce that they’re done with layoffs for at least a year so everyone can focus on their work.

These seemingly random mini layoffs will hurt productivity bigly. They may be doing to avoid filing WARN but it’s still a bad strategy.

As MB sent a letter to his org 3 hours ago, the era of unlimited tokens is officially over in Oracle. Well, didn't last long and they already threw in a towel, starting rolling out on Monday from AI department of all places.
Everybody will be assigned a weekly limit. I guess we will see on Monday what is the limit.

I think it's a very bad sign, even Oracle lost confidence and this AI bubble is coming to an end very fast. They just now treat it as an expensive limited resource to augment productivity, no pipe dreams of full automation and some revolution. Energy cost grounded this whole thing very quickly.

The company’s stock has been extremely volatile recently. Will the already low morale take an additional toll on the share price? Within my team, even with AI assistance, I haven’t seen more code being delivered. In fact, performance in terms of code output has unfortunately declined.

Man, it’s a pretty great time to be at Quest Software right now. They’re investing in a ton of new tools and training to help us sell more, which is smart.

And the tracking systems are next-level management can see exactly who’s driving the extra productivity and revenue, so the right people get rewarded. No guesswork.

We’re a leaner company these days too, which means there’s nowhere to hide how productive you actually are.

I’ve never seen so many VPs this eager to support such a small team. While other companies are cutting those big roles, Quest is doing the opposite. It’s actually pretty refreshing.

And with the data and AI bo-m happening, their early investments are paying off big time. Now they’re doubling down on security and migrations. At this rate, we’ll be the next SpaceX before long.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/ai-productivity-gains-precede-expeditors-141311489.html

Can someone explain how they are tracking productivity? What’s the software? Is it just Viva Insights? What are they tracking? Who gets the reports? Please share if you actually know. This is important info for all of us!

A review needs to happen for leadership roles within the India team, particularly L10 and above, should also be included. These are some of the highest-cost resources, especially when travel expenses are considered.Corruption is at its best with some leaders who run ICC or GCC
There is a perception that accountability standards are not being applied consistently. From what I have observed, some leaders have limited overlap with business hours, significant flexibility in schedules, and there is little visibility into actual productivity or outcomes.
The return-to-office expectations should also be reviewed. While the requirement may be three days onsite, there are concerns that attendance is not always being validated consistently. I have heard reports that some individuals badge in briefly and leave shortly afterward, while others may be relying on workarounds that undermine the intent of the policy. Whether these reports are accurate or not, they warrant verification if compliance is being reviewed.
In addition, overlapping leadership and management roles, travel spend, organizational layers, productivity, and office attendance should all be evaluated together to ensure consistent standards, fairness, and value realization across the organization.

Anybody else being given more meaningless "busy" work by their manager when you already have more than enough work of your own and are actually busy tying to get it done? Can there be any other point to this other than intentionally trying to make me look incompetent?

Alright, let's hear it! Comment below on the first week back under the new RTO mandate. People going from 3 to 4 days a week, how bad was it having that extra day and having 3x the amount of people around you all day? HBAs returning to office (myself included), was it as bad as you thought, worse or better? My personal opinion and observations were the following:

• Commutes: These are only 'tolerable' if you get there before 7 and leave before 3. Traffic is and always will su-k in a post covid world where everyone drives like they are either on me-h or sleeping pills.

• Collaboration: We have to sit around people we already work with (I work with cool people thank goodness). Zero difference in teamwork, communication etc other than talking over a cube wall instead of in a teams chat. The idea that being in person will "increase collaboration" is one of the biggest lies told to us. In fact, it seems that people are less likely to do any type of extra "collaborating" because everyone is tired, burnt out, and of patience. Another Fail for ELT. (put this L on the stack with the others)

-"Culture": Day one had lots of chatter and "summit energy" from associates seeing others they had not seen in years. This type of "energy" also can be found at Founders Day. Oh wait, PP ki-led that whole event with no explaination. By day 3 people appeared to be less "bubbly" and were more or less just focused on staying in their cubes, plugging the ears with a headset or ear buds, and counting down the hours until it was time to leave. Everyone looks tired and checked out. If EDJ had any brains, 2 days in office seems to be the sweet spot if you were going to have RTO and not make it fail horribly. But, these people are stupid and will never notice this. Also, for the folks that think HBA peeps are lazy because we are (or were) at home, please sit down and take your L. Lazy people in the office are no different than a lazy HBA. In office are actually worse about getting out of doing work because there is nobody watching them. HBAs always felt like they had to go above and beyond to stay off the radar.

• Productivity: This was the biggest fail of them all. The distractions of having people walking by my cube, the background noise, hearing other calls, and just general in office vibes. This is a horrible, outdated, beyond stupid way to complete non client/branch facing work. It is unbelievable how much less productive I was this week in office VS at home. The time it took to get day to day work done was increased due to having so many distractions. I made more errors this week than I have in years. Stupid errors from simply not being 100% locked in on the work I was doing.

