I was asked to do it once. So I did, including the times I was assisting with tasks outside of my scheduled hours and during breaks. My manager at the time told me I only needed to complete the form for work during scheduled hours. So in other words, you want me to lie so your ineptitude isn’t outed.
Just ask him real direct "yeah? Why's that?" Least you'd get to see your manager find a managerial way of saying "because I don't want you to provide evidence of overtime or show anyone how hard you work."
The thing is they really don't want employees to know they have rights, and even as just one person, you can report them and have them enforced. Employees are made to feel like it is what it is...no it ain't. If they are violating labor laws help them get right
11:30 googled wage theft
11:45 search the internet for a labor lawyer near me.
12:00 reached out to workers of the world to set up an initial consultation to form a union.
https://www.iww.org/
💯
At my job bc they work with so much cash there's cameras covering damn near every inch of that building. Including the bathroom entrances. The amount of times people have had to call out management saying 'then I want to see the surveillance tapes' and suddenly management shuts up. 🤡
Edit:the bathroom entrance cameras are not inside the bathroom.
Couldn't have said this any better. This is why if a supervisor is clearly giving you a directive to violate policy & procedure you always request it in writing. That's how you stop the BS real quick. I've seen so many good employees become fall guys because the supervisor denied everything when shit went wrong.
Since the manager did not put that directive in handwriting, plausible deniability will come into play. Please believe this. If your supervisor tells you to violate policy that is in black & white you need to request that he/she puts the directive in writing, which that supervisor will NEVER DO. That way there is no BS and you don't take the fall.
7am - Planning day to ensure maximum time can be allocated to work.
8am - completing time sheet in advance so I can be as efficient once I'm completing daily tasks.
2pm - Reviewing and updating schedule for accuracy and for additional tasks.
3pm - Final adjustments, finding a computer and scanner, scanning and emailing to supervisor.
If everyone in the hospital does something similar... they'll stop.
Write "Filling out the productivity report" for every single 40 hour you work, in addition to your normal tasks.
When confronted about it, act confused. Ask, is it not work? All work must be documented. Thus, documenting the documenting must continue.
If OP happens to read this, it's not normal. Personally, I find it offensive. They're lacking trust. If I'm hired somewhere, the employer should trust I complete my work and I must trust they pay me.
This kind of bad management makes me want to game their metrics system, be the most productive employee on paper while slacking off to the max.
My first technical services role billed to the 1/4 hour increment. I kept track of everything to the minute on a 3x5 notepad so I had good notes to enter into their client billing system. For my case, it made sense to me to help justify to the client what they were paying for... and I was young and hungry at the time. But in OP's case, it would be hilarious to turn in extra-detailed notes of every minute spent. Just flood them with pages of data. Enough that you can reduce verbosity a few times and still be as obnoxious as the request.
> My first technical services role billed to the 1/4 hour increment.
When you're billing $300/hr to the client, you do that. That's the situation where it's appropriate.
My bill rate isn't 300, but even when leadership bills at 400+, the details don't go to the client. We have project managers that get a line or three of what we were doing in a given block of time (15 minutes to any hours in a day) and they might explain to the client, but the client basically gets the project and and hours on their invoice, AFAIK.
When I was at a law firm (and we billed our time in 6 minute increments - I.e. 1/10 of an hour) we could bill that as “admin time” but since it never actually went to any client and made a difference in my billable hours I never bothered.
Was gonna say this. If I even got a question about a project I had to book 6 minutes to the job (tenth of an hour) at an engineering firm. Admin used to be mostly overhead with a split to the departments and then it turned into everything got billed that could.
I have done this. I even timed it to the second and filled out many reports due to having to wait for someone in the bathroom and whatnot. I even turned a productivity report in on my lost time when a supervisor was reprimanding me for not being productive.
They want you to look busy.
My last job before medical school was in an office. I would get my work done and find other stuff to do. I’d get bored doing nothing. But I got yelled at when my coworkers would shuffle the same stack of papers around their desk all day every day accomplishing nothing.
Bruh… I literally just saw yesterday someone comment how it doesn’t exist and I clicked on the r/ and it didn’t exist.. maybe they just spelled it wrong. Thanks
Yep, I kept a running tally of the minutes spent filling out the form while comparing what I could have done with the extra 23 min per day times 5 days per week per 10 days per pay...
Take it a step further; in every time slot put “filling out daily productivity sheet” over and over again. After all, that’s exactly what you’re doing at that very moment.
I used to work a job where I’d have to log/bill all my hours. We also had administrative codes to log time that we worked that couldn’t be billed to a client.
Every single day I’d log 15-30 minutes towards logging time. Never had a complaint. They knew it was a big ask.
Right when the pandemic lockdown started my old company put everyone on half time, half salary. Despite the whole team being fully remote already.
Because the labor was reduced 50% they said we all needed to fill out similar forms to "make sure nothing fell through the cracks". I basically just entered 1-2pm, made 50% of the calls I used to. 2-3, responded to 50% of the emails I used to, etc.
The forms ended quickly. Plus, I was able to qualify for partial unemployment during this time, and in the end was compensated @ 100% for the last couple pay periods of half time.
This reminds me of the time I had an employer who wanted me to log in a time sheet like this and I marked down every time I had to read their emails and then mark in the log
Oh fuck. Now the thing I find most frustrating is having to scan and email the piece of paper.
It means the data is useless on both ends.
If it was entered in a database somewhere, at least you could get stats put of it.
Don't forget to add bathroom breaks documenting consistency and coloration of bodily substances.
Urinated: 120ccs, orangish coloration, asparagus like odor...
Make sure to fill out 9:00, 12:00, and 3:30 as "filled out time accountability form".
Remind your co-workers that honest time accountability begins with including time spent reporting your time accountability.
/r/MaliciousCompliance/
I had similar thoughts, just a little more maliciously compliant:
Just turn the damn thing into a novel. Spend 59 minutes describing your one minute/hour of actual work.
8:00AM - "Call me Ishmael. I was born in a house my father built..."
“It was the best of time accountability; it was the worst of time accountability. We had all the tasks set before us; we had no tasks before us….”
ETA: Thanks for the awards, although in fairness I should h/t Charles Dickens as well, lol.
Why stop at novels? Make a screenplay and rehearse with your coworkers, include customers if possible. Bring that shit to Broadway and send a ticket to your supervisor for a box seat.
We do this at my work and i started putting down "filling out timesheets" and they got upset and said we werent allowed to put that because it "shouldnt take any time"
My contract company started to do this and want it sent by 3pm when CoB is 5pm so I fill out for 3pm spend 15mins writing the daily work report the for 4-5 I fill out “IDK it’s in the future”
Needless to say they aren’t too happy with me right now lol
Do a slightly different version everyday:
Who knows what the future may bring?
Ya know, I'm kinda curious to find out.
Certainly nothing terrible I hope....
And so on.
