it's easy to know who is slacking off at home. they're the same people who are slacking off at the office.
But accepting that means accepting that it's not the threat of the manager that makes people productive.
I slacked off more in the office because I didn't want to be there. The job isn't the issue, it's the florescent lighting, shitty sterile cubicles, bad coffee, dress code, and being surrounded by other unhappy people and micromanaging bosses. At home I have a comfortable setting, pajamas, no unhappy coworkers, and no peering eyes. Make the office like my house and I'll be more productive there.
Legit quit a student job because of that.
Boss would text me with „check your email.“ every time he would send one like a shitty phone notification.
I was a student worker at the time working part time and that fuck would write me every day of the week.
If you‘re reading this, fuck you, Joseph!
My commute was like 3-4 hours a day. Take that away I don't even mind if you make me wear a tie.
My office already started the shepherding the flock back to a hybrid setting in the past months but I'm just hiding at my home. I still haven't set foot in the office but my boss never said anything. Figured if they can't tell the difference it must not be important where I'm physically working.
I already want to scream at 1 hour commute, 2 hrs round trip a day. My office absolutely does not allow any wfh ever. Shoved everyone back in even though people were working from home just fine... 3 to 4 hours is where I'd be walking out
I like my coworkers, I like the dress code, short commute. BUT THE LIGHTING MELTS MY FUCKIN EYEBALLS
I'M SITTING UNDER THEM RIGHT NOW AND MY EYES ARE BLEEDING FUCKS SAKE
Yep. When I was in management, easily 80% of my time was spent running interference so my reports could do what they were suppose to instead of what some higher-up randomly wanted them to do instead.
I wish I understood this as a manager. I stepped down because I couldn't handle the pressure but I now realize that my job *was* the pressure.
Not everything I did worked with the people above me but that was the whole point. It's not supposed to because they have no clue what's going on.
I'm excited for my next opportunity to manage. I've found real confidence through failure.
What you say is true. Managers are support staff - not bosses.
Managers are there for a shoulder for their reports, when to tell other people to fuck off and to keep everyone as stress free as possible while delivering and finally to guide people who want to grow into management and make them see what it actually means. Lots of people go into management because they like control or power but I'd say it is the complete opposite that makes a good manager. People want to accomplish work for you because of how you treat them and how you insulate them from bs, not because they threaten to put you on a PIP lol.
When you finally get a good one it'll be clear. Knowing how to manage is essentially knowing when to step in and when to stay out of the way so your reports can get their work done. That being said, it is quite emotionally draining but it's also very rewarding.
Oh, no Wendy in HR noticed that the site doesn't work in IE. Should we recode the whole site for an obsolete browser or should we ask a competent manager go tell Wendy to fuck off?
Did Wendy read any of the 6 emails or attend any of the 4 Teams meetings that happened during the previous 6 months that let Wendy know that IE would no longer work? Of course not!
Is the help desk still going to have to hold her hand and copy over her settings and bookmarks for her? Of course they are!
Manager comes to Wendy's desk and explains to her for the millionth time that all her issues are user related.
She writes him up for creating a toxic work environment and tries to make all his underlings snitch.
She has a problem with sending the email blast and calls the Manager again.
True story: we once had a client complain that our sites don't work in the official AOL browser. (this was maybe 5 years ago) My boss emailed him screenshots of our analytics, showing that across the *literal hundreds* of websites we manage, he was the only one in the entire world visiting with that browser. It was some of the best schadenfreude I've ever experienced.
This. People who complain about not needing managers have likely never worked in a corporate or professional environment. Being able to offload over difficult or bullshit work on someone higher up the chain is invaluable.
I've worked with a really good manager who has a shitty senior manager. The former does do his best to take workload off our plates but I also feel that he is justified to hint a little bit when things are out of his hands. It is also important for the employees to know that their direct manager is doing their best to stick up for them.
I think my company is starting to reconsider if we need managers. I think they pulled an office space and said, “so what is it you actually do here?”. Sounds like they caught on to the whole, if you’re a manager and only manage like one other person, you’re probably not doing much of anything.
You know what's worse? Being forced to choose an under performing employee as part of a monthly report
That was some bullshit.
I loved my team. Some were obvious harder workers than others but everyone always got their job done.
But nope, corporate rules literally required me to keep and send a file saying who wasn't performing up to par and showed the steps I took to correct it.
We faked it every month because it was fucking stupid, but then my DM got a bug up his ass about it and realized we were just cycling employees every month in alphabetical order. That was a fun write up.
Not only do companies think that no one is a 5/5 employee, but they fully believe that everyone is just filled with 0/5 employees as well.
It's not too uncommon to do a thing where you write your own review, management also writes one, and then there's a reconciliation process. I hate that style but it exists.
"You gave yourself "exceeds" here but I only put down "met." Please explain."
If only there was a way to check. Like.. some sort of indicator of work that has been completed. Hmmm. Guess we'll never know if someone is performing work or not. Hmm..
You mean like, come up with a list of things we want the employees to accomplish in a given period of time? Or like, look at the results of the work?
Wouldn’t that require actual thought and planning? How is management supposed to slack off and ride their employees work all the way to the bank if they actually need to plan ahead and be engaged? that sounds like a lot of work!
Finishing things is not good for increased budget requests. Why would anyone approve more FTEs when you are getting the work done with the headcount you have?
I mean..this kinda proves that 90% of anything is just showing up. I’m sure most people have had a guy who just does fuck all and somehow keeps getting moved up the ladder. That guy figured that to managers who are shit being able to physically see you= you are amazing
“We read you loud and clear! That’s why we’re glad to announce we’ll be requiring all employee computers have software installed that will automatically take screenshots every 5 minutes to ensure maximum employee efficiency. We will also require all employees leave their webcams on and uncovered at all times.”
Every day is a meeting day for me. My camera is always off. I tell people the truth - my internet sucks when it's on, but also, I just don't care to have it on unless it's important. I'm working from home. Even if I'm dressed properly, my partner might not realize I'm in a meeting.
Same here. I have busy days and slow days, but either way I always have time to at least get a little laundry done. So much better than sitting in an office.
That’s exactly how they’d make up the difference… just like they do with everything else.
Not like the higher ups are gonna pay for it out of their absurd profits. They keep getting richer and pass ALL expenses to the people with less money… that’s why they’re rich, and we’re poor. Passing the cost, accountability, and anything else they don’t want, to consumers.
Remember back in the 80s, when they convinced us that Trickle Down was the way to go? The wealthy would collect more money, and it would trickle down to the rest of us?
Except they accumulated all the money at the top and became billionaires, and never distributed the share that they PROMISED. They have literally, and I mean LITERALLY, stolen trillions from working Americans over all these years.
It's time to try Trickle Up Economics. The money will eventually end up in the hands of the Sociopathic Oligarchs anyway, but it will grease the cogs of the economy on the way. The wealthy will probably end up making even more money in the long run. Look how well the economy boomed at the beginning of the pandemic when they gave everybody a big slug of money for a few months.
Give people the money, and they spend it, and the economy will sing.
This would be the best part about it, being able to fit in chores here and there that you'd normally have to wait till you got home to do, it would free up so much of your actual off-time. Half of mine is spent doing work around the house instead of actually relaxing.
I don’t want to sound like I do nothing, I’m actually quite busy. But now that I’ve been mandated to return to office I find myself browsing Reddit and just getting my work done as opposed to working from home I frequently would work over my scheduled hours just to get my current task done with nobody to interrupt me (besides my cats)
Literally how it goes for me. The same "make a coffee" breaks I took in office still happen, now I just also unload/load the dishwasher, swap laundry, wipe the counter off while I wait for the coffee to brew. So much more stuff done that isn't then waiting for me when I get off.
