Online is not the same as working

There is a small green dot beside a name that says the person is online. There are two ticks that say a message has been read. A lot of people who hire others have quietly started treating these as proof of work.

A man who runs a small online shop takes on someone to handle orders from home. Within a week he is checking the dot. Is she online. Did she read it. How fast did she answer. It feels like management. It is close attention to the wrong thing.

Being online is not the work. Neither is being in the room. The habit of measuring presence grew up in offices, where presence was at least easy to see, and it has followed people home on their phones. It counts what is visible, and what is visible is rarely what matters.

Good work has been possible from anywhere a laptop reaches for years now. People talking to each other still matters a great deal. Sitting in the same place is one way to do that, and often not the best one.

People who are good at what they do, wherever they are, do not need to be watched into it. They need to know why it matters: that the order she packed with care is a present someone opens tonight, that the customer she calmed down came back, that her judgement changed something.

That is harder to give than a status check. It asks the owner to explain, to share, to trust. But it works at a distance, which counting never did.

The dots were never the point. Significance is what people work for, wherever they happen to be sitting.