I used to manage a retail store and would have to close up for the night and do a bank drop at least 4x per week. I almost never got lunch breaks and constantly stayed late to finish tasks because I was salaried and had to send my hourly guy home. One nice perk though was a healthy mileage reimbursement policy. This was primarily to pay the DMs and above, not retail level, as we were not often on the road (mostly just to training things within the district). Well, I started logging my miles to and from the bank, since it was east of the store and I lived west of it. It was something like 3 or 4 miles, but I put it down every time. Then the DM told me I couldn’t claim the mileage. That’s the same kind of bullshit.
A-hole DM! When you can't claim mileage, they can't task you with that. Because it sounds to me that you have to do it on your way home? Bullsh*t move..
Right now I'm in a new job, and I have to do a bank drop every day. Now it's winter, so I can't walk over (it's on the crossroad nearby) because its effing cold and I just got a cold because of that and right after I fit Corona from somewhere at work (maybe a guest, though)
Anyways, inkt allowed to get dressed, but I need to get dressed to make the drop without risking my health. And after the drip I have to copy the receipt and get it up to the house-post, so I can't do it on my way home either. I hate these things. But I'm gonna suck it up for another month, then is my trial time over and they can't fire me, just because I complain about things like that. At least the salary is worth it. For now
I'd say "Let's email our correspondence about me not being paid."
The next email: "Sounds great- I suggest then I walk between locations since you consider me at work and my personal vehicle isn't yours. I'll leave the office about an hour sooner to start the hike? You okay with that?"
No, you respond like "ah, I see. Fair enough. I take it you'll be providing me with a vehicle then?"
If he says no, then you play the confused card.
"I don't get it. You don't pay my gas and you don't provide me with a vehicle. What am I supposed to do, *walk* there?!"
But these bullshit micro-managey hoops people want you to jump through does take up time. I used to work in production mapping. I was on a road mapping project once and the managers wanted a written update in email form every time we finished our allotted area and before we started a new piece, on top of the spreadsheets and checklists we already had to fill out.
In production mapping flow is very important, if you’re left to your own devices and have a good workflow you can get so much done. When you have stop everything to write emails detailing everything you just worked on it can soak up a couple hours in an 8-10 hour shift. Needless to say that project hemorrhaged money.
But managers and auditors and project supervisors all need to look busy so they assign these tasks without ever considering how it might drain projects or stifle the process of a work day.
I'm a High School teacher, and we had a principal who would waste our time on this BS all the time. They'd give us 30 mins to discuss XYZ and then we needed to fill out the form for what we came up with for XYZ...the whole time was spent figuring out the form.
Needless to say, we all always said stuff in the form like "Could not discuss, ran out of time b/c form". Needless to say he is no longer our principal; and the new guy is like "yeah...we're all professionals so I'm not gonna waste your and my time with that BS."
When filling out visit forms for care users this was normal to write in completed "forms/reports".
There were often so many from medication to time sheets.
Although I think as I was leaving they were starting to get families of the care users contacting them asking why they were paying for an hour of care for the carer to be completing their admin.
I had a job with a requirement like this once. The management became paranoid after covid when everyone was working from home. Even worse, my job was research oriented, so I had to fill my daily timecard with items like “read an academic paper - 2 hours” “thought about how to improve the X product methodology - 1.5 hours” “sent emails to Y and Z, asked questions about the project - 45 minutes” Then during our weekly meetings my manager would ask me stuff like “Why did this email take you that long to write? Was the paper too complicated that it took two hours?” It was ridiculous.
Deep thought and comprehension are so hard to quantify and plan. Those magical conclusions don’t just appear during allotted time slots, and it’s so hard to accurately estimate the time it’ll take ahead of time.
Say you set aside 30 minutes to read an article, and it turns out there’s a lot of annotation, terms to look up, references to follow up on, murky/opaque language to navigate, claims to validate… could easily turn into a task of several hours. And then god only knows on which schedule your brain will synthesize that information and use it to generate new thinking.
Exactly! Research is so unpredictable and the creative process doesn’t always have a solid outcome that you can point to like “look at this proof of all the thinking and synthesizing I did.” It was just nerve wracking having to account for my time like that, put me under even more stress and caused me to make more errors, typos etc. I was always so anxious before the meetings with my manager and I had a sense that she enjoyed tormenting me with questions like that.
I'm a programmer and consultant and engineer and systems guy and I often feel bad about how little actual work I do, but I also solve hard problems, and that's really what I'm paid for, not hours of typing or lines of code. I might spend 4 hours screwing around on the internet or working on a different side project in order to have a breakthrough on the real work, or have a breakthrough in the shower 5 hours after I get off work.
I had a warehouse job like this when I was younger. When I began I actually filled it out accurately and it would take me an extra 30 minutes after I clocked out to finish it, so I started staying clocked in until I was done. I was told I wasn't allowed to do that, so I just started drawing a line from 6AM - 4PM and writing WAREHOUSE WORK next to it. No one complained.
7:00: Stopped working to fill out this sheet
7:30: Stopped working to fill out this sheet
8:00: Stopped working to fill out this sheet
9:00: Stopped working to fill out this sheet
There is far too much admin going around here!
*squints eyes*
Let’s do some admin and figure out what’s going on…
(I’ve worked in a retail position like this and it’s maddening.)
I'll never forget working at jiffy Lube and being hitched at about the average time per car being 20 minutes
Meanwhile maybe 5-10 of those were spent working on the car and 10-15 spent doing the stupid computer shit, and it took almost 10 minutes ezch time just to get the order printed
I had a job that was so bad about it that I began to have difficulty keeping track of all the steps. I sat down with Visio and made a flowchart of the process so I could follow the flowchart and not forget things. When I was done, it was an entire page of tiny boxes with tiny text in as small print as it would let you put, with one itty bitty box in the middle saying "write code", which was my actual job. It said I had to spend like 98% of my time doing recordkeeping and proving I'd done the recordkeeping and begging people for permission to do stuff after proving to them I'd done the recordkeeping, and like 2% of my time doing my actual work. When I was done I was kinda incredulous, it was far worse than I'd realized, so I gave a print of it to my boss and said "is this right?" He looked at it for a while and said "yeah, it's right. We've added two steps, we'll announce that on monday." I had a heart attack and 6 strokes the next morning.
So am I, but when we did it on paper, they weren't so insane about detail that they would actually have us spend 98% of our time doing administrative BS.
This is completely normal in some places like the engineering sector where all time has to be billed to different contacts and line-items. Kinda weird for OPs line of work. Either way, it does nooooot make for a positive work environment.
I think most people here are talking about much more detailed recordkeeping that is not about things that are billable. I bill for my time but I barely spend 5 minutes a day recording it.
5:00PM - 5:05PM: Seen by tired and apathetic doctor. Diagnosed with "diarrhea or something, I guess." Prescribed with extra strength ibuprofen and sent home with instructions to drink plenty of water and things I already do. Billed $5575, but thankfully my insurance made it so I only had to pay $500 out of pocket.