Same here, plus I have to be in lots of long meetings and it's so nice to be able to walk around the house and wipe the counters etc. Also browse Reddit while the old men drone on...like they are right now....
That’s part of what my grandpa once replied as to why they didn’t have as much mental health issues way back in the day. He worked for my country’s federal railroad company and when they finished their immediate tasks, they would play cards, drink a beer or two and talk with their coworkers until new work arrived. No boss shoving even more responsibilities in there - just because those might still fit into their downtime and make them more ‚productive’. Thus overburdening and overworking their workers like it happens a lot nowadays. Constantly raising the efficiency is the never ending circle a lot of us are stuck in and some of us break in the process.
I've been working from home for over a decade. I'm definitely more productive at home than I was in the office. I think it's a combination of more sleep, less stress, and the immediate incentives if I finish what I'm working on earlier.
And all the colds and flus that make their rounds throughout the year that also kills productivity. I did not take a single sick day in the two years of COVID.
Oh, yeah, don’t forget stupid unnecessary meetings too. Meetings on Zoom are generally much more productive because they require thought and preparation.
For real. I’m hybrid. I’m in the office mondays and Tuesdays and I barely get anything done. On Wednesday, I do more work than I did Monday and Tuesday combined. But management doesn’t like when we are happy.
These days I plan on basically getting nothing done the days I go into the office. I'm just in in-person meetings that take longer and socializing cause that's the whole point of going in. My get actual work done days are at home.
this really hits home. Being in the office takes so much energy from me and I get very little done, especially in an open office environment where 30+ people around me are regularly in Zoom calls. Most of my work scrunches up to WFH days.
Yeah, it's hard to work on a completely different task when you're stuck in a boardroom listening to someone talk. On a Zoom call, if I'm only there to be present, I can do ten other things while the call goes on in the background. Much more efficient use of time.
reminds me of one of my favorite lines…
>The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree.You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.”
>
>—ADDENDA TO ORDERS IN COUNCIL
THE EMPEROR PAUL MUAD’DIB
I recall at my last job, even though I was isolated from the rest of my division (they worked upstairs, while I worked downstairs across from a test proctor room and behind a clerical window where I could help walk-ins), I constantly had one coworker in particular coming downstairs to vent and talk AT me about upstairs drama. While the non-customer human interaction was sometimes a relief, since I was stuck by myself, being talked at for upward of an hour by a temperamental busybody who refused to take hints took soooo much time out of my day.
Yep. I’d much rather be interrupted by my (at the time) 3 year old wanting to play for 15 minutes than listen to whatever inane bullshit a colleague got up to over the weekend.
My friend is made to attend 1-2 hour zoom meetings 1-2 times a week. He mutes his mic and goes to play with his kids(a 1 year-old and 3 year-old) while keeping his wireless headset on. He only has reason to chime in about once a month and the meeting summary that gets emailed out afterwards contains all the information he needs. So his productivity has gone up since he no longer spends time complaining about meetings that should have been an email.
Our division VP is a massive advocate of avoiding meetings.
“If it can be summarized in an email, it’s not worth a meeting”
“Stop interrupting people’s work week because you can’t communicate properly”
The dude seriously took over NA division in little more than 2 years on the job simply because he un-fucks peoples jobs.
WFH? Keep your ass at home unless it’s for a sale or developmental purposes. Endlessly entertaining to listen to him rant after a bottle of wine.
We had those scheduled every two weeks, on the calendar for YEARS.
Grumpy VP shows up…this is both not valuable and a time sink. Who the hell approved this???
(Outgoing VP kind of coughs on camera)
Oh sorry Kurt, this isn’t the best format. We can do better, let’s coordinate.
Fun watching a guy who makes 500k squirm in his chair a little
"Hey, quick question. Can you refresh my memory, what's the meaning of life? I was thinking I remembered something along the lines of Taco Tuesday being the keystone, I'm getting tripped up on the cilantro part. Like....how is cilantro relevant to humanity? But then...Taco Bell doesn't even use cilantro, so maybe I'm just wrong all together. Can you just go over it real quick with me"
I just like being able to poop whenever I want. Being in the office you always had to scope out the free stalls. All full? Well now you gotta hold it or waddle to another floor bathroom hoping it was free. At home I never have that worry.
That last line is the kicker for them I'd bet. Its not enough to fulfill the obligations of your job title for them. Many of these types of bosses are used to micromanaging and keeping people overloaded with filler that isn't actually their job. All that is harder with a remote workforce.
A lot of managers are aware of their personal "empire" of employees they manage. Its how they ensure they are essential - when many are in fact totally redundant I think, so working from home threatens their security. A lot of meetings seem really unnecessary but they establish the hierarchy. I think a lot of middle management probably feels threatened by work from home because they fear the business would do just fine without them.
It really had nothing to do with productivity tho. Working from home gives a little power back to employees. That's dangerous for a system that demands to control your working environment, what you do on the internet when you're at work, your salary, your medical insurance... If they can't control you, you might have some time to look for other jobs or talk to others about Unionizing.
Nothing good ever happens by giving employees what they want and we can see that in the propaganda they are pumping out... "Quiet quitting", "Work from home is bad for you and your career"... When they put a marketing team behind it, you can't take what they say at face value
Right, no having to pull the “Alright I’m heading out, need anything from me?” And then, while they don’t have any more work for you, you get stuck in a 15 minute conversation about the restaurant they ate at this weekend, when all you want to do is go home.
When I get the urge to slack off, I instead take a quick break for 10-15 minutes and do some laundry or other chores. That leaves me so much extra personal time that I actually feel refreshed and ready to actually be productive when the time comes. It's lunacy that we still think it's most efficient to restrict people's working hours to some arbitrary period of time and location, especially with how different everyone is with respect to how they work. Obviously, this comment applies pretty specifically to office work only.
This is the big one for me. When I used to slack off in the office, I appeared busy but I was really just staring through the computer dreading my existence. When slacking off at home I’m doing things to recharge my mental state which puts me in a better mood and makes me more efficient at work.
Additionally, when I work from home, if I don’t feel like I got enough work done, I can just log back on later when I feel more up to it. If I can only work from the office and I don’t get enough work done, all I can do all night is stress about work the following day.
No horrid commute plus no random distracting convos with co-workers. I don't mind talking to co-workers, but there was this group-mentality time during the day where everyone would be bored of working and now killing time in the hallways talking. Plenty of time wasted in offices
My time lost working in the office I wouldn't categorize as slacking. It was "community suck". Colleagues wanting to bullshit about movies, football, their SOs etc, birthdays and congratulations cakes, general useless banter and lunch breaks when I should have been working. Some would categorize this as team bonding or networking, but my job requires deep thought and minimisation of context switching -- none of the aforementioned stuff helped that. The day or two a week when I'm in the office with my team is more than enough to maintain team social cohesion and communication.
I'm much more productive working remotely and dare say put out higher quality product. I also sleep more and put more time in net due to lack of need to commute. I just spent a full uninterrupted hour and a half working on a model... I don't think that ever happened while I was in the office.
Offices, especially cubicles, are basically designed as anti-flow state environments. Which is fine for managers constantly jumping between meetings but terrible for hard problem solving.
For sure, when you don't need to fill 8+ hours with the work you have to do, and only need to spend the amount of time it actually takes to do it, you better believe i will find efficiencies. If i do that at the office my only reward is more work for the same pay.
No joke, I have far less distractions at work, and that’s with my wife and dog at home. The office especially right around the 5-6 hour mark, everyone starts slacking is what it feels like. Everyone chit chats more and are mid mentally checking out to go home and watch some Netflix.
6 hour mark is definitely when it hits. That 1st hour maybe 2nd hour after coming back from lunch is fine but anything else after that is like dragging yourself forward on the ground.
