Week 8: Presence

Passive face time and the research behind it, the 2026 proxies that replaced the car park, and why this is a different week from week 5.

27 April 2027

Why it worksBeing seen present triggers automatic inferences of "dependable" and "committed", and nobody who makes them knows they did.

Nobody can see effort. A manager sees its proxies, and the proxies have changed. In 2010 the proxy was your car in the car park. Elsbach, Cable and Sherman interviewed office workers and then ran an experiment, and found that being seen at work during normal hours made observers rate a person as dependable, being seen outside those hours made them committed, and that the observers made those inferences spontaneously, without meaning to and without knowing they had. The trait was read off the presence. Nothing about the work was involved.

In 2026 the car park is a green dot. The proxies are the status light in the chat client, the timestamp on a document comment, the camera being on, the name in the attendee list, the reply on a Sunday. Each is a weak signal of presence, none is a signal of work, and all of them are read by the same part of a manager’s mind that once noted who was still at their desk. Week 5 was about the trace that work leaves, which a manager remembers as an event. This is the trace you leave when you are not working, and it goes in by a different route: not remembered as an event but absorbed as a trait.

Campbell’s law says an indicator used for decisions will be corrupted by the pressure on it. A presence indicator is the cheapest one there is to corrupt, because what it stands for cannot be checked and the signal costs nothing to produce. The person who pays is whoever cannot produce it: the one with a school run at five, a carer at home, a time zone the team forgot, or a body that does not do Sundays. They do the work and not the presence, and they are rated on the second.

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Teaching team