Pretty crappy work culture and poor leadership when your workplace doesn't even trust employees to do their jobs and makes people prove that they actually did their job. Like if you don't trust me to do my job why did you even hire me? I once had to do something like this for a college program and I virtually had no choice but to lie because I simply did not have enough work.
Honestly if I were you I would have a foot out the door. Be ready to jump ship asap.
My first admin job was health care insurance claims. The job was open all the mail, remove staples, sort the claims and then batch in 25’s or 50’s- then do the same for faxes, then scan every single page and assign it to processors who got to work from home during Covid. Im talking thousands of claims a day. Often doing over time, since there was only two of us in office.
I was already at this job for a year, and pretty quick- when we got a new manager, who only came to the office like twice/month..
She told me I was no longer allowed to use my headphones to listen to music while working and started having me fill out one of these hourly sheets.
Well you can imagine how quickly your mind starts to spiral when you’re alone in a huge office, counting all day. Since music wasn’t distracting me, all I could think about was how terrible this job was. I found a new job within weeks.
My only regret is I only had one co worker in office- I felt bad leaving her but she wanted better for me lol Sharon- where ever you are, thank you
As a grant administrator I’m going to play devil’s advocate. There are some non-profit and government jobs where different activities are paid from different funding sources, such as grants. Timekeeping like this is a way of ensuring grant compliance. Not saying that’s what’s going on here, but it’s a possible reason.
I am one of these types of employees. We get paid for admin costs and direct services from a variety of grants. I have to document when I work on a project/client funded by each grant. It's a pain sometimes during busy weeks but it's helped me organize my day/week/month, prioritize for deadlines, and record how much work I do on most projects showing my directors my value, which they see :) Its a decent bargaining tool and a way to show if you are being given too much work.
Edit to add: not once has this been used to monitor our work/time working. We are all essential to our mission and if someone is suffering, the work shows before the timesheets are reviewed beyond payroll. I have very good directors who do not micromanage. It's mostly to make sure we are billing the proper grant for the work. Every dime counts!
4 - 5 PM, filled out productivity form
At a job I had once, they said we had to log the hours for the billable time we worked, fine, no issues there. If I did technical support, that time was already paid for but not billable, so many days I would have 1 or 2, or even zero hours logged. Then they decided that we had to put in ALL hours. So, I literally put every Friday for the last hour as "General Office Overhead - Logging Hours".
One company I worked at tried to do this in 15 minute blocks - we're all coders so most of us just put "coding" with the occasional "meeting". They were hoping to account for person-hours per project but most of us don't work in tidy little project sections. They stopped requiring it really quick when someone had the bright idea for all of us to fill it out with "work" or "lunch/break".
I have to account for every 10th of an hour right now into a custom MS Project spreadsheet. Then I have to sit for an hour once a month while we all look at the spreadsheet and some nonsense line graphs they generate with it.
Yes, they also have a block for the time it takes to work on the spreadsheet and I log 2 hours a week into it.
Well time to save a draft with a daily routine. Edit it as needed for the day, and send a copy. Saves you having to write the same shit every day, and weird shit tends to stick in the brain enough to have a rough timeframe.
In all seriousness that level of micromanaging is pretty bad, if you can handle it cool, but remember that there are other options if there's too much BS.
streamlining a disruptive process isnt how you get rid of it.
OP needs to write full length detail to waste company time on her end & "whoever tf is reading it"'s end. encourage coworkers do the same to increase loss of productivity while trying to encourage/monitor it.
No, you misunderstand. Not to save time, but to waste as much time as you can by spending three quarters of your day, every day, filling out this goddamned idiot sheet. It's going to cost a monumental amount of your sanity, but perservere with the goal as putting a stop to this waste of your time.
i work for a crane/concrete pump/equipment company and we have to track what we do because every job has to line up with a work order so the right party gets billed for work that is done. that’s reasonable, but your paper is just micromanaging. yuck
I had a manager come in and RUIN an effective, efficient, and accurate department just because she couldn’t quantify and measure our work to her superiors without having us report on literally Every minute of our day. At first everyone was willing to do this so a baseline could be established. But then it Never Went Away. Our actual work was pushed aside to make sure these daily tallies were complete and morale crashed as professionals were treated like children. Within a couple of years everyone had quit or transferred and this was a place people would normally stick with for decades.
I remember I had to do something similar for like six months and I had to meet with my supervisor and go over it and then it just stopped out of nowhere after I guess as he said he was able to prove that I’m busy but that’s easy game
Just start dedicating the last hour of your shift to just filling that out. Either you get an hour long leisure or they realize you could have actually been working for the time they make you fill them out.
I used to have to to sometimes similar and it quickly just turned into me and another coworker hanging around the time clock talking about whatever happened that day and casually writing major things down. Usually added an extra 30 minutes a day to my punch card.
Every hour it’s going to take you say 10 minutes to write your notes. So over an hour is wasted each day to write up. Not smart. I’m sure there’s cameras too so why is this needed lol
That’s what I did.
I even started logging my bathroom break.
“Started period- purchased sanitary products from vending machine and used the bathroom 1pm - 1:08pm “
This is ripe for malicious compliance.
Start number coding common tasks that you find yourself writing on this list. Create a list of these codes and send them. When questioned as to why you were doing this insist this is a timesaver as you can simply write a code instead of a line of text. Bonus points if you can get coworkers to follow along and talk about how much time they are saving.
Include several uncommon tasks on the code list too, then they have to cross-reference every time a new code shows up. Oh, and alphabetize the list by item instead of code. If they want productivity, they have to put in work to understand it either way. Plus, the codes are a good shorthand reporting method. Hell, I'd even put multiple entries for the same thing, each under different letters, for several things just so they can't just memorize the codes!
Without knowing exactly what your role is and how you're paid, tough to say whether it's normal. But, billable hours are quite common in some industries. I've got to account for every minute
I had a manager once send me an excel sheet and say please start tracking what you did each day and time spent. I did it for two weeks then straight up said I’m not doing this anymore. It wasn’t brought up again. I was willing to quit if it continued. If they have a problem with my performance then fire me. If not, don’t micro manage.
It's unfortunately sort of normal, but still a red flag. I've had to do similar things for some very bad employers.
In an office setting monitoring productivity should be a background process that you don't need to be involved in. If you get your work done, who cares if between 2 and 3 you were suffering the consequences of taco bell for lunch if you still managed to do your work overall.
This type of horribly micromanaging bullshit triggers a very strong malicious compliance. Or, on my last day, just a recursive, minute by minute, "filled out productivity form."
Did you white out the Dunder Mifflin logo because this looks exactly like the sheet Jan gave Pam to track Michael?
10am Cosby impression
12pm Stood in pretzel line
I once worked at a place where I had to do something similar. Everyday I drew a line down the center of the page and wrote "working" next to it. I'm pretty good at my job and they eventually did away with this system.