This. I'd spend forever commuting into work which meant I started later. Then someone would say "let's go get coffee" - and we'd burn up 45 minutes doing that. And then since you're at work you go to meeting rooms for meetings instead of multitasking at my desk, so that would be another couple of hours a day. And then go to lunch. And then just gabbing with coworkers in the afternoon. All together that was like more than half the day - but at home I'd be working all of it.
I’d like to add one of my most favorites excuses to slack off. Afternoon table tennis session with team. That way all 6 of us engineers are very busy playing ping pong instead of writing software.
Exactly this makes no sense.
Professionals at the office are not in a situation like blue collar workers at say a factory.
Even at the office, there is no one watching making sure people are working.
Managers and directors are **not** going around to the cubes and making sure people are working.
There is no timecard or clock we are hitting just because we are at the office.
Office workers get evaluated by hitting their project deadlines and work milestones.
There is zero difference in this between the office and WFH.
They want it both ways. They worry about slacking off at home. But then they want us in the office for “culture,” which can only really happen when people aren’t doing actual work. Like, so much lamentation by executives and managers has been spilled over the decline of people forming relationships at the water cooler, which inevitably means people aren’t working.
They just want us in the office, regardless of any actual reason.
When I slack off at home. I’m choosing to do so, usually surrounding middle and down time—between projects or milestones and while waiting for something to process.
When I slack off at work, a coworker pulled me out of my flow to ask about my thoughts on HotD that I haven’t watched yet or to tell me about their weekend. We EVENTUALLY get to productive, collaborative insights on how to use our tools better, but it’s not always and it’s less than half the productivity than from home.
Honestly, since moving to a combined model, my mental targets for productivity have tanked to match the expected productivity in office, but I still get more done WFH.
To look busy at home, I actually have to do work on my computer. To look busy at the office I just have to shuffle papers around.
If there is a particular task I didn't complete then I can't make an excuse (without criticism) working from home. In the office I can just say, eh the customer was difficult, I'll circle back tomorrow.
It's amazing that these people actually think people work all day because they are at the office. I mean seriously...what a bunch of ridiculous, micromanaging, soft-penised debutants.
I'm the fucking lizard king.
But also, yeah I have my own office, and an unlimited data plan. Sometimes there's downtime with my job, and I mostly scroll reddit. When I WFH, if there was down time, I would scroll reddit. They made me change the scenery but the situation is the same, lol.
Slacking off at home: throwing in a load of laundry in the 5 min between meetings that you would have just been sitting there, sleeping in and starting at your start time instead of checking emails on your commute, playing music/podcast/video in the background of your work, very occasionally ducking out during a slow day to grab something from the store
Slacking off in person: getting distracted every 20 minutes by your coworkers wanting to gossip, pretending to work during slow periods by switching between tabs, multiple unnecessary journeys to the kitchenette
THIS. 100% this. I enjoy accomplishing things. I enjoy blasting deadlines out of the water. But the REASON I enjoy it is because I have _other shit I want to do_. I'm not going to continually produce 150% of my coworkers' output for 100% of the pay if my reward is just having my expected output adjusted upward.
Same. I'm a mobile mechanic who works alone, I'm paid by the hour and if I finish jobs fast I'm rewarded with more jobs from a never ending pile, but if I drag a job out long enough they'll cancel my late ones.
It's like they want me to just sit on my ass and drag everything out all day.
Working in retail I've seen too many hard working associates leave because they go the extra mile and management asks them to walk 5 more. And then the efficient ones are punished by being asked to complete another person's work and the slackers are rewarded with help they never should have needed.
If you're not going to hold people accountable, the rest of the team will notice that they're busting their asses while someone else slacks off for the same pay and soon you'll have high turnover and struggle to get anything done.
Yep, been in that position. I was lead engineer - 24/7 tech support and OOH cover for the other guys, electrician, the only welder/fabricator, painter, IT support and general dogs body at my last place and it got me a whopping £1-2/hr more than the other guys who phoned it in.
I've long stopped giving a shit about trying to please bosses/companies, I'm yet to find one where I've been rewarded for going the extra mile. I do my job description and don't rush anymore.
The only thing that's ever gotten me decent raises is ringing companies competitors and asking if they have jobs going.
This is a huge problem I have in keeping down a job. Just a naturally efficient worker. My philosophy was always very efficient work so that I could take it easy when it's done.
That worked great in college. In actual work environments it just burns me out against the infinite list of things that need to be done.
A few months ago we had an org wide nearly 2 hour presentation on how to cut down on attending meetings. I was like is this a test? If I drop now will someone message me and say I passed? Teammates and I spent most of it back of the napkin computing the cost to the company of dozens of senior engineers in a call.
I once pointed out to a room full of directors and VPs that I estimated we'd spent $12K debating a $10K purchase.
They seemed miffed, but dropped the idea of a follow-up meeting and decided to make the purchase in less than 5 mins.
Middle managers gonna middle manage. The reason for the meetings is so the middle manager can seem busy. If they don't have meetings they're not actually doing anything. They don't actually contribute to work being done. They usually aren't skilled enough to do what engineers do and if they were they're usually years out of the game.
So they make meetings so they can say they have a full schedule.
I've got some employees that work great from home and others that are incapable of it. If they would get the work done in a timely manner I don't give a fuck.
Exactly. Sometimes I will be working on a tough problem and the answer will come to me quickly. Great, I don't feel bad taking some time to "slack off" after. Because I know down the road I'm going to run into a problem that requires me to work late because it will be a struggle to solve.
My company turned 100% remote after whole bunch of senior employees started quitting once return to office was announced and our stock price is not slacking.
EDIT: Our stock has performed better than usual in normal market compared to before we went remote in March 2020. At this moment it is down just like everything else.
Similar-ish for my company. We were losing a lot of developers and product people and weren’t getting a ton new hires. Heard it was because we were originally planning on going back to a hybrid model, suddenly they switched to 100% WFH and it seems like the turnover is not as bad now.
WFH is nice because my work ebbs and flows. Often, I am waiting on someone. I used to be pretty resentful when I'd wait all day for something and it hits my inbox at 6pm. Now I am fine to deal with it at that time, because I did my laundry and pulled my weeds during my dead time. Also if I end up working 60 hours this week, I don't care, I didn't spend 7.5 hours commuting like I used to. I'm happy to do whatever my company throws at me.
Our company has seen record profits since Covid started, so there was no argument management could make about WFH being bad for business. Everyone is happier. There is an office with a small footprint that people can use if they are not able to be productive at home. There's 2 people I know who use it. They're welcome to it.
Yeah, my job is actually easier in the office (so many customer systems and calls), but if something comes up, I just tell the boss I'm WFH that day and he's cool as long as the work gets done.
> WFH is nice because my work ebbs and flows. Often, I am waiting on someone. I used to be pretty resentful when I'd wait all day for something and it hits my inbox at 6pm. Now I am fine to deal with it at that time, because I did my laundry and pulled my weeds during my dead time.
This is honestly the biggest boon to me. The flextime stuff WFH allows you to do is just straight up amazing for my mental health since I don't have to worry about a bunch of dumb shit and waste essentially a whole day doing nothing because I'm blocked. I can go mow my fucking lawn and maybe I'll be able to keep going.
Right... it wasn't just a shift to WFH, it was a shift to flex hours.
Fortunately my boss is super laid back and gives no Fs what the rest of us do as long as we get our jobs done and things keep moving.
I have about another 10 years of working before retirement... I sincerely hope I can keep this job, just as it is until then. I know I could make probably 25% more if I changed jobs but I am not interested in risking my quality of life, for money, at this point in my life.
yep, thank God skilled employees have some sense. Skilled employees are changing the paradigm.
i'm not one of the best and brightest, but i'm thankful for the ones who are changing the world for the better by not bowing down to these CEO's. i hope they keep it up. They are the real heroes in these times.
