[Jestar342]

Has your team productivity actually dropped? You mention things that are supplemental to productivity but nothing about the actual productivity itself. If not, then I suspect there is no more "time theft"* than usual and you shouldn't get wound up by it.

* that is a hideously obnoxious and entitled phrase to use - instead of "distracted" or even simply just "not working".

[lrossi]

Right, somehow I missed the time “theft” part. He thinks of his people as if they’re criminals.

This is like a textbook example of manager red flags that you should check for and avoid when joining a company.

[croutonwagon]

I wasn’t necessarily talking about my team. In fact mine has remained productive. But it has taken more effort on my part to keep them organized and on task. I’m the opposite of a micromanager, I hate that stuff. But the fact is I’m having to probe more and more as time goes on to keep things moving. Heck it not cuts into my productivity which also cuts into my teams.

Heck Just last week I had an admin that it took 45 minutes to get a hold of during an outage mid day because he was trying to renovate a bathroom and had setup a workstation in his garage.

Time theft is just a common term and I used it for that reason.

And I’ve seen it elsewhere in my workplace and across my communities. We have seen an increase in AV/app whitelisitng reporting attempts to install mouse shakers, auto responses, running video all day to avoid idle timeouts on teams Statius etc.

People calling into meeting while out fishing, hunting, shopping doing home improvement etc and usbeing asked to locate them at xyz time.

On a personal level idgaf about personal time. I heavily encourage my employees to take it. I heavily encourage mental health awareness and having hobbies and interests outside of work. Heck I regularly take off for such things myself. And I work to give my employees projects that fit their interests and strengths.

But what would your prefer I call it when people are trying to do these things and not claiming vacation time?

[ryandrake]

If I hire someone on a salary and expect him to do X, and he meets that expectation, I wouldn’t care if he did it in 40 hours or if he did it in 10 hours and spent the remaining 30 hours fishing. I hired him to do X and he did. Why should I care how many hours he’s staring at a screen?

Now if he’s on an hourly contract, I’d expect the hours to be accurate.

For some jobs the expectation is literally “be reachable and physically at this workstation when a fire ignites”. Can’t do that while fishing. But lots of jobs are “do this batch of things, and come to these meetings at these times.” If someone can do this effectively from the middle of a lake, who cares?

[TameAntelope]

Emotionally, I see "time theft" and I have to work extra hard to continue to be objective, because I associate it with the "higher productivity with static wages" problem that I don't see getting solved the way I'd hope.

FWIW I understand where you're coming from generally, I don't want to make these concerns about you or your team specifically.

[dccoolgai]

When you ask or expect an employee to work late or longer (say, sending them a message at 530), do you think of yourself/your company as a "thief" of their time?

[croutonwagon]

I do....And im very cognizant of that. In many cases i will be doing catch up or research, alpha testing something that may have a use case at work. I often spend nights reading things like net sec blogs etc and sometimes it will pertain to work. For example CISA guidance posts on Sparrow and CTR etc. Rather than post them as a reminder to looking into them in the am, I will hold messages BECAUSE i dont want to give the impression that i want them to read it or respond during personal time.

And in fact I have interjected into late sessions i wasnt a party to to ask parties to suspend their tshooting when i found out it was happening and it wasnt really....critical. My developers specifically can work some odd hours, which is perfectly fine, but they cant abuse my on call ops shifts for it at their leisure.

Or in cases where its needed, they are given comp time starting at 1.5x time to make up for it. Often times it more than that.

Not all work places act like the employee is cattle. Many do see the people as an asset.

[pcthrowaway]

Just out of curiosity, I fully agree with, but do you let employees take off time as needed? Because most people are in the 9-to-5 grind, and the 15 days yearly paid vacation aren't nearly enough.

[alsetmusic]

From this and another post, I got the impression that some of the employees might not be salaried. If that’s the case (getting paid hourly and giving the impression of working while actually doing something else), I would consider that stealing from the company.