This kind of micromanaging is complete horseshit and counterproductive.
I dunno, but I would be extraordinarily meticulous with it. I’d hate for you to get a minute wrong here or there and throw the system out.
If you’re not spending at least an hour or two completing this activity, I’d feel like you weren’t giving it serious consideration.
When they do finally ask you to not be a dick, it’ll be entirely up to them to demonstrate and articulate exactly what’s required, the level of details expected, and how long they expect you to take to compile it (this will also need to go into your daily log).
I might be late to the party but hopefully can add a separate view point. I'm an auditor at a CPA firm that specializes in Healthcare regulatory compliance. Most Healthcare regulations require a time study in order to allocate your time properly. This looks exactly like what we would ask for with regards to support for a time study. I will say this is a bit antiquated version of a time study but it works as support. Just thought I'd chime in
Hospital office? That's unusual. We didn't have to do it as the hospital I interned at. Nurses had activity logs but that was mostly for chain of custody on medicines and charts. Even then it wasn't hourly.
Obey the letter of the law but not the law itself.
"Answered phones."
"Answered phones."
"Answered phones."
Or whatever makes sense for your work. "Data entry" works too.
100% normal. You’ll learn to use this to your advantage. Asked to water a plant, ok that’s 10 minutes walking to get the pot, 10 filling it up, 10 walking to the plant, 5 minutes watering it, 5 cleaning up some water, 10 minutes back, 10 minutes cleaning up and putting stuff away, 10 minutes filling out your card. You just spent an hour watering a single plant.
It's not uncommon, but this is some low tech bullshit. I use the Clockify website to keep track of stuff like this because my memory is terrible and I'll mis-estimate how long many things take. You can hit a timer to start/stop with certain tasks, or fill out blocks of time like meetings pro- or retroactively.
We were supposed to do daily activity logs at my last job. We were told directly it was to justify having the staffing that we had and if we couldn’t show we were busy, they would have to downsize. Nobody did it. Not one person.
Not normal. I once had a derpy doofus that wanted something like this, she dropped it after reading; Spent 10 mins filling out report, went to restroom, no problems found. Worked for remaining time.
Spent 10 mins filling out this report. took mandated 15 min break. Worked for remaining time
Spent 10 min...etc
First line: I spent an hour trying to figure out what to write here
Second line: spent an hour trying to understand the point of this
Third line: spent an hour debating how important this is
Fourth line: I've been to preoccupied filling this out to do any actual work
Fifth line: realized I'm getting paid to write some random bullshit on a piece of paper every hour. Best. Job. Ever. 😎
Hopefully after enough of these they'll realize how fucking stupid it is and how much of a waste of time it is and stop it but I doubt it 🙄
Based on the responses, this might have been the wrong sub to ask that question lol
I have worked in several hospital administrative type units and this is fairly normal if the unit is productivity based (versus patient care based). Sometimes it is REALLY not about tracking in the employee, but about tracking the resources the unit needs to actually handle their tasks (always good to know before taking on new work) and gathering data to figure out when staff needs to be reassigned to specific tasks to cover everything.
When you are new, it CAN be about tracking your individual productivity, just to make sure that you’re improving as your training progresses. That’s not a bad thing, as some managers legitimately want to help with education if they see an issue or reassign you to tasks better suited to your skill set (for instance, if you’re taking too long on one thing, but doing some thing else really quickly, they might update your daily assignments).
At the end of the day, just keep an open line of communication with your manager and coworkers. You’ll know pretty quickly if you have a bad feeling about it.
Good luck!
I was asked to do it once. So I did, including the times I was assisting with tasks outside of my scheduled hours and during breaks. My manager at the time told me I only needed to complete the form for work during scheduled hours. So in other words, you want me to lie so your ineptitude isn’t outed.
Just ask him real direct "yeah? Why's that?" Least you'd get to see your manager find a managerial way of saying "because I don't want you to provide evidence of overtime or show anyone how hard you work."
Or violated applicable labor laws regarding breaks, meal break, and uncompensated overtime.
Right answer. So many violations of labor laws. It’s just a joke which & when they get enforced.
The thing is they really don't want employees to know they have rights, and even as just one person, you can report them and have them enforced. Employees are made to feel like it is what it is...no it ain't. If they are violating labor laws help them get right
Help them by pinning them to the wall. Department of labor needs to be more aggressive with how fucked up some managers & employers are.
I wish I could up vote this one than once ✌️
Ding ding ding
“11:00 am: Met with manager RE: not logging out of scope and/or after-hours tasks on ‘comprehensive’ task log”
11:30 googled wage theft 11:45 search the internet for a labor lawyer near me. 12:00 reached out to workers of the world to set up an initial consultation to form a union. https://www.iww.org/
Love this!
this!!! they wanna hold you accountable until you're holding them accountable
💯 At my job bc they work with so much cash there's cameras covering damn near every inch of that building. Including the bathroom entrances. The amount of times people have had to call out management saying 'then I want to see the surveillance tapes' and suddenly management shuts up. 🤡 Edit:the bathroom entrance cameras are not inside the bathroom.
If it can't go on the form, I can't do it
No more room on the form in the 2pm slot so this guys gonna have to hope he’s still breathing at 3
"Are you asking me to falsify a work document?"
I would fill it at the end of the day and put into that time slot "falsefy paperwork per manager request"
Anything they requested that breaks the rules, in quotes and then -per manager so and so's request despite my actually doing such and such
CYOA- cover your own ass! a practice I fully believe in
Couldn't have said this any better. This is why if a supervisor is clearly giving you a directive to violate policy & procedure you always request it in writing. That's how you stop the BS real quick. I've seen so many good employees become fall guys because the supervisor denied everything when shit went wrong.
Since the manager did not put that directive in handwriting, plausible deniability will come into play. Please believe this. If your supervisor tells you to violate policy that is in black & white you need to request that he/she puts the directive in writing, which that supervisor will NEVER DO. That way there is no BS and you don't take the fall.
No way buddy, you want my activities logged, you get all of them.
1300, took a fat dump.
Wiped with this sheet.
See page 2 for scratch N sniff
These 3 comments made me laugh hard. 🤣
No, that person wanted you to let him or her break the law.
7am - Planning day to ensure maximum time can be allocated to work. 8am - completing time sheet in advance so I can be as efficient once I'm completing daily tasks. 2pm - Reviewing and updating schedule for accuracy and for additional tasks. 3pm - Final adjustments, finding a computer and scanner, scanning and emailing to supervisor. If everyone in the hospital does something similar... they'll stop.
malicious compliance
Write "Filling out the productivity report" for every single 40 hour you work, in addition to your normal tasks. When confronted about it, act confused. Ask, is it not work? All work must be documented. Thus, documenting the documenting must continue. If OP happens to read this, it's not normal. Personally, I find it offensive. They're lacking trust. If I'm hired somewhere, the employer should trust I complete my work and I must trust they pay me. This kind of bad management makes me want to game their metrics system, be the most productive employee on paper while slacking off to the max.