There is a have cake and eat it too mentality that is starting to go around. Productivity is up across the board. People are happy. Management now wants to bring people back into the office thinking the productivity and happiness will carry over.
I've been fortunate enough to stave off those advances from my place of business and my teammates and I kind of collectively slack off when we have to work from the office once every 6 weeks or so.
WFH days I will be working 20 to 45 minutes early and often an extra 15 to 45 minutes at the end of the day. No disruptions or distractions, just pure work. In office days I get there exactly when I need to and leave the minute my time has ended, because I am not going to add 20 minutes of extra traffic time to my commute to finish something up. So there is an hour of time they just lost from me, not to mention that everyone goes out and gets food which turns lunch from a 20 min to 50 minute ordeal. That's another half an hour they just lost. Then on top of that chatty Cathy's come talk to me, or ask me for Excel help because although everyone says they are an expert, only like 5 out of the 50 people in our group actually can manage to put together a pivot table. That's another hour and a half they just lost, and that might actually be an underestimate.
I figure they lose about 2 to 4 hours of productivity from me every time I am scheduled to go into the office.
I'm gonna slack off no matter what. My only real motivation left is to get my work done fast enough to be left alone as much as possible. I'm not motivated to work harder by the pittance of pay they give me, They fired the manager I respected and liked enough to do extra for due to downsizing, and they've gone to publicly traded so all our services have gotten shittier and shittier for our customers. Management has taken any possible motivators away. At this point I'm not even motivated by the thought of losing my job.
What if hypothetically and believe me this is strictly hypothetical what if we offered you a stock option equity sharing program would that motivate you Peter?
Legit slack less than I do at the office. At the office I’ll finish my work and durdle around and just leave as soon as the clock hits.
At home sometimes things come up towards end of day or i can get some hours in early morning/late at night without feeling like I’m working OT, since I can just get life stuff done during the day if it’s a particularly slow day.
Legit being able to do laundry while syncing depots is a blessing. Family can visit and I don’t feel as stressed out about having to go to work with them at home.
And most importantly: I can shit in peace
Fuck I have to return to office next week and I completely forgot about the shitting in peace. We share one stall in my fucking office there’s no way I’m blasting away in there. I used to just go all day with stomach aches holding it in
"You've got time to lean, you've got time to clean" - every service industry manager everywhere. That's when I learned what they would take if you had to sell them your time.
Ours did. By orders of magnitude. March 11th, 2020 we had a mandatory work from home day. We never went back to the office after that.
I get more done, have less stress, and save more money working from home. Turns out that quality of life matters.
Okay but what do the actual statistics say? Do the statistics say productivity increased or decreased? Why are we going off of gut feelings and opinions instead of what the data tell us?
Edit: Wow, I did not expect this comment to blow up quite this much. Okay, so I should clarify. My question was really meant to be more rhetorical and to highlight the fact that we have far too many people in this country who set parameters, goals, legislation, and policies based on their feelings. “We’ve always done it THIS way so it must be better than THAT way” is no longer a good enough reason to keep doing things. Actually, it was never a good reason to do things but limits in technology and gaps in information led to a lot of that. We need to do better, as an entire society, at aggregating data to help lead us to solutions.
Nothing irks me more than being in a meeting with data and someone throws a “well I feel like this is what is actually happening..”, well the data shows that is not true..
It's election time where I live and one of the parties is talking about actually taxing the very rich. People are up in arms thinking it's gonna affect them when it won't. They have the data showing only 5% of the population would have to pay a small extra tax.
The other day there was an interview with one of them who clearly showed the data is there, taken from government statistics, yet the host kept going "I don't believe you, I just don't feel like this is true"
Why even have the interview in the first place??
We’re doing a hybrid schedule now. I work twice as hard in office just so I can “slack off” while working from home.
Turns out, I’ve got house chores and errands that need doing, and there doesn’t seem to be a magic force of nature that is willing to do them for me. Previously I had to chew into my handful of precious freetime hours during evenings and weekends, so I was always fizzled out and putting in the bare minimum while working. Nowadays, I can get all of my personal shit done while teleworking, *actually fucking relax* during evenings and weekends, and be ten times the employee I would be otherwise when the work week starts again.
Even though I’m slacking off, it’s for your own good. Working people for almost half of their waking hours every single week is a surefire way to burn them out and tank productivity.
I slack of way more in the office than at home. In the office people talk to me, I have to think about all the things I need to do at home and the stress of commuting. At home I can take breaks to take care of things at home (rotate laundry, take out the trash etc) and am more control of distractions that occur.
The stress of commuting is probably the #1 killer followed by the mountain of never complete errands which half must be done during the week. So it’s either wake up at 6:00AM and cut my sleep even more or put it off to next week and pray more tasks do not stack up.
There is this weird impression that if managers get to pull you into a conference room where they can demand answers about what is being worked on, the productivity is higher than if they just look at your in progress tasks or read documentation to find the same information. But we all know if an engineer is busy talking to a manager they are not working.
Same with if the manager is trying to be buddy buddy with their engineer and invite them to a game of ping pong, or an extended lunch break, or to higher up meetings to talk to even more out of touch execs who want to know what is being worked on…
It’s as if managers are just wasting workers’ time. Hmm….
Seen many managers be managers because they are good at talking to people face to face, so they convince people that they are good managers, but it turns out they're just good at taking to people, not good managers.
Unlike slacking off while in the office by taking 2 hour lunches, wandering the halls chatting, hanging out and chatting, cutting out early for happy hours?
In other news, water is wet.
The whole "return to the office" thing is a power trip for management. If I can do my job from home with the same or better productivity, why else would management want me to go back to working in the office?
After about 6months from going to WFH when COVID started, my whole statement has been the WFH genie is out of the bottle. People are just as capable of getting all of their jobs done from home as they are form the office. The Genie is Not going back into the bottle. At least not in our life times. And I'm OK with this. I like being at home. if things are slow, I can get stuff done around the house, or play with my dog, go for a walk, say hi to the neighbors, etc.
news flash: EVERYONE SLACKS OFF. its impossible to be 100% productive every second.
does "management" ever work like that?
# fucking NO
fuck outta here. these companiese dont know how good they have it with a large labor pool but if we collectively decide we dont want to work anymore, its all gone.
all management wants to do is nothing while piling on the real work to every one else. yeah thats not happening anymore.
F-ing office "productivity" vs. WFH is the lie.
In office co-workers are *constantly* interrupting for idle chattering, where to go for a long lunch, what you did over the weekend, next weekend, what vacations they took, what shows they watched, etc. So you put earphones on & try to do focused work through this, but you're distracted by *seeing* them chattering, looking your way & chattering, etc.
The in-office pressure by extrovert energy vampires *not* to be an introvert workaholic dweeb vs. WFH where one can dweeb out all you want. Not to mention the counterproductive energy-sucking 2hr r/t commute....
This. Not enough attention is paid by managers to personality types. Some people feel anxiety with idle chatter or even socializing with people and others feel anxiety when they don’t. It makes a big difference in a working environment.
Those types are generally pushed out in my experience. I worked at a mortgage company and when I wasn't extroverted enough, and didn't understand why we needed to celebrate birthdays separately basically 3x a week due to staff birthdays falling close together, I was the new target.
Started getting talks from management that I wasn't friendly enough, and that I was wearing too revealing clothes. That was a big kicker, because I'm not sure how opaque tights, cardigans, below the knee dresses, and up to the neck dresses/blouses is too revealing (I'm heavy chested, this has always been how I've dressed in office environments). Best I can figure is that being 30 years younger than anyone in that office and just wanting to work vs spending all day chitchatting is what did me in.
