When a company suddenly decides to fight for high productivity 🤡
My former colleague, now a Director of Engineering and overall a great guy, Fabiano, did a breakdown of a recent case in Brazil where a large bank fired 1,000 employees. The official reason was low employee productivity.
The company had been secretly measuring productivity based on activity at the work computer: mouse clicks, keystrokes, and similar nonsense. Then they fired everyone whose activity was below 40 percent per day.
Basically, they copied Elon Musk’s Twitter/X purge playbook one-to-one.
Let’s unpack what went wrong.
1. The company had no idea how to measure real productivity like impact on team success, work quality, or successful releases. So they measured mouse clicks instead.
This can work, but it creates a massive number of false positives.
Some of the laid-off employees said things like: “I got promoted a month ago for high performance, and now I’m fired for being supposedly unproductive.”
2. The company never told employees that high productivity was a priority.
You might say, “Come on, of course productivity matters to companies.”
Sure, but 99% of companies are operationally inefficient. Banks are probably even worse.
You can be highly productive personally and still be constantly blocked by other people and departments. The end result is low output.
Also, if you truly want high productivity, you have to pay significantly above the market.
My prediction:
The remaining employees will start simulating productivity by constantly moving the mouse, but they will leave the company within a year. Their salaries were not raised, obviously.
What amused me the most was the reaction of the labor union.
They did not mention any of the points above. Instead, they complained about violated rights, offended feelings, and “spy software.” Like, wow, what a bloodthirsty bank for monitoring its own work computers.
Elon Musk’s methods are great when you need to create a miracle in a swamp.
– Convincing the world that electric cars are not just golf carts.
– Getting a country back into space when the tech has been collecting dust for 60+ years.
But they do not work when you need stable long-term results and low risk.
What do you think about this move?