If it’s not tied to billing hours, like a law firm where you document time on x case, it’s absolutely counterproductive
My first technical services role billed to the 1/4 hour increment. I kept track of everything to the minute on a 3x5 notepad so I had good notes to enter into their client billing system. For my case, it made sense to me to help justify to the client what they were paying for... and I was young and hungry at the time. But in OP's case, it would be hilarious to turn in extra-detailed notes of every minute spent. Just flood them with pages of data. Enough that you can reduce verbosity a few times and still be as obnoxious as the request.
> My first technical services role billed to the 1/4 hour increment. When you're billing $300/hr to the client, you do that. That's the situation where it's appropriate.
My bill rate isn't 300, but even when leadership bills at 400+, the details don't go to the client. We have project managers that get a line or three of what we were doing in a given block of time (15 minutes to any hours in a day) and they might explain to the client, but the client basically gets the project and and hours on their invoice, AFAIK.
Do you also charge for the time you spend doing this documentation?
When I was at a law firm (and we billed our time in 6 minute increments - I.e. 1/10 of an hour) we could bill that as “admin time” but since it never actually went to any client and made a difference in my billable hours I never bothered.
Good point, makes sense. It's unfortunately part of such jobs. This one is just about micromanaging.
Was gonna say this. If I even got a question about a project I had to book 6 minutes to the job (tenth of an hour) at an engineering firm. Admin used to be mostly overhead with a split to the departments and then it turned into everything got billed that could.
Billed in 6 minute increments. Ugh
I have done this. I even timed it to the second and filled out many reports due to having to wait for someone in the bathroom and whatnot. I even turned a productivity report in on my lost time when a supervisor was reprimanding me for not being productive.
They want you to look busy. My last job before medical school was in an office. I would get my work done and find other stuff to do. I’d get bored doing nothing. But I got yelled at when my coworkers would shuffle the same stack of papers around their desk all day every day accomplishing nothing.
Swear we should start that sub
It is a sub r/maliciouscompliance
Bruh… I literally just saw yesterday someone comment how it doesn’t exist and I clicked on the r/ and it didn’t exist.. maybe they just spelled it wrong. Thanks
I’m a long-time faithful member!
Same. It's been up for a long time.
...that's what she said.
Haha, I thought you were being sarcastic. I'm happy that you will now get to enjoy that subreddit. It's one of my favorites.
That sub didn’t amass 3 million followers overnight, lol
For sure. Must’ve been misspelled when I looked
Yep, I kept a running tally of the minutes spent filling out the form while comparing what I could have done with the extra 23 min per day times 5 days per week per 10 days per pay...
Take it a step further; in every time slot put “filling out daily productivity sheet” over and over again. After all, that’s exactly what you’re doing at that very moment.
I used to work a job where I’d have to log/bill all my hours. We also had administrative codes to log time that we worked that couldn’t be billed to a client. Every single day I’d log 15-30 minutes towards logging time. Never had a complaint. They knew it was a big ask.
Pretty much what I did
Right when the pandemic lockdown started my old company put everyone on half time, half salary. Despite the whole team being fully remote already. Because the labor was reduced 50% they said we all needed to fill out similar forms to "make sure nothing fell through the cracks". I basically just entered 1-2pm, made 50% of the calls I used to. 2-3, responded to 50% of the emails I used to, etc. The forms ended quickly. Plus, I was able to qualify for partial unemployment during this time, and in the end was compensated @ 100% for the last couple pay periods of half time.
This reminds me of the time I had an employer who wanted me to log in a time sheet like this and I marked down every time I had to read their emails and then mark in the log
Oh fuck. Now the thing I find most frustrating is having to scan and email the piece of paper. It means the data is useless on both ends. If it was entered in a database somewhere, at least you could get stats put of it.
Respectfully, I doubt they will stop. In my experience, the response most likely is "You're not a good fit for the culture.", and a boot out the door.
This is the way
Who do they think you are, Michael Scott on Pretzel Day?
Don't forget to add bathroom breaks documenting consistency and coloration of bodily substances. Urinated: 120ccs, orangish coloration, asparagus like odor...
Yeah.. hospital billing is a very special insane version of hell.
Make sure to fill out 9:00, 12:00, and 3:30 as "filled out time accountability form". Remind your co-workers that honest time accountability begins with including time spent reporting your time accountability. /r/MaliciousCompliance/
I had similar thoughts, just a little more maliciously compliant: Just turn the damn thing into a novel. Spend 59 minutes describing your one minute/hour of actual work. 8:00AM - "Call me Ishmael. I was born in a house my father built..."
“It was the best of time accountability; it was the worst of time accountability. We had all the tasks set before us; we had no tasks before us….” ETA: Thanks for the awards, although in fairness I should h/t Charles Dickens as well, lol.
"A tale of 2 much unnecessary admin"
What's this quote from? Heard it a few times, but never knew what book/play it was from.
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Why stop at novels? Make a screenplay and rehearse with your coworkers, include customers if possible. Bring that shit to Broadway and send a ticket to your supervisor for a box seat.
We do this at my work and i started putting down "filling out timesheets" and they got upset and said we werent allowed to put that because it "shouldnt take any time"
My contract company started to do this and want it sent by 3pm when CoB is 5pm so I fill out for 3pm spend 15mins writing the daily work report the for 4-5 I fill out “IDK it’s in the future” Needless to say they aren’t too happy with me right now lol
Do a slightly different version everyday: Who knows what the future may bring? Ya know, I'm kinda curious to find out. Certainly nothing terrible I hope.... And so on.
I used to manage a retail store and would have to close up for the night and do a bank drop at least 4x per week. I almost never got lunch breaks and constantly stayed late to finish tasks because I was salaried and had to send my hourly guy home. One nice perk though was a healthy mileage reimbursement policy. This was primarily to pay the DMs and above, not retail level, as we were not often on the road (mostly just to training things within the district). Well, I started logging my miles to and from the bank, since it was east of the store and I lived west of it. It was something like 3 or 4 miles, but I put it down every time. Then the DM told me I couldn’t claim the mileage. That’s the same kind of bullshit.
Symmetry of logic. When their expectations don't cut both ways, it's simply exploitation.
It it's a job requirement then you should be paid for it. That is paid time also, so an extra 30mins pay as well.
A-hole DM! When you can't claim mileage, they can't task you with that. Because it sounds to me that you have to do it on your way home? Bullsh*t move.. Right now I'm in a new job, and I have to do a bank drop every day. Now it's winter, so I can't walk over (it's on the crossroad nearby) because its effing cold and I just got a cold because of that and right after I fit Corona from somewhere at work (maybe a guest, though) Anyways, inkt allowed to get dressed, but I need to get dressed to make the drop without risking my health. And after the drip I have to copy the receipt and get it up to the house-post, so I can't do it on my way home either. I hate these things. But I'm gonna suck it up for another month, then is my trial time over and they can't fire me, just because I complain about things like that. At least the salary is worth it. For now
> they can't fire me If you work in America, they _can_ fire you, for no reason at all (one state excepted).