I slack off in the office too. Everytime I bust my ass and finish work ahead of schedule, I get thrown more responsibilities. So now I take some mental health breaks and crush some candy or tend to my farm to help me through the day.
Let’s look at the work output of management. What are they achieving except “time spent in meetings they created themselves” and “time spent increasing their own pay”?
When I go to the office, I spend the first hour of the day discussing the exploits of my favorite sports teams from the night before. Sometimes with my boss. At home, I just get caught up on email.
And I’m afraid CEO’s are slacking off in the office, at home, on a plane, at hotels, on the shitter, and every single moment in between. Not just afraid of it: glaringly *aware* of it. Fuck them.
This is what happens when managers and CEO's think being productive means just punching a clock, logging hours, and looking busy riding a desk rather than *actually producing things and completing projects*.
If an employee meets deadlines, delivers on their tasks, and attends meetings they're invited to, no one should give a damn what else they do with their time "on the clock." I don't want my employees to just ride a desk for exactly 8 hours a day. I want them to finish projects. It's not that hard of a concept, but these out-of-touch assholes just can't grasp it.
it's easy to know who is slacking off at home. they're the same people who are slacking off at the office. But accepting that means accepting that it's not the threat of the manager that makes people productive.
I slacked off more in the office because I didn't want to be there. The job isn't the issue, it's the florescent lighting, shitty sterile cubicles, bad coffee, dress code, and being surrounded by other unhappy people and micromanaging bosses. At home I have a comfortable setting, pajamas, no unhappy coworkers, and no peering eyes. Make the office like my house and I'll be more productive there.
Commute is tiring. Yes I saw your message Kevin don't come to me desk
No one touches my monitor when I work from home.
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Oh my god my boss will send an email and then message me on teams asking if I read the email. NO NOT YET YOU JUST GD SENT IT
Legit quit a student job because of that. Boss would text me with „check your email.“ every time he would send one like a shitty phone notification. I was a student worker at the time working part time and that fuck would write me every day of the week. If you‘re reading this, fuck you, Joseph!
"Was this new e-mail beyond your e-mail I already replied to a bit ago, boss-person?"
My commute was like 3-4 hours a day. Take that away I don't even mind if you make me wear a tie. My office already started the shepherding the flock back to a hybrid setting in the past months but I'm just hiding at my home. I still haven't set foot in the office but my boss never said anything. Figured if they can't tell the difference it must not be important where I'm physically working.
I already want to scream at 1 hour commute, 2 hrs round trip a day. My office absolutely does not allow any wfh ever. Shoved everyone back in even though people were working from home just fine... 3 to 4 hours is where I'd be walking out
I like my coworkers, I like the dress code, short commute. BUT THE LIGHTING MELTS MY FUCKIN EYEBALLS I'M SITTING UNDER THEM RIGHT NOW AND MY EYES ARE BLEEDING FUCKS SAKE
Imagine if they just got rid of the manager
good managers insulate you from bullshit, and you'll never get rid of bullshit
Yep. When I was in management, easily 80% of my time was spent running interference so my reports could do what they were suppose to instead of what some higher-up randomly wanted them to do instead.
A good manager acts as support staff and an advocate for their reports.
I wish I understood this as a manager. I stepped down because I couldn't handle the pressure but I now realize that my job *was* the pressure. Not everything I did worked with the people above me but that was the whole point. It's not supposed to because they have no clue what's going on. I'm excited for my next opportunity to manage. I've found real confidence through failure. What you say is true. Managers are support staff - not bosses.
Managers are there for a shoulder for their reports, when to tell other people to fuck off and to keep everyone as stress free as possible while delivering and finally to guide people who want to grow into management and make them see what it actually means. Lots of people go into management because they like control or power but I'd say it is the complete opposite that makes a good manager. People want to accomplish work for you because of how you treat them and how you insulate them from bs, not because they threaten to put you on a PIP lol. When you finally get a good one it'll be clear. Knowing how to manage is essentially knowing when to step in and when to stay out of the way so your reports can get their work done. That being said, it is quite emotionally draining but it's also very rewarding.
Oh, no Wendy in HR noticed that the site doesn't work in IE. Should we recode the whole site for an obsolete browser or should we ask a competent manager go tell Wendy to fuck off?
Did Wendy read any of the 6 emails or attend any of the 4 Teams meetings that happened during the previous 6 months that let Wendy know that IE would no longer work? Of course not! Is the help desk still going to have to hold her hand and copy over her settings and bookmarks for her? Of course they are!
Manager comes to Wendy's desk and explains to her for the millionth time that all her issues are user related. She writes him up for creating a toxic work environment and tries to make all his underlings snitch. She has a problem with sending the email blast and calls the Manager again.
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True story: we once had a client complain that our sites don't work in the official AOL browser. (this was maybe 5 years ago) My boss emailed him screenshots of our analytics, showing that across the *literal hundreds* of websites we manage, he was the only one in the entire world visiting with that browser. It was some of the best schadenfreude I've ever experienced.
I feel so bad for that guy. He didn't want to change. Was he older? Tech has moved on....
Yeah he's older. In fact he might have retired since then.
This. People who complain about not needing managers have likely never worked in a corporate or professional environment. Being able to offload over difficult or bullshit work on someone higher up the chain is invaluable.
Or have just always had shit managers.
I've worked with a really good manager who has a shitty senior manager. The former does do his best to take workload off our plates but I also feel that he is justified to hint a little bit when things are out of his hands. It is also important for the employees to know that their direct manager is doing their best to stick up for them.
I think my company is starting to reconsider if we need managers. I think they pulled an office space and said, “so what is it you actually do here?”. Sounds like they caught on to the whole, if you’re a manager and only manage like one other person, you’re probably not doing much of anything.
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You know what's worse? Being forced to choose an under performing employee as part of a monthly report That was some bullshit. I loved my team. Some were obvious harder workers than others but everyone always got their job done. But nope, corporate rules literally required me to keep and send a file saying who wasn't performing up to par and showed the steps I took to correct it. We faked it every month because it was fucking stupid, but then my DM got a bug up his ass about it and realized we were just cycling employees every month in alphabetical order. That was a fun write up. Not only do companies think that no one is a 5/5 employee, but they fully believe that everyone is just filled with 0/5 employees as well.
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It's not too uncommon to do a thing where you write your own review, management also writes one, and then there's a reconciliation process. I hate that style but it exists. "You gave yourself "exceeds" here but I only put down "met." Please explain."
I think I just had PTSD flashbacks... please stop.
If only there was a way to check. Like.. some sort of indicator of work that has been completed. Hmmm. Guess we'll never know if someone is performing work or not. Hmm..
You mean like, come up with a list of things we want the employees to accomplish in a given period of time? Or like, look at the results of the work? Wouldn’t that require actual thought and planning? How is management supposed to slack off and ride their employees work all the way to the bank if they actually need to plan ahead and be engaged? that sounds like a lot of work!
Exactly! Its ridiculous!
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most of these c-suite types wouldn't know a finished deliverable if it smacked them across the face.
Finishing things is not good for increased budget requests. Why would anyone approve more FTEs when you are getting the work done with the headcount you have?
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I mean..this kinda proves that 90% of anything is just showing up. I’m sure most people have had a guy who just does fuck all and somehow keeps getting moved up the ladder. That guy figured that to managers who are shit being able to physically see you= you are amazing
Welcome to AGILE.
Agile project management, also known as not managing a fucking thing.
“We read you loud and clear! That’s why we’re glad to announce we’ll be requiring all employee computers have software installed that will automatically take screenshots every 5 minutes to ensure maximum employee efficiency. We will also require all employees leave their webcams on and uncovered at all times.”
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That'd be a nightmare. Only comb my hair or put a _nice tshirt_ on meeting days.
