[JakeTheAndroid]

Wait, so you have an employee that can get all their work done using 20% of their working hours and then spend the rest of their day ensuring they don't burn out and you want to become adversarial to that employee?

Because clearly they are getting stuff done if they can post that video and not get fired. Otherwise, you have a low performer slacking off which is its own, completely separate issue from the video itself.

It's like that quote from The Office where Michael says Jim is a lazy worker because it takes Jim 20 minutes to complete a project that would take Michael hours to complete. Seems like you're saying you want your least efficient employees and can't be bothered to understand the working habits of your most efficient employees.

Or maybe, just maybe, using time as a sole metric isn't the best way to evaluate employee effectiveness or efficiency.

[boredtofears]

You're missing several other options:

B) no one is paying that close attention to their performance in the first place or the metrics for performance themselves are setup in such a way that can be gamified and are therefore meaningless.

C) there really isn't enough work to justify a FTE for it.

My hunch is that its a combination of these two.

I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.

[JakeTheAndroid]

I am not missing those options at all. It's just that the video is not the issue nor the way time can be spent at the company. If your metrics for evaluating performance is wrong that should be addressed before becoming adversarial to your employees based on a flawed perception.

And if there isn't enough work to justify a FTE, then again your metrics are bad. The forecast was not accurate enough. And the only way to know if that's true or not is to fix the formula, do the math again, and figure out the truth.

In both scenarios the employee isn't necessarily the problem, or even a problem at all.

And if we take a step back and evaluate the source material, it's a TikTok video. It's meant to be content. Do we even know if the employee is really only working 20% of the time? We aren't getting a 16 hour live stream here, it's short form content. The truth of the matter is heavily obscured.

It just seems like a bad idea to me to base you're business decisions around a TikTok video, especially when it's one that is adversarial to your employees. Instead, spend the time to understand the reality. Like we might find that the employee is actually working 90% of their workday. And then suddenly you're making decisions that never need to be made in the first place.

> I've worked long enough to know that the mean time for work completion (assuming C is not the predominant factor) is more than 20% of your work week.

Depends heavily on function. Plenty of roles are somewhat peaks and valleys of backlogged work. There might be times where some employees really can get their work done using 20% of their day, but then at a different stage they would need to use way more than 20%.

[boredtofears]

Yeah, I’m not a twitter exec but presumably would be making decisions off of more than just a TikTok video. I don’t think any of your argument is counter to mine.

It doesn’t take a genius to observe that there may be some fat to cut.

[JakeTheAndroid]

I mean I agree, there is probably fat to cut. But the premise was that if you were an exec and saw that video you'd then consider tightening up the amenities. And if you're basing that decision on a TikTok video that seems a bit short sighted to me.

If you're tightening up the available amenities that should be based on totally different data that has nothing to do with a social media post.

[boredtofears]

This is just more straw-manning. The video either leaves an impression on you or it doesn't. It's really not possible to have a meaningful argument about the actions inferred from an ambiguous statement like "I might be considering tightening things up".

The video struck me as particularly brash given the current economic climate.