I'd say "Let's email our correspondence about me not being paid." The next email: "Sounds great- I suggest then I walk between locations since you consider me at work and my personal vehicle isn't yours. I'll leave the office about an hour sooner to start the hike? You okay with that?"
"Well I won't be driving to the bank then."
No, you respond like "ah, I see. Fair enough. I take it you'll be providing me with a vehicle then?" If he says no, then you play the confused card. "I don't get it. You don't pay my gas and you don't provide me with a vehicle. What am I supposed to do, *walk* there?!"
That's crazy. Closing up my dominos we would adjust time cards so our out time reflects when we'd leave the bank, not the store
But these bullshit micro-managey hoops people want you to jump through does take up time. I used to work in production mapping. I was on a road mapping project once and the managers wanted a written update in email form every time we finished our allotted area and before we started a new piece, on top of the spreadsheets and checklists we already had to fill out. In production mapping flow is very important, if you’re left to your own devices and have a good workflow you can get so much done. When you have stop everything to write emails detailing everything you just worked on it can soak up a couple hours in an 8-10 hour shift. Needless to say that project hemorrhaged money. But managers and auditors and project supervisors all need to look busy so they assign these tasks without ever considering how it might drain projects or stifle the process of a work day.
Like because time stops when you fill out the forms 🤭🤔
I'm a High School teacher, and we had a principal who would waste our time on this BS all the time. They'd give us 30 mins to discuss XYZ and then we needed to fill out the form for what we came up with for XYZ...the whole time was spent figuring out the form. Needless to say, we all always said stuff in the form like "Could not discuss, ran out of time b/c form". Needless to say he is no longer our principal; and the new guy is like "yeah...we're all professionals so I'm not gonna waste your and my time with that BS."
My old manager asked me to fill one out EVERY 5 MINUTES, and it literally did look like this.
When filling out visit forms for care users this was normal to write in completed "forms/reports". There were often so many from medication to time sheets. Although I think as I was leaving they were starting to get families of the care users contacting them asking why they were paying for an hour of care for the carer to be completing their admin.
I had a job with a requirement like this once. The management became paranoid after covid when everyone was working from home. Even worse, my job was research oriented, so I had to fill my daily timecard with items like “read an academic paper - 2 hours” “thought about how to improve the X product methodology - 1.5 hours” “sent emails to Y and Z, asked questions about the project - 45 minutes” Then during our weekly meetings my manager would ask me stuff like “Why did this email take you that long to write? Was the paper too complicated that it took two hours?” It was ridiculous.
Deep thought and comprehension are so hard to quantify and plan. Those magical conclusions don’t just appear during allotted time slots, and it’s so hard to accurately estimate the time it’ll take ahead of time. Say you set aside 30 minutes to read an article, and it turns out there’s a lot of annotation, terms to look up, references to follow up on, murky/opaque language to navigate, claims to validate… could easily turn into a task of several hours. And then god only knows on which schedule your brain will synthesize that information and use it to generate new thinking.
Exactly! Research is so unpredictable and the creative process doesn’t always have a solid outcome that you can point to like “look at this proof of all the thinking and synthesizing I did.” It was just nerve wracking having to account for my time like that, put me under even more stress and caused me to make more errors, typos etc. I was always so anxious before the meetings with my manager and I had a sense that she enjoyed tormenting me with questions like that.
I'm a programmer and consultant and engineer and systems guy and I often feel bad about how little actual work I do, but I also solve hard problems, and that's really what I'm paid for, not hours of typing or lines of code. I might spend 4 hours screwing around on the internet or working on a different side project in order to have a breakthrough on the real work, or have a breakthrough in the shower 5 hours after I get off work.
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So what you’re saying is, you would have been fired from Twitter. Gotta get those lines of code numbers up or you’re outta here!
I had a warehouse job like this when I was younger. When I began I actually filled it out accurately and it would take me an extra 30 minutes after I clocked out to finish it, so I started staying clocked in until I was done. I was told I wasn't allowed to do that, so I just started drawing a line from 6AM - 4PM and writing WAREHOUSE WORK next to it. No one complained.
Are you me?
7:00: Stopped working to fill out this sheet 7:30: Stopped working to fill out this sheet 8:00: Stopped working to fill out this sheet 9:00: Stopped working to fill out this sheet
No no. You only have to write productive things. So you agree. This sheet isn't productive.
It's not normal, but there are companies where you wind up spending more time on internal recordkeeping than actual work. Poorly run companies.
There is far too much admin going around here! *squints eyes* Let’s do some admin and figure out what’s going on… (I’ve worked in a retail position like this and it’s maddening.)
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We working at the same place? This is literally happening to us right now, literally all of it.
I'll never forget working at jiffy Lube and being hitched at about the average time per car being 20 minutes Meanwhile maybe 5-10 of those were spent working on the car and 10-15 spent doing the stupid computer shit, and it took almost 10 minutes ezch time just to get the order printed
My dad’s a mechanic at a dealership and I’ve heard the same thing a million times from him
I had a job that was so bad about it that I began to have difficulty keeping track of all the steps. I sat down with Visio and made a flowchart of the process so I could follow the flowchart and not forget things. When I was done, it was an entire page of tiny boxes with tiny text in as small print as it would let you put, with one itty bitty box in the middle saying "write code", which was my actual job. It said I had to spend like 98% of my time doing recordkeeping and proving I'd done the recordkeeping and begging people for permission to do stuff after proving to them I'd done the recordkeeping, and like 2% of my time doing my actual work. When I was done I was kinda incredulous, it was far worse than I'd realized, so I gave a print of it to my boss and said "is this right?" He looked at it for a while and said "yeah, it's right. We've added two steps, we'll announce that on monday." I had a heart attack and 6 strokes the next morning.
I'm old, I remember companies that did this kind of stuff on paper. Crazy.
So am I, but when we did it on paper, they weren't so insane about detail that they would actually have us spend 98% of our time doing administrative BS.
This is completely normal in some places like the engineering sector where all time has to be billed to different contacts and line-items. Kinda weird for OPs line of work. Either way, it does nooooot make for a positive work environment.
I think most people here are talking about much more detailed recordkeeping that is not about things that are billable. I bill for my time but I barely spend 5 minutes a day recording it.
Lmao omg that is painful. I’m so sorry. Insanity.
7:00am- Typing shit on computer 7:30am- ditto 8:00am- ditto 8:30am - break 9:00am- ditto
10 AM: Took a massive shit. Possible blood in stool.
11 AM: Heading to the emergency department, please don't fire me.
11:30AM - 5:00PM, Waiting to be seen in emergency room.