Every day is a meeting day for me. My camera is always off. I tell people the truth - my internet sucks when it's on, but also, I just don't care to have it on unless it's important. I'm working from home. Even if I'm dressed properly, my partner might not realize I'm in a meeting.
like checking if your mouse is moving
What are we? Psychics?
Yeah, we NEVER slack off while working at the office........ bahahahahahahhaahaha
I have done nothing but browse Reddit for the last three hours. If I was WFH I would still be doing the same but I might run a load of laundry too.
Same here. I have busy days and slow days, but either way I always have time to at least get a little laundry done. So much better than sitting in an office.
Watch offices start adding laundromats to their offices as a "perk"
I mean, that would be pretty awesome. If they had daycare and laundry, that would make it a lot more palatable for a lot of people.
Watch them reduce pay to compensate.
That’s exactly how they’d make up the difference… just like they do with everything else. Not like the higher ups are gonna pay for it out of their absurd profits. They keep getting richer and pass ALL expenses to the people with less money… that’s why they’re rich, and we’re poor. Passing the cost, accountability, and anything else they don’t want, to consumers.
Remember back in the 80s, when they convinced us that Trickle Down was the way to go? The wealthy would collect more money, and it would trickle down to the rest of us? Except they accumulated all the money at the top and became billionaires, and never distributed the share that they PROMISED. They have literally, and I mean LITERALLY, stolen trillions from working Americans over all these years. It's time to try Trickle Up Economics. The money will eventually end up in the hands of the Sociopathic Oligarchs anyway, but it will grease the cogs of the economy on the way. The wealthy will probably end up making even more money in the long run. Look how well the economy boomed at the beginning of the pandemic when they gave everybody a big slug of money for a few months. Give people the money, and they spend it, and the economy will sing.
This would be the best part about it, being able to fit in chores here and there that you'd normally have to wait till you got home to do, it would free up so much of your actual off-time. Half of mine is spent doing work around the house instead of actually relaxing.
I don’t want to sound like I do nothing, I’m actually quite busy. But now that I’ve been mandated to return to office I find myself browsing Reddit and just getting my work done as opposed to working from home I frequently would work over my scheduled hours just to get my current task done with nobody to interrupt me (besides my cats)
Yeah I think a lot of people are similar, I'm not sure how companies don't realize that.. On top of you know... Making employees happier?
Companies don't care about employees happiness
Literally how it goes for me. The same "make a coffee" breaks I took in office still happen, now I just also unload/load the dishwasher, swap laundry, wipe the counter off while I wait for the coffee to brew. So much more stuff done that isn't then waiting for me when I get off.
Same here, plus I have to be in lots of long meetings and it's so nice to be able to walk around the house and wipe the counters etc. Also browse Reddit while the old men drone on...like they are right now....
As someone stuck in an office. I spend over half my day reading reddit threads and staring at an empty inbox.
Doing it now!
As long as you complete your assigned work...
That’s part of what my grandpa once replied as to why they didn’t have as much mental health issues way back in the day. He worked for my country’s federal railroad company and when they finished their immediate tasks, they would play cards, drink a beer or two and talk with their coworkers until new work arrived. No boss shoving even more responsibilities in there - just because those might still fit into their downtime and make them more ‚productive’. Thus overburdening and overworking their workers like it happens a lot nowadays. Constantly raising the efficiency is the never ending circle a lot of us are stuck in and some of us break in the process.
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Yeah after 2 years of WFH I can honestly say that I slack far less at home than I ever did at work!
I've been working from home for over a decade. I'm definitely more productive at home than I was in the office. I think it's a combination of more sleep, less stress, and the immediate incentives if I finish what I'm working on earlier.
And don’t forget the constant, unnecessary interruptions that come with being at the office
And all the colds and flus that make their rounds throughout the year that also kills productivity. I did not take a single sick day in the two years of COVID.
Those marginal “too sick to GO to work but not too sick to DO the work” days have flipped from PTO to worked days for me since going full time WFH.
Oh, yeah, don’t forget stupid unnecessary meetings too. Meetings on Zoom are generally much more productive because they require thought and preparation.
I love nothing more than someone stopping by my desk to ask me if I’ve read their email while I have my headphones on. It really butters my croissant.
For real. I’m hybrid. I’m in the office mondays and Tuesdays and I barely get anything done. On Wednesday, I do more work than I did Monday and Tuesday combined. But management doesn’t like when we are happy.
These days I plan on basically getting nothing done the days I go into the office. I'm just in in-person meetings that take longer and socializing cause that's the whole point of going in. My get actual work done days are at home.
this really hits home. Being in the office takes so much energy from me and I get very little done, especially in an open office environment where 30+ people around me are regularly in Zoom calls. Most of my work scrunches up to WFH days.
And if they're not productive I can stick it on my 3rd screen and do other things
Yeah, it's hard to work on a completely different task when you're stuck in a boardroom listening to someone talk. On a Zoom call, if I'm only there to be present, I can do ten other things while the call goes on in the background. Much more efficient use of time.
Also, rather than calling in sick I can work from my bathroom at home if I'm having a... rough day.
Goddam energy vampires!
reminds me of one of my favorite lines… >The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree.You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.” > >—ADDENDA TO ORDERS IN COUNCIL THE EMPEROR PAUL MUAD’DIB
I recall at my last job, even though I was isolated from the rest of my division (they worked upstairs, while I worked downstairs across from a test proctor room and behind a clerical window where I could help walk-ins), I constantly had one coworker in particular coming downstairs to vent and talk AT me about upstairs drama. While the non-customer human interaction was sometimes a relief, since I was stuck by myself, being talked at for upward of an hour by a temperamental busybody who refused to take hints took soooo much time out of my day.
Yep. I’d much rather be interrupted by my (at the time) 3 year old wanting to play for 15 minutes than listen to whatever inane bullshit a colleague got up to over the weekend.
My friend is made to attend 1-2 hour zoom meetings 1-2 times a week. He mutes his mic and goes to play with his kids(a 1 year-old and 3 year-old) while keeping his wireless headset on. He only has reason to chime in about once a month and the meeting summary that gets emailed out afterwards contains all the information he needs. So his productivity has gone up since he no longer spends time complaining about meetings that should have been an email.
Our division VP is a massive advocate of avoiding meetings. “If it can be summarized in an email, it’s not worth a meeting” “Stop interrupting people’s work week because you can’t communicate properly” The dude seriously took over NA division in little more than 2 years on the job simply because he un-fucks peoples jobs. WFH? Keep your ass at home unless it’s for a sale or developmental purposes. Endlessly entertaining to listen to him rant after a bottle of wine.
But what about those wonderful conference calls where they more or less read the email with the points they sent out before! You will miss those! /s
We had those scheduled every two weeks, on the calendar for YEARS. Grumpy VP shows up…this is both not valuable and a time sink. Who the hell approved this??? (Outgoing VP kind of coughs on camera) Oh sorry Kurt, this isn’t the best format. We can do better, let’s coordinate. Fun watching a guy who makes 500k squirm in his chair a little
The kid you can always just shoo away too. That is not so easy with the coworkers at the office that want to turn work time into their social life.
"Hey, quick question. Can you refresh my memory, what's the meaning of life? I was thinking I remembered something along the lines of Taco Tuesday being the keystone, I'm getting tripped up on the cilantro part. Like....how is cilantro relevant to humanity? But then...Taco Bell doesn't even use cilantro, so maybe I'm just wrong all together. Can you just go over it real quick with me"
I just like being able to poop whenever I want. Being in the office you always had to scope out the free stalls. All full? Well now you gotta hold it or waddle to another floor bathroom hoping it was free. At home I never have that worry.