• Leaders: The only leaders that seem to be enjoying this new RTO are the ones at or above DL. The ones who wear the sport coat/blazer every day. They have the talking points down, the fake persona like a politician, and generally walk around thinking they are Gods gift to this company as they figure out new and creative ways to break everything they touch. They don't even seem like real people and make zero effort to interact or have any personal relationship with the people under them, unless of course they need a new 'work around' created for a system tech failure. They stay in their clique` with the other 'jackets'. They seem almost completely detached from reality and have zero ability to "read the room".

Summary: I knew it would be bad, but this is much worse than I imagined now that I'm seeing it in real time. People that love WFH don't care if someone is in office, teams chat is yellow/away, or someone doesnt reply right away. We simply do not care and only focus on the job we are paid to do. Nothing else matters to us if the work is getting done correctly. The in office junkies (the ones who love RTO) seem to be nothing more than micro managing control freaks. They dont have enough to do and have major insecurities. They love being in the office and therefore everyone needs to be in the office to fill whatever mental void they have. These people are borderline psychopaths with the way they obsess over what their coworkers are doing. It's sick and childish when it comes down to it. The obsession with seeing bodies in the cubes and nothing more has to be one of the biggest fumbles and fails EDJ has ever done (next to layoffs and outsourcing). I'm generally curious at this point as to how much extra $ is wasted on these buildings to keep them functional VS when the company was fully remote for almost 4 years. It's going to be a very long summer.

Every team is now building their own AI Agents. it's chaos.

The pencil pushers have recently discovered that tokens cost money. Now they are getting rationed. We are only halfway through the year too. lmao. productivity!!!

Updated - F, 6/5/26.

The purpose of AI -

• To enhance (Productivity), (Efficiency); and to provide (Cost-savings).

• Employees are a line-item expense due to (Cost of Salary, and Benefits) from a business viewpoint.

  These are the facts.

Polaris efficiency is really just shifting of work to a different cost center. A few examples:

1. I now spend time every pay period downloading my paystub and emailing it to myself. This used to be automated. With Lolaris I now take time to do it that I would otherwise be working.
2. Time writing now takes multiple clicks and entering in archaic codes to get to the actual timesheet where in the former program it just opened up to the timesheet immediately.

Multiply these small time wasters by thousands of employees. Where is the productivity gain?

Give the keys to the people who know exactly where the useless management is. Most management is just getting in the way; completely useless. When my Dir or Sr Dir are on vaca, productivity soars! They have zero self awareness when they hold 3 hour meetings delegating pointless tasks while the ADs are trying to keep their teams functioning.

The culture that we are getting into right now with teams, and these group pings is absurd. They say it takes 20 minutes to refocus after you’ve been distracted… these silly group pins and constant teams alerts on pinging are so unproductive and frustrating. Just send us an email! Not to mention things keep getting lost in different variations of group groups that are pinging so I literally can’t keep up.

I’m so over teams and all the obnoxious features that come with it that destroy my productivity.

Kevin O’Leary said recently he doesn’t care if someone works “from their basement” as long as they can execute and deliver results. That’s the part “leadership” still doesn’t seem to understand.

https://fortune.com/2026/03/10/shark-tank-kevin-oleary-ai-tech-gen-z-rto-office-cubicles-corporate-america/

We already proved remote work works. The job gets done. In a lot of cases productivity improved, turnover dropped, and companies saved money. Even Stanford research still shows hybrid schedules had zero negative effect on productivity while reducing turnover.

Instead, we are doubling down on badge swipes, presence reports, and forcing people back into traffic for work that still happens on laptops and Teams calls all day.

People aren’t frustrated because they “don’t want to work.”

They’re frustrated because leadership saw proof that flexibility worked… and ignored it anyway. They chose max pain and misery over common sense and happy employees.

Whenever we find a new way to be more efficient or prodctive the benefit never goes to the employee doing the work.

Mgmt will use it to increase output, cut heads, or dump more work on whoever is left. Nobody in leadership is sitting around saying great, now employees can work less… They are asking how much MORE $$$$ they can squeeze out of it.

Workers only get a share of the gains when they have leverage.

Usually, that means, bargaining collectively.

Now let the downvotes come.

We are doing it to ourselves…

Bring back DF, majority of employees would agree, it would improve morale and the productivity would go back up. I am not sure we can continue like this any more.

How is this possible?

I just want to do my actual job and go home. Instead, I spend hours in meetings where nothing gets accomplished, where we generate more questions than answers, and where people just complain about things that no one is going to fix. It is exhausting and completely pointless.

Lots of people want out and it’s leading to complacency. TC you’ll have a much more productive workforce if you offer early retirement again.

Do they not realize that happy workforce equals profits and unhappy one brings major drops in productivity? It's been proven again and again. What's their aim here? To keep making us more and more miserable until what? We quit? Is that what this is all about?