Why Outcomes Matter More Than Fixed Attendance in Creative Work
["career","production"]For a manager or technical lead, fixed attendance is easy to count. It is not the same thing as useful contribution.
For creative technical work, including games, software, architecture, product development, novel problem-solving and critical analysis, a stronger operating model uses clear outcomes, autonomy, feedback, accountability, protected focus and sustainable workload. Teams still need deadlines and time together. They do not need to confuse visibility with value.
I first wrote this argument in 2015 from the perspective of game development. After more years spent coding, leading technical work and working at different levels of software development, I am more convinced by its central point. I am also clearer about where the original argument was wrong.
Regular hours are not evidence that somebody lacks passion. Some people do their best work within a dependable routine, then go home. That boundary is healthy. The problem begins when an organisation treats the routine itself as proof of performance.
Creative work does not arrive to a timetable
The original version imagined a manager issuing these instructions:
- 9:00 - be creative
- 12:00 - stop thinking for lunch
- 13:00 - resume creativity
- 17:30 - park the problem and go home
It was deliberately absurd, but the underlying experience was real. A difficult problem can resist you for most of the day, then give way at 17:15. On another day, the useful insight arrives during a walk and the scheduled desk hours produce very little.
That does not make creative work mystical or exempt from management. It means progress is non-linear. Time is an input; it is not the outcome.
A manager can observe when somebody enters an office or appears online. It is harder to define whether a rendering system is reliable, whether a design problem has been resolved, whether a release is safe, or whether a team understands what it is trying to build. The danger is obvious: when the meaningful thing is difficult to measure, organisations reach for the visible thing instead.
Presence then becomes a management shortcut.
Autonomy works with clarity, not instead of it
Autonomy is often misrepresented as letting everybody do whatever they want. That is not what I mean.
Self-determination theory distinguishes autonomous motivation - acting with a sense of choice - from controlled motivation. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s work links autonomy with the related needs for competence and connection. It does not prove that remote work or flexible hours will improve every workplace. It does explain why giving capable people meaningful control over their method can matter.
Control without direction is neglect. Direction without discretion is micromanagement.
The useful combination is:
- a specific outcome and a reason it matters;
- constraints that are explicit rather than discovered through punishment;
- enough autonomy for the person closest to the work to choose a method;
- feedback while change is still affordable;
- accountability for quality, progress and communication.
Goal-setting research points in the same direction. Locke and Latham’s 35-year review of goal-setting evidence found that specific, challenging goals generally outperform vague instructions to “do your best”. Feedback matters because people need to compare progress with the goal and adjust. For complex or unfamiliar work, however, a crude performance target can produce bad strategies; a learning goal may be more appropriate.
In other words: define success carefully. Do not replace a clock with an equally lazy output quota.
Protected focus is part of the job design
Autonomy over hours is of little value if every hour is fragmented.
My earlier account of flow and interruptions in game development came from watching developers and leads lose their train of thought to calls, messages, meetings and desk-side questions. Leads suffered most: they were expected to remain available as managers and produce focused technical work as developers. The work did not disappear. It moved into the evening.
That is not flexibility. It is an organisation borrowing somebody’s private time to cover its own failure to design the day.
Teresa Amabile and colleagues’ longitudinal field study of time pressure and organisational creativity found lower creative cognitive processing under high perceived time pressure. The research was based on field diaries rather than a randomised trial, so it does not show that every deadline damages creativity. It does distinguish focused urgency around important work from chronic overload and fragmentation.
A wider meta-analysis of 259 work-design studies involving 219,625 people found that autonomy, feedback, task significance and other job characteristics were related to attitudes and performance. Much of that evidence was correlational, but the practical message is still stronger than “watch the clock”: the way work is designed matters.
Flexibility still needs coordination
A team cannot collaborate if everybody is available only by accident. Games and software have integration points, production deadlines, incidents, reviews and decisions that require people to work together.
The answer is not universal freedom or universal attendance. It is deliberate coordination:
- Define what must be true, who owns it and how quality will be judged.
- Name the deadline, dependencies, budget, legal or technical boundaries and genuine periods of required availability.
- Reserve focus blocks in which non-urgent interruption is the exception, not the default.
- Put reviews, decisions and shared work into predictable overlap rather than scattering meetings across the day.
- Use working software, playable builds, decisions, tests and short written updates to show progress, not online-status theatre.
- If delivery repeatedly depends on evenings and weekends, treat that as a planning or capacity problem rather than proof of commitment.
This model also leaves room for people who prefer a regular 9-to-5 pattern. Flexibility means fitting the work and the person within agreed boundaries; it does not mean forcing everybody into irregular hours.
A 2024 randomised hybrid-working trial involving 1,612 employees at Trip.com found that two home-working days each week improved retention and job satisfaction without detectable damage to performance ratings, promotion or engineers’ code output. That is evidence from one company, not a universal template, and code volume is not a complete measure of engineering value. It does show that a shared office timetable is not the only credible way to organise accountable technical work.
Outcomes must not become an excuse for crunch
There is a dangerous counterfeit version of outcome-based work:
We do not care when you work, provided you absorb every planning error and finish the milestone.
That is not autonomy. It is unlimited liability disguised as trust.
When I wrote the original post, I defended developers who wanted to keep working when they were close to a breakthrough. I still recognise that impulse. I no longer think a business should depend on it. Passion offered freely is not capacity a manager can quietly budget.
The health boundary matters too. A joint WHO and International Labour Organization analysis reported that working at least 55 hours a week was associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of death from ischaemic heart disease compared with 35-40 hours. These are population estimates built from observational evidence, not a clinical trial of game-industry crunch. They are still a serious warning against treating sustained long hours as harmless.
A sustainable outcome model therefore includes a workload boundary. If the agreed outcome cannot be reached within reasonable capacity, the responsible choices are to change scope, sequence, staffing, method or date. The answer is not to make overtime invisible.
The principle survived the games industry
Game development gave me the clearest early examples because creative, technical and commercial pressures collide so visibly. The same principle followed me into web and eCommerce development, enterprise architecture, technical leadership and back into hands-on software work.
The artefacts changed. The management problem did not.
At every level, useful work became easier when people understood the outcome, had enough context to make decisions, could protect periods of concentration and received feedback before they had travelled too far in the wrong direction. My move from games into enterprise technology changed the scale and vocabulary of the work, not that underlying lesson.
Measure contribution, not attendance
I do not support hard 9-to-5 attendance as the default measure of commitment in creative development. I support clear expectations, dependable collaboration and people being accountable for work that matters.
Hours still affect capacity. Deadlines still matter. Teams still need each other. None of that makes attendance a useful substitute for judgement.
Define the outcome. Make the constraints honest. Give capable people room to think. Protect their concentration. Check progress through evidence. And if the work routinely consumes their evenings, fix the system rather than praising the sacrifice.