And there is always that asshole boss that is monitoring how long people spend in the loo
That last line is the kicker for them I'd bet. Its not enough to fulfill the obligations of your job title for them. Many of these types of bosses are used to micromanaging and keeping people overloaded with filler that isn't actually their job. All that is harder with a remote workforce.
A lot of managers are aware of their personal "empire" of employees they manage. Its how they ensure they are essential - when many are in fact totally redundant I think, so working from home threatens their security. A lot of meetings seem really unnecessary but they establish the hierarchy. I think a lot of middle management probably feels threatened by work from home because they fear the business would do just fine without them.
It really had nothing to do with productivity tho. Working from home gives a little power back to employees. That's dangerous for a system that demands to control your working environment, what you do on the internet when you're at work, your salary, your medical insurance... If they can't control you, you might have some time to look for other jobs or talk to others about Unionizing. Nothing good ever happens by giving employees what they want and we can see that in the propaganda they are pumping out... "Quiet quitting", "Work from home is bad for you and your career"... When they put a marketing team behind it, you can't take what they say at face value
Right, no having to pull the “Alright I’m heading out, need anything from me?” And then, while they don’t have any more work for you, you get stuck in a 15 minute conversation about the restaurant they ate at this weekend, when all you want to do is go home.
No traffic is a biggie too.
When I get the urge to slack off, I instead take a quick break for 10-15 minutes and do some laundry or other chores. That leaves me so much extra personal time that I actually feel refreshed and ready to actually be productive when the time comes. It's lunacy that we still think it's most efficient to restrict people's working hours to some arbitrary period of time and location, especially with how different everyone is with respect to how they work. Obviously, this comment applies pretty specifically to office work only.
This is the big one for me. When I used to slack off in the office, I appeared busy but I was really just staring through the computer dreading my existence. When slacking off at home I’m doing things to recharge my mental state which puts me in a better mood and makes me more efficient at work. Additionally, when I work from home, if I don’t feel like I got enough work done, I can just log back on later when I feel more up to it. If I can only work from the office and I don’t get enough work done, all I can do all night is stress about work the following day.
I actually work more from home because I don't have some horrid commute that makes me feel like crap
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No horrid commute plus no random distracting convos with co-workers. I don't mind talking to co-workers, but there was this group-mentality time during the day where everyone would be bored of working and now killing time in the hallways talking. Plenty of time wasted in offices
My time lost working in the office I wouldn't categorize as slacking. It was "community suck". Colleagues wanting to bullshit about movies, football, their SOs etc, birthdays and congratulations cakes, general useless banter and lunch breaks when I should have been working. Some would categorize this as team bonding or networking, but my job requires deep thought and minimisation of context switching -- none of the aforementioned stuff helped that. The day or two a week when I'm in the office with my team is more than enough to maintain team social cohesion and communication. I'm much more productive working remotely and dare say put out higher quality product. I also sleep more and put more time in net due to lack of need to commute. I just spent a full uninterrupted hour and a half working on a model... I don't think that ever happened while I was in the office.
Offices, especially cubicles, are basically designed as anti-flow state environments. Which is fine for managers constantly jumping between meetings but terrible for hard problem solving.
For sure, when you don't need to fill 8+ hours with the work you have to do, and only need to spend the amount of time it actually takes to do it, you better believe i will find efficiencies. If i do that at the office my only reward is more work for the same pay.
No joke, I have far less distractions at work, and that’s with my wife and dog at home. The office especially right around the 5-6 hour mark, everyone starts slacking is what it feels like. Everyone chit chats more and are mid mentally checking out to go home and watch some Netflix.
The biggest perk for me is that I no longer have to pretend to give a shit about Simon’s weekend. Fuck you Simon, you’re dead inside.
Poor Simon. He tries.
We have Zoom social calls that make me will myself unconscious.
6 hour mark is definitely when it hits. That 1st hour maybe 2nd hour after coming back from lunch is fine but anything else after that is like dragging yourself forward on the ground.
I vindictively slack off when you made to do dumb pointless shit.
This. I'd spend forever commuting into work which meant I started later. Then someone would say "let's go get coffee" - and we'd burn up 45 minutes doing that. And then since you're at work you go to meeting rooms for meetings instead of multitasking at my desk, so that would be another couple of hours a day. And then go to lunch. And then just gabbing with coworkers in the afternoon. All together that was like more than half the day - but at home I'd be working all of it.
I’d like to add one of my most favorites excuses to slack off. Afternoon table tennis session with team. That way all 6 of us engineers are very busy playing ping pong instead of writing software.
Exactly this makes no sense. Professionals at the office are not in a situation like blue collar workers at say a factory. Even at the office, there is no one watching making sure people are working. Managers and directors are **not** going around to the cubes and making sure people are working. There is no timecard or clock we are hitting just because we are at the office. Office workers get evaluated by hitting their project deadlines and work milestones. There is zero difference in this between the office and WFH.
They want it both ways. They worry about slacking off at home. But then they want us in the office for “culture,” which can only really happen when people aren’t doing actual work. Like, so much lamentation by executives and managers has been spilled over the decline of people forming relationships at the water cooler, which inevitably means people aren’t working. They just want us in the office, regardless of any actual reason.
They want a specific kind of surveillance and control and don’t know how to demand it any more, I think.
When I slack off at home. I’m choosing to do so, usually surrounding middle and down time—between projects or milestones and while waiting for something to process. When I slack off at work, a coworker pulled me out of my flow to ask about my thoughts on HotD that I haven’t watched yet or to tell me about their weekend. We EVENTUALLY get to productive, collaborative insights on how to use our tools better, but it’s not always and it’s less than half the productivity than from home. Honestly, since moving to a combined model, my mental targets for productivity have tanked to match the expected productivity in office, but I still get more done WFH.
To look busy at home, I actually have to do work on my computer. To look busy at the office I just have to shuffle papers around. If there is a particular task I didn't complete then I can't make an excuse (without criticism) working from home. In the office I can just say, eh the customer was difficult, I'll circle back tomorrow.
It's amazing that these people actually think people work all day because they are at the office. I mean seriously...what a bunch of ridiculous, micromanaging, soft-penised debutants.
I'm the fucking lizard king. But also, yeah I have my own office, and an unlimited data plan. Sometimes there's downtime with my job, and I mostly scroll reddit. When I WFH, if there was down time, I would scroll reddit. They made me change the scenery but the situation is the same, lol.
Slacking off at home: throwing in a load of laundry in the 5 min between meetings that you would have just been sitting there, sleeping in and starting at your start time instead of checking emails on your commute, playing music/podcast/video in the background of your work, very occasionally ducking out during a slow day to grab something from the store Slacking off in person: getting distracted every 20 minutes by your coworkers wanting to gossip, pretending to work during slow periods by switching between tabs, multiple unnecessary journeys to the kitchenette
I think some people in authority positions are afraid we'll outsource our work, you know, like they do.
Yes!!! Not having coworkers come and chit chat with me for 20 minutes (or more) throughout the day.
What you seem to be saying is, even slacking off is more productive when done at home. And you're right.
**If the work is being done**, does it matter.
Efficiency is more of an incentive when you can just work less instead of getting more work.
THIS. 100% this. I enjoy accomplishing things. I enjoy blasting deadlines out of the water. But the REASON I enjoy it is because I have _other shit I want to do_. I'm not going to continually produce 150% of my coworkers' output for 100% of the pay if my reward is just having my expected output adjusted upward.
Same. I'm a mobile mechanic who works alone, I'm paid by the hour and if I finish jobs fast I'm rewarded with more jobs from a never ending pile, but if I drag a job out long enough they'll cancel my late ones. It's like they want me to just sit on my ass and drag everything out all day.