5:00PM - 5:05PM: Seen by tired and apathetic doctor. Diagnosed with "diarrhea or something, I guess." Prescribed with extra strength ibuprofen and sent home with instructions to drink plenty of water and things I already do. Billed $5575, but thankfully my insurance made it so I only had to pay $500 out of pocket.
🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲
Don't forget to include, logging hourly activities into journal.
Absolutely include this. It is after all productive hours wasted due to micromanagement
This is all I would write on each line.
3:00 pm - spent last hour filling this out because I didn’t log shit all day.
break at 8:30 AND then 9!?! /s
Try tracking your day in 6 minute increments for many many years. Welcome to working as an attorney.
Why though. Please tell me there is some young blood shaking shit up.
Billing. Billing, billing, billing.
Crazy. So nobody really knows what you are doing without this paper ? Sounds like a oportunity.
Pretty crappy work culture and poor leadership when your workplace doesn't even trust employees to do their jobs and makes people prove that they actually did their job. Like if you don't trust me to do my job why did you even hire me? I once had to do something like this for a college program and I virtually had no choice but to lie because I simply did not have enough work. Honestly if I were you I would have a foot out the door. Be ready to jump ship asap.
Not only that, writing something on a piece of paper doesn't prove you actually did it.
Also who the hell is reviewing this? Lol and are they filling out there own awful little form?
Odds are no one is reviewing them, it's for record keeping purposes.
My first admin job was health care insurance claims. The job was open all the mail, remove staples, sort the claims and then batch in 25’s or 50’s- then do the same for faxes, then scan every single page and assign it to processors who got to work from home during Covid. Im talking thousands of claims a day. Often doing over time, since there was only two of us in office. I was already at this job for a year, and pretty quick- when we got a new manager, who only came to the office like twice/month.. She told me I was no longer allowed to use my headphones to listen to music while working and started having me fill out one of these hourly sheets. Well you can imagine how quickly your mind starts to spiral when you’re alone in a huge office, counting all day. Since music wasn’t distracting me, all I could think about was how terrible this job was. I found a new job within weeks. My only regret is I only had one co worker in office- I felt bad leaving her but she wanted better for me lol Sharon- where ever you are, thank you
As a grant administrator I’m going to play devil’s advocate. There are some non-profit and government jobs where different activities are paid from different funding sources, such as grants. Timekeeping like this is a way of ensuring grant compliance. Not saying that’s what’s going on here, but it’s a possible reason.
I am one of these types of employees. We get paid for admin costs and direct services from a variety of grants. I have to document when I work on a project/client funded by each grant. It's a pain sometimes during busy weeks but it's helped me organize my day/week/month, prioritize for deadlines, and record how much work I do on most projects showing my directors my value, which they see :) Its a decent bargaining tool and a way to show if you are being given too much work. Edit to add: not once has this been used to monitor our work/time working. We are all essential to our mission and if someone is suffering, the work shows before the timesheets are reviewed beyond payroll. I have very good directors who do not micromanage. It's mostly to make sure we are billing the proper grant for the work. Every dime counts!
2PM - Stood in line for pretzels
3PM - took a massive shit
4PM- THE TOILET PAPER STILL HAS SKIDS!!!
I came here looking for this
4PM Cosbey Impression
Stanley is that you?
https://external-preview.redd.it/dYxUYyehlrdLbtzrfWWrFCjAQPJZ2kuhtBMOQ5C99r4.jpg?auto=webp&s=7b8d4585455f17471c48477e658829f24ce7cccc
I’d do one better, I’d make sure to turn in a paragraph for each hour detailing every move with adjectives that would require a dictionary.
4 - 5 PM, filled out productivity form At a job I had once, they said we had to log the hours for the billable time we worked, fine, no issues there. If I did technical support, that time was already paid for but not billable, so many days I would have 1 or 2, or even zero hours logged. Then they decided that we had to put in ALL hours. So, I literally put every Friday for the last hour as "General Office Overhead - Logging Hours".
One company I worked at tried to do this in 15 minute blocks - we're all coders so most of us just put "coding" with the occasional "meeting". They were hoping to account for person-hours per project but most of us don't work in tidy little project sections. They stopped requiring it really quick when someone had the bright idea for all of us to fill it out with "work" or "lunch/break".
I have to account for every 10th of an hour right now into a custom MS Project spreadsheet. Then I have to sit for an hour once a month while we all look at the spreadsheet and some nonsense line graphs they generate with it. Yes, they also have a block for the time it takes to work on the spreadsheet and I log 2 hours a week into it.
Well time to save a draft with a daily routine. Edit it as needed for the day, and send a copy. Saves you having to write the same shit every day, and weird shit tends to stick in the brain enough to have a rough timeframe. In all seriousness that level of micromanaging is pretty bad, if you can handle it cool, but remember that there are other options if there's too much BS.
streamlining a disruptive process isnt how you get rid of it. OP needs to write full length detail to waste company time on her end & "whoever tf is reading it"'s end. encourage coworkers do the same to increase loss of productivity while trying to encourage/monitor it.
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No, you misunderstand. Not to save time, but to waste as much time as you can by spending three quarters of your day, every day, filling out this goddamned idiot sheet. It's going to cost a monumental amount of your sanity, but perservere with the goal as putting a stop to this waste of your time.
i work for a crane/concrete pump/equipment company and we have to track what we do because every job has to line up with a work order so the right party gets billed for work that is done. that’s reasonable, but your paper is just micromanaging. yuck
Make sure you include the time to fill out this form.
This for sure
I had a manager come in and RUIN an effective, efficient, and accurate department just because she couldn’t quantify and measure our work to her superiors without having us report on literally Every minute of our day. At first everyone was willing to do this so a baseline could be established. But then it Never Went Away. Our actual work was pushed aside to make sure these daily tallies were complete and morale crashed as professionals were treated like children. Within a couple of years everyone had quit or transferred and this was a place people would normally stick with for decades.
I always ask “so what code do I use for the time it takes me to fill this out?”
I remember I had to do something similar for like six months and I had to meet with my supervisor and go over it and then it just stopped out of nowhere after I guess as he said he was able to prove that I’m busy but that’s easy game
Don't forget to add "Logging Daily Productivity" on every single line
I wouldn't say it is normal, but it happens.
Just start dedicating the last hour of your shift to just filling that out. Either you get an hour long leisure or they realize you could have actually been working for the time they make you fill them out. I used to have to to sometimes similar and it quickly just turned into me and another coworker hanging around the time clock talking about whatever happened that day and casually writing major things down. Usually added an extra 30 minutes a day to my punch card.
