The question that Elon Musk lobbed to federal workers in an email set off anger and angst from unions and employees. It also prompted some head scratching from corporate America, where technology tracks worker productivity at a granular level to answer that question in real time.
At a click of a button, managers can check how many pitches a sales person made this week, how quickly a customer service representative resolved a complaint, or the progress an engineer made on an assigned task.
Some companies have taken to using sophisticated data analysis tools to spy on their employees, sifting through millions of emails and chat messages and calendar appointments to measure productivity.
Executives say the intel allows for quicker and more nimble feedback, allowing them to shuffle resources according to the data. Productivity in the U.S. has been on the rise, in part because of new technologies.
“Corporations have moved beyond calling for written weekly status reports and into real-time accountability,” said Deidre Paknad, chief executive of WorkBoard, a software company.
Deidre Paknad, CEO of WorkBoard, says companies have moved on from weekly status reports.In WorkBoardAI, responsibilities and progress are transparent, and dashboards show teams and leaders what needs urgent attention.
While working at IBM, Paknad said she endured the tedium of compiling weekly status reports. As a manager, she collected information from her reports by Wednesday so she could add it to her own on Thursday (often combing through calendars and emails to find details to include). Then, her manager would put all those together on Friday.
Frustrated by the inefficiency, she co-founded WorkBoard in 2014. Among the services: Managers are sent an automated weekly report on Friday that includes prompts to praise high performers, and another at 8:15 a.m. Monday outlining areas that needed prioritization.
For Erik Huddleston, an Austin-based chief executive of marketing for technology company Aprimo, feedback has been a fundamental part of the seven companies he built. Technology that logs employee progress throughout the day makes the process more efficient, without offending employees.
“It doesn’t take as much time to find out where the bottlenecks are, and you don’t have to be as big of a jerk to find out,” he said.
When he was asked to provide regular status reports himself, he recalls being rankled, too. “You automatically go: ‘I’m an autonomous human being, respect me!’”
Now technology collects all that information as work goes on. “The boss doesn’t need to ask what you did last week, because it’s all there in the system,” he said.
Some federal departments also use technology to track employee productivity.
Musk has famously deployed the question before in a pointed text exchange with the former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. Referencing that episode, Musk recently posted on X, “Parag got nothing done. Parag was fired.”
Yet the request to understand what employees are doing is a logical one, bosses and employees said. But approach is everything.
“I don’t think that it’s an unreasonable ask to tell the people who sign your paycheck what you did to earn it, however, the employer must be extremely careful in how they ask and how they scrutinize that information,” said Kyle H. David, chief executive of KDG, a technology-services company in Allentown, Pa., with around 60 employees.
He said an approach such as Musk’s could make it harder to attract top talent and give a skewed picture of employee performance.
“Human beings are entitled to bad weeks, learning moments, development opportunities, time to build relationships, and a plethora of other things that make them great at their jobs, but may not present well on a ‘what have you done for me lately report,’” he said.
It is problematic to ask for self-reported data from people who are afraid of losing their jobs, says Stacia Garr, co-founder of workforce research and advisory firm RedThread Research. Anyone who is asked to self-report data that might be used against them is likely to report information that reflects well on them, not necessarily prioritizing information that provides a full picture, she added.
Monitoring technologies also have downsides, she said. They may only measure a sliver of activity, while potentially eroding trust between employees and managers. Employees wonder why they were hired to do the job and then distrusted by those who hired them, she said.
Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, invites all of his employees to email him directly, but the question is different. He asks employees to email him with Top-5 Things they are working on, thinking about or seeing in their departments. Huang reads hundreds of T5Ts as a way of keeping tabs on how his business is running and seeing what is on the horizon.
Some people were offended by the implication that Musk’s question, posed with the tight deadline of 11:59 p.m. Monday and the risk of job loss, was really a statement that federal employees aren’t doing much of anything.
“It comes off like the workers are not trusted to get their work done,” said Ryan Graveline, who writes how-to guides, best practice documents and user manuals at a consulting company in Virginia.
Some workers said their instinct would be to quit if they received such an email. But they acknowledged that might be easier said than done in the current job market, which has cooled significantly.
“If my boss pulled this stunt, I’d be trapped between keeping my livelihood and maintaining my dignity,” said Tyler Bray, a software developer in Los Angeles. “Any leader who thinks threats are the path to efficiency doesn’t understand how to manage people effectively.”
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, said he viewed Musk’s email as “hostile” and “threatening” and the antithesis of good management.
“It’s worse than micromanaging, this is more like nanomanaging,” he said. “I mean, what are they going to do next, ask what the employees ate that morning?”
Others said they would have no problem responding to Musk’s request.
“I would not hesitate with a response, your employer has every right to ask for this, and you should be prepared to answer,” said Peter Suh, a New York-based senior risk-management manager in the financial services industry. “But at the same time I’m not sure that most of us, even me at times, could give you five big ticket items I’ve been working on right now.”
When Avi Singer saw the news about Musk’s email demand, he thought, if these were my staff it would take them seconds each to reply. They could just log on to platforms they use during the workday and take their pick of tasks completed.
Singer, who is based in New York, employs 40 people all over the world for his company showd.me, which provides online compliance for healthcare organizations. All his staff are fully remote, but he doesn’t worry about what they have been doing.
“A good employee wants to be seen as productive,” Singer said. Logging items like meetings, prospect calls and pitches made on a platform such as Salesforce show managers what an employee has been up to, he said.
If a salesperson hadn’t closed a deal in a while, the system might show the person had made dozens of pitches, and was near a result, Singer said.
Mitch Mitchem is a Denver-based chief executive of HIVE Interactive, a company that helps organizations such as the baseball team Colorado Rockies with AI tools.
He says his approach to management involves giving his employees more agency.
His workers have goals set for every quarter, and they can reach those milestones in whatever manner they deem appropriate. If they want to share their progress, there is a weekly stand-up staff meeting where they can troubleshoot or get advice.
“I hold them accountable for the metric and not the day-to-day,” said Mitchem. “Everyone’s a grown-up—I see them as a community, not as my children.”
The General Services Administration building in Washington, D.C. Musk’s demand that more than two million federal employees defend their work is facing pushback from powerful figures in the Trump administration.
Write to Natasha Khan at natasha.khan@wsj.com and Ray A. Smith at Ray.Smith@wsj.com