Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Aleyla t1_j4b8fg5 wrote

I don’t understand why companies feel the need to put monitoring software in. Assign work. If the work is being completed in a timely manner then it shouldn’t matter it they spent 30 hours or 40 hours on it.

If the work is not being completed in a timely manner then figure out if more training is required or if the work load is too much. If neither is the issue then put the employee on notice. If it still doesn’t improve then fire them.

In none of these situations does it matter if the employee watched disney for 3 hours a day. That would be found out just from seeing if the work is being completed.

edit: Quite a few people have said that I’m missing that she is hourly.

Even being hourly I still think an argument could be made that such a level of monitoring would still not be necessary. If I ask someone to do a specific task then I should have an approximate idea of how long that task would take. If they then bill me for far more time than I expect I should start asking detailed questions. Bullshit isn’t often hard to detect.

If it continues then I’d either need to adjust my expectations or replace the worker. We’ve all known people that drag their feet; both salary and hourly. Good management should have regular status meetings with their employees so that this doesn’t go unnoticed or uncorrected.

The work I do requires a short daily meeting for a team of 10 people that takes about 15 minutes. Some of our group is salary, some bill their 40 hours each week. As a group we estimate the time frame the work can be completed in and as a group we divide up who does what. During our daily status meeting we say how it’s going. This method makes it very very difficult for anyone to drag their feet. If someone is taking too long then we dig into why. Sure someone could slide for a day or two but not any longer than that before the problem would be fixed.

None of this requires nanny software. I still feel that nanny software is a crutch for bad management. Maybe instead of constantly reading reports about how often a document is accessed or a mouse is moved they could just keep an open dialogue with their employees.

86

FalconFiveZeroNine t1_j4c4bkk wrote

The problem is that companies want employees to be productive 100% of the time, which is simply not possible. They install software like that to ensure employees are on task as much as possible and oftentimes it's only used as a means to fire for cause when it's convenient for the company, or as a means to deny pay increases.

This management style is more prevalent in retail or food service ("if you got time to lean, you got time to clean"), but it's been creeping into other work sectors for a while now.

38

Rosebunse t1_j4cspqv wrote

What's stupid to me is that my compy expects this and expects us to be friendly and polite and partake in social activities with our coworkers. And some workers are allowed to do this while I'm told to "get back to work" and watch people just talk to each other for a full half hour.

10

segfaultsarecool t1_j4cjl5b wrote

>it shouldn’t matter it they spent 30 hours or 40 hours on it.

It does if your company is a on a contract. Every hour gets billed to the customer and has to be justified, or else the company is stealing from the customer.

7

Rosebunse t1_j4csisx wrote

At my job, the problem is that my managers don't want to admit that more training is required. "But it's so easy!" is what they always say. Well, yes, it is easy if you have been doing it almost every day for ten years, Michelle. And no, I did not have training. I say with the receptionist while she did her job, which is completely different from the job I am currently doing, and the several people who were supposed to train me decided that they should just talk about their crappy marriages on Teams during training.

But no, I am clearly the problem (:

6

StarCitizenIsGood t1_j4dhk9d wrote

Yes but if you have 10 extra hours thats time to work on organizing a union or a civil protest. Cant give the slaves that kind of time

2

SixStringGamer t1_j4fi1ka wrote

I feel like this whole argument could be averted if they would just pay people on salary. Like, I pay you to be on call for my companies issues, heres a yearly salary. I dont care how long anything takes just get it done, please. This seems to be the issue here, not enough work to pay for the time that they hired for.

2

InterestingTesticle t1_j4byvlk wrote

What you're talking about is a salaried employee.

As far as an hourly wage is concerned, it's just the best system of measurement for most jobs. It's based on the idea that you pay for what you use. If I use 30 hours of your time, I'm not going to pay you for 40.

Would you pay a 500 dollar utility bill if you'd only used 100 dollars worth of said utility?

−8

samiwas1 t1_j4eyj4s wrote

What if you required me for ten hours of my time for a day, but you had only five hours of work for me to do, but you needed me to be there for those ten hours just in case other work came up? And what if I spent that extra five hours just doing whatever I wanted?

1

InterestingTesticle t1_j4eyzx2 wrote

Then I'd pay you for ten and you can enjoy those extra five hours sticking around in case something comes up on your phone or the internet.

In every job I've ever had, that's pretty much how it goes.

1

samiwas1 t1_j4ez94p wrote

Okay, then we are in agreement. That's pretty much what my job is. I'm there for 12-14 hours. But on a normal day, I do maybe 3-4 hours of actual work. The rest of the time is spent on hobbies or scrolling until I find the end of the internet. But, that's what the job is.

1

MrLumpykins t1_j4ba19q wrote

I agree in principal but that doesn't make it ok to commit fraud. I would not choose to work for a company that micromanaged my time like that but if it was the situation them I can't just make up hours I worked and bill the company for them.

Paying hourly for work like this only encourages poor and inefficient work. Better to set a salary and expect the employee to finish the tasks assigned to them each day/week. But that isn't the agreement she had when she started working

−11

chernobyl169 t1_j4bmifj wrote

> I can't just make up hours I worked and bill the company for them.

Actually, that's exactly how most contractors do it.

16

MrLumpykins t1_j4buixh wrote

Then we they get caught committing fraud they should have to pay. Everyone else does it is a kindergarten excuse

−10

chernobyl169 t1_j4eote3 wrote

Welp, if you think time billing is fraud, good luck going after the lawyer that's charging you in hour increments for two-minute phone calls. Three short calls in half an hour? That's three billable hours. Whether you think it's fraud is irrelevant - the law does not, because the people that are in the business of law make a lot of money from that being the case.

"Time theft" only exists for employees. This is by design to protect wealth, like most laws regarding money. It's not fraud to bill for a made-up amount of time, it's literally how all time billing except for employee wages is done. Only "wage earners" are paid by the minute. Some employers actually calculate down to the six second interval (tenth of a minute). Meanwhile, the overnight parking garage gets to round up to the nearest four hour increment. Who's really "committing" anything here - the lady getting her job done quickly, or the folks claiming they overpaid after the job is done?

2

TacoMeat563 t1_j4cd5w6 wrote

Not to be that guy/gal, but if work isn’t being completed on time, this could actually just be a lazy person who is purposefully putting in little effort. No amount of training is going to fix that. When I managed folks, if you were at the bottom of pile regarding amount of work you completed in the same time as other colleagues, you were offered training (which involved repeating things folks already knew) or you were counseled out - either way chances are you don’t/didn’t like the work, so why continue being miserable. Why should I keep paying the low performer, when I can just use that training time for a new employee who is willing to put in the work. You can make the argument that it is costlier to hire new employees, but the toll low performers take on the moral of the rest of team isn’t great either. How would you feel knowing that someone who puts in 30% of your effort, gets paid similarly (granted performance based bonus and raises are highly variable)

Also read the article. It has absolutely nothing to do with someone having too much work to do in a small amount of time. She even admits she mis-logged as well as claims to have been working with paper documents of which she doesn’t have any proof of.

−11

rood_sandstorm t1_j4bb0ba wrote

There are companies and jobs that pay salary. Maybe she should work for those and leave the hourly wage job for people who want to work hourly

−12

ux3l t1_j4bjkx4 wrote

While I'm also against software that monitors mouse movements or other spyware-like stuff, I think monitoring how often the remote worker interacts with the work server (or, probably less often, work-related local files) is legit and seems like a good way to figure out if people are actually working while being clocked in during remote work. That has nothing to do with monitoring productivity or similar.

−16