[dbecker]

I think that a good deal of that fear/anxiety comes from the fact that people are expected to be more productive. If someone doesn't respond to an email immediately, we think the are not working or are being lazy.

A quick but possibly meaningless e-mail response doesn't constitute productivity. The expectation you describe is just one of availability (or working), while ignoring productivity or presenting real solutions.

[weland]

Unfortunately, enough, well, for the lack of a more elegant term, MBA leeches, have climbed the corporate ladder high enough to generalize equating the vague term "proactivity" (which tends to involve permanent availability, diligence and so much pseudo-politeness that it starts smelling a lot like ass-kissing) to productivity.

This is particularly annoying when it's augmented by unrealistic expectations, like "you're a programmer... you spend all your time on a computer, can't you check your inbox"?

I used to work in a place where this was common practice, especially among the HR and sales drones. They pissed me off so hard that I cracked up and explained one particularly pushy tie-wearer that I only check my mail every hour or so, when I take a break from, you know, work, and if something is more urgent than that, he can come to my office. He obnoxiously explained me that a lot of his work involves remote communication and he can't just go all the way to my office (which was otherwise on the same floor), so I just went like, ok, prioritize or whatever your newspeak language calls it and leave me the fuck alone.

I stubbornly enforced my "one e-mail checking each hour" until the whole department started doing it. To everyone's surprise, things went a lot more smoothly; instead of hurriedly replying some half-thought obvious crap just to show the boss how attentive you are to your work, you could actually take five minutes and explain the guy what he needed to know. Much fewer details slipped and everyone was eventually happier, save for the self-important rookies who thought Skyping and placing phone calls was the substance of their work.

[koralatov]

Absolutely, but unfortunately, in many places of business `availability' is conflated with, or entirely replaces, `productivity'.

[yaddayadda]

Under average circumstances I have to drive about 50 minutes from my house to my office. This past winter we were expecting a bad storm one evening. Being a hardworker, I took home stuff to work on if I got stuck and couldn't make it into the office.

Just before I got home that evening one of my tires blew. I called the manager I was working for and explained the situation. I was planning on getting the tire replaced first thing. The tire shop didn't have internet, but I had plenty of paper work that didn't require internet, so I could work at the shop. And of course, I would call him as soon as the tire was fixed.

Next morning the storm had settled over our area. I limped to the tire store. It took about 1.5 hours for them to replace the tire (they had to wait on delivery of the tire from their supply house). When they had replaced it I called the manager and let him know I was en route. Unfortunately, a couple of exits down the road a tire related emergency light came on.

So, I turned around and headed back to the shop. En route I saw a large accident happen on the road I had just traversed. As soon as I got to the shop, I called the manager. I explained the current situation, and suggested that I just continue to work from the tire shop and when they were done I could work from home.

Long story short, this "productivity focused" manager insisted (i.e., I would be fired if I did otherwise) that I drive down to the office. I ended up spending 2.5 hours stuck in winter storm traffic, so that I could sit for an hour at a desk in an office to do paperwork that I could have done at home. Of course, I then had to turn around and drive back (thankfully that only took 2 hours).

So instead of 3.5 hours of productivity I got 4.5 of completely wasted drive time for 1 hour of actual work. (Then there's the fact that if I'm on a work roll at home, I tend not to stop, so he would have likely gotten more than just the 3.5 hours of work out of me.) All because his idea of 'work' is that someone in a seat in an office is productive while someone at home can't possible be productive.

I'm now much more punctual about working as close to 40 hours/weekly on the dot as I possibly can (I used to average many more hours). I won't do more than cursory email checks from home. And, I don't care how productive I am when I'm actually at the office. Because clearly all that actually matters is that I'm physically there.

[jcromartie]

As the current generation replaces boomers, and hopefully comes to their senses, maybe we'll see a shift from "butt-in-chair-time" to actual output as the primary metric for productivity.

[Florin_Andrei]

When you are a resource, you're supposed to be available.

Would you not expect your website to be available all the time? Or running water? Or electricity?

[yaddayadda]

Available is indeed a key word. If someone is able to work from a connected location anywhere in the world, and they're at a connected location, are they available?

There are certainly some occupations, and some aspects of other occupations, that require a person to be at a very specific place at a very specific time (e.g. emergency room personnel). But there are also many, many jobs that do not inherently have a location and/or temporal requirement for the work to be successfully completed.

So my question to employers is whether it is more important for (a) work to be effectively completed within given time constraints or (b) employees to have a physical presence, particularly when the two are at odds (e.g., storm prevents someone from getting to work location, but the person can effectively work from their current location)?

edited: typo and clarification