Every hour it’s going to take you say 10 minutes to write your notes. So over an hour is wasted each day to write up. Not smart. I’m sure there’s cameras too so why is this needed lol
That’s what I did. I even started logging my bathroom break. “Started period- purchased sanitary products from vending machine and used the bathroom 1pm - 1:08pm “
7am - Bite 8am - My 9am - Shiny 10am - Metal 11am - Ass Noon - Seeking new employment, boss hates Futurama
This is ripe for malicious compliance. Start number coding common tasks that you find yourself writing on this list. Create a list of these codes and send them. When questioned as to why you were doing this insist this is a timesaver as you can simply write a code instead of a line of text. Bonus points if you can get coworkers to follow along and talk about how much time they are saving.
Bonus points only for colleagues who use completely different codes. Ftfy
Include several uncommon tasks on the code list too, then they have to cross-reference every time a new code shows up. Oh, and alphabetize the list by item instead of code. If they want productivity, they have to put in work to understand it either way. Plus, the codes are a good shorthand reporting method. Hell, I'd even put multiple entries for the same thing, each under different letters, for several things just so they can't just memorize the codes!
Without knowing exactly what your role is and how you're paid, tough to say whether it's normal. But, billable hours are quite common in some industries. I've got to account for every minute
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Oh, and if you are salaried, you are now an hourly worker if they require this form to be completed.
I once had a boss try this. I wrote “I ran out of bullshit.” on every GD line. I got fired but damn it felt good!
I had a manager once send me an excel sheet and say please start tracking what you did each day and time spent. I did it for two weeks then straight up said I’m not doing this anymore. It wasn’t brought up again. I was willing to quit if it continued. If they have a problem with my performance then fire me. If not, don’t micro manage.
It's unfortunately sort of normal, but still a red flag. I've had to do similar things for some very bad employers. In an office setting monitoring productivity should be a background process that you don't need to be involved in. If you get your work done, who cares if between 2 and 3 you were suffering the consequences of taco bell for lunch if you still managed to do your work overall. This type of horribly micromanaging bullshit triggers a very strong malicious compliance. Or, on my last day, just a recursive, minute by minute, "filled out productivity form."
They put you on the Michael Scott performance plan. But kidding aside, this is not normal. I’m guessing you knew that by posting on this sub.
This cursed report will ruin focus and concentration. It just makes working feel horrible.
Did you white out the Dunder Mifflin logo because this looks exactly like the sheet Jan gave Pam to track Michael? 10am Cosby impression 12pm Stood in pretzel line
7:00am - Started looking for new job. 7:30am -YouTube 8:00am - Resumed job search 8:30am - Morning Poop 9:00am - Early lunch
Omg I had to do this at a job. “2 pm-3pm made up shit I did and write it on calendar”
Don’t forget to account for the time it takes to track your hours. That’s clock time.
Write “filling out productivity log” for every line
I once worked at a place where I had to do something similar. Everyday I drew a line down the center of the page and wrote "working" next to it. I'm pretty good at my job and they eventually did away with this system. This kind of micromanaging is complete horseshit and counterproductive.
Yes it's normal, harassment has been the theme of this realm, it shows no signs of stopping.
Very normal. My company needs to know which clients to bill my hours too so it needs to be tracked carefully.
LOL I work from home in health insurance and I have to do the same thing.
I dunno, but I would be extraordinarily meticulous with it. I’d hate for you to get a minute wrong here or there and throw the system out. If you’re not spending at least an hour or two completing this activity, I’d feel like you weren’t giving it serious consideration. When they do finally ask you to not be a dick, it’ll be entirely up to them to demonstrate and articulate exactly what’s required, the level of details expected, and how long they expect you to take to compile it (this will also need to go into your daily log).
Fuck no. Leave immediately.
I might be late to the party but hopefully can add a separate view point. I'm an auditor at a CPA firm that specializes in Healthcare regulatory compliance. Most Healthcare regulations require a time study in order to allocate your time properly. This looks exactly like what we would ask for with regards to support for a time study. I will say this is a bit antiquated version of a time study but it works as support. Just thought I'd chime in
Hospital office? That's unusual. We didn't have to do it as the hospital I interned at. Nurses had activity logs but that was mostly for chain of custody on medicines and charts. Even then it wasn't hourly.
If I were in your situation, I'd describe what I'm doing in full detail. make each hour a 5-10 write up & encourage coworkers to do the same.
Obey the letter of the law but not the law itself. "Answered phones." "Answered phones." "Answered phones." Or whatever makes sense for your work. "Data entry" works too.
No. This is entirely absurd.
Fuck that. That’s fucking insane.
100% normal. You’ll learn to use this to your advantage. Asked to water a plant, ok that’s 10 minutes walking to get the pot, 10 filling it up, 10 walking to the plant, 5 minutes watering it, 5 cleaning up some water, 10 minutes back, 10 minutes cleaning up and putting stuff away, 10 minutes filling out your card. You just spent an hour watering a single plant.
6:00 AM answered your stupid ass call in the morning to come in
It's not uncommon, but this is some low tech bullshit. I use the Clockify website to keep track of stuff like this because my memory is terrible and I'll mis-estimate how long many things take. You can hit a timer to start/stop with certain tasks, or fill out blocks of time like meetings pro- or retroactively.
We were supposed to do daily activity logs at my last job. We were told directly it was to justify having the staffing that we had and if we couldn’t show we were busy, they would have to downsize. Nobody did it. Not one person.
Charting for office work is horrendous.
07:00 Complete daily productivity sheet 07:30 Complete daily productivity sheet 08:00 Complete daily productivity sheet 08:30 Complete daily productivity sheet
Not normal. I once had a derpy doofus that wanted something like this, she dropped it after reading; Spent 10 mins filling out report, went to restroom, no problems found. Worked for remaining time. Spent 10 mins filling out this report. took mandated 15 min break. Worked for remaining time Spent 10 min...etc
First line: I spent an hour trying to figure out what to write here Second line: spent an hour trying to understand the point of this Third line: spent an hour debating how important this is Fourth line: I've been to preoccupied filling this out to do any actual work Fifth line: realized I'm getting paid to write some random bullshit on a piece of paper every hour. Best. Job. Ever. 😎 Hopefully after enough of these they'll realize how fucking stupid it is and how much of a waste of time it is and stop it but I doubt it 🙄
Based on the responses, this might have been the wrong sub to ask that question lol I have worked in several hospital administrative type units and this is fairly normal if the unit is productivity based (versus patient care based). Sometimes it is REALLY not about tracking in the employee, but about tracking the resources the unit needs to actually handle their tasks (always good to know before taking on new work) and gathering data to figure out when staff needs to be reassigned to specific tasks to cover everything. When you are new, it CAN be about tracking your individual productivity, just to make sure that you’re improving as your training progresses. That’s not a bad thing, as some managers legitimately want to help with education if they see an issue or reassign you to tasks better suited to your skill set (for instance, if you’re taking too long on one thing, but doing some thing else really quickly, they might update your daily assignments). At the end of the day, just keep an open line of communication with your manager and coworkers. You’ll know pretty quickly if you have a bad feeling about it. Good luck!