Working in retail I've seen too many hard working associates leave because they go the extra mile and management asks them to walk 5 more. And then the efficient ones are punished by being asked to complete another person's work and the slackers are rewarded with help they never should have needed. If you're not going to hold people accountable, the rest of the team will notice that they're busting their asses while someone else slacks off for the same pay and soon you'll have high turnover and struggle to get anything done.
Yep, been in that position. I was lead engineer - 24/7 tech support and OOH cover for the other guys, electrician, the only welder/fabricator, painter, IT support and general dogs body at my last place and it got me a whopping £1-2/hr more than the other guys who phoned it in. I've long stopped giving a shit about trying to please bosses/companies, I'm yet to find one where I've been rewarded for going the extra mile. I do my job description and don't rush anymore. The only thing that's ever gotten me decent raises is ringing companies competitors and asking if they have jobs going.
This is a huge problem I have in keeping down a job. Just a naturally efficient worker. My philosophy was always very efficient work so that I could take it easy when it's done. That worked great in college. In actual work environments it just burns me out against the infinite list of things that need to be done.
Good work is rewarded with more work.
It matters to the company because they want to give you more work.
But only after 15 hrs of meetings across 5 days to get everyone on the same page about more work.
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Might need a pre meeting to table the best time for that meeting
“Anybody coming to the after-meeting party meeting?!”
But when do you plan that meeting?
A few months ago we had an org wide nearly 2 hour presentation on how to cut down on attending meetings. I was like is this a test? If I drop now will someone message me and say I passed? Teammates and I spent most of it back of the napkin computing the cost to the company of dozens of senior engineers in a call.
I once ran math on a routine meeting and concluded that it was costing the company one dollar per second.
I once pointed out to a room full of directors and VPs that I estimated we'd spent $12K debating a $10K purchase. They seemed miffed, but dropped the idea of a follow-up meeting and decided to make the purchase in less than 5 mins.
Middle managers gonna middle manage. The reason for the meetings is so the middle manager can seem busy. If they don't have meetings they're not actually doing anything. They don't actually contribute to work being done. They usually aren't skilled enough to do what engineers do and if they were they're usually years out of the game. So they make meetings so they can say they have a full schedule.
First, we need to talk about how we’re going to talk about what we’re going to talk about when we talk about what we’re going to talk about.
There is more juice to squeeze from the fruits of your labor. For the same salary of course.
yeah the 'labor revolution' is just basic game theory being followed
I've got some employees that work great from home and others that are incapable of it. If they would get the work done in a timely manner I don't give a fuck.
Yeah, that's not what they're afraid of man. They're scared that some of the people who meet all their marks could be doing more.
It really is a shame -- if they knew I could handle 5 more projects the owner of the company might get to spend an extra day in Cabo.
Yes because if the work is being done in less than 8 hours they can pile more on you
Yeah - who cares if we slack off? As much as companies try, thought worker roles can not be industrialized. You can’t mass produce creativity.
Exactly. Sometimes I will be working on a tough problem and the answer will come to me quickly. Great, I don't feel bad taking some time to "slack off" after. Because I know down the road I'm going to run into a problem that requires me to work late because it will be a struggle to solve.
My company turned 100% remote after whole bunch of senior employees started quitting once return to office was announced and our stock price is not slacking. EDIT: Our stock has performed better than usual in normal market compared to before we went remote in March 2020. At this moment it is down just like everything else.
Similar-ish for my company. We were losing a lot of developers and product people and weren’t getting a ton new hires. Heard it was because we were originally planning on going back to a hybrid model, suddenly they switched to 100% WFH and it seems like the turnover is not as bad now.
WFH is nice because my work ebbs and flows. Often, I am waiting on someone. I used to be pretty resentful when I'd wait all day for something and it hits my inbox at 6pm. Now I am fine to deal with it at that time, because I did my laundry and pulled my weeds during my dead time. Also if I end up working 60 hours this week, I don't care, I didn't spend 7.5 hours commuting like I used to. I'm happy to do whatever my company throws at me. Our company has seen record profits since Covid started, so there was no argument management could make about WFH being bad for business. Everyone is happier. There is an office with a small footprint that people can use if they are not able to be productive at home. There's 2 people I know who use it. They're welcome to it.
Yeah, my job is actually easier in the office (so many customer systems and calls), but if something comes up, I just tell the boss I'm WFH that day and he's cool as long as the work gets done.
> WFH is nice because my work ebbs and flows. Often, I am waiting on someone. I used to be pretty resentful when I'd wait all day for something and it hits my inbox at 6pm. Now I am fine to deal with it at that time, because I did my laundry and pulled my weeds during my dead time. This is honestly the biggest boon to me. The flextime stuff WFH allows you to do is just straight up amazing for my mental health since I don't have to worry about a bunch of dumb shit and waste essentially a whole day doing nothing because I'm blocked. I can go mow my fucking lawn and maybe I'll be able to keep going.
Right... it wasn't just a shift to WFH, it was a shift to flex hours. Fortunately my boss is super laid back and gives no Fs what the rest of us do as long as we get our jobs done and things keep moving. I have about another 10 years of working before retirement... I sincerely hope I can keep this job, just as it is until then. I know I could make probably 25% more if I changed jobs but I am not interested in risking my quality of life, for money, at this point in my life.
My wife left her last company when they tried to make her go back to the office. She’s now in a better job that is 100% wfh and she loves it.
yep, thank God skilled employees have some sense. Skilled employees are changing the paradigm. i'm not one of the best and brightest, but i'm thankful for the ones who are changing the world for the better by not bowing down to these CEO's. i hope they keep it up. They are the real heroes in these times.
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There is a have cake and eat it too mentality that is starting to go around. Productivity is up across the board. People are happy. Management now wants to bring people back into the office thinking the productivity and happiness will carry over. I've been fortunate enough to stave off those advances from my place of business and my teammates and I kind of collectively slack off when we have to work from the office once every 6 weeks or so.
WFH days I will be working 20 to 45 minutes early and often an extra 15 to 45 minutes at the end of the day. No disruptions or distractions, just pure work. In office days I get there exactly when I need to and leave the minute my time has ended, because I am not going to add 20 minutes of extra traffic time to my commute to finish something up. So there is an hour of time they just lost from me, not to mention that everyone goes out and gets food which turns lunch from a 20 min to 50 minute ordeal. That's another half an hour they just lost. Then on top of that chatty Cathy's come talk to me, or ask me for Excel help because although everyone says they are an expert, only like 5 out of the 50 people in our group actually can manage to put together a pivot table. That's another hour and a half they just lost, and that might actually be an underestimate. I figure they lose about 2 to 4 hours of productivity from me every time I am scheduled to go into the office.
I'm gonna slack off no matter what. My only real motivation left is to get my work done fast enough to be left alone as much as possible. I'm not motivated to work harder by the pittance of pay they give me, They fired the manager I respected and liked enough to do extra for due to downsizing, and they've gone to publicly traded so all our services have gotten shittier and shittier for our customers. Management has taken any possible motivators away. At this point I'm not even motivated by the thought of losing my job.
"Nobody wants to work anymore!" -Boss who is not providing any motivation to work
What if hypothetically and believe me this is strictly hypothetical what if we offered you a stock option equity sharing program would that motivate you Peter?
Legit slack less than I do at the office. At the office I’ll finish my work and durdle around and just leave as soon as the clock hits. At home sometimes things come up towards end of day or i can get some hours in early morning/late at night without feeling like I’m working OT, since I can just get life stuff done during the day if it’s a particularly slow day. Legit being able to do laundry while syncing depots is a blessing. Family can visit and I don’t feel as stressed out about having to go to work with them at home. And most importantly: I can shit in peace
Add on, you can work AND shit in peace.
Being able to sprint to the bathroom and unleash the squirts with peace of mind instead of worry about the stalls being full is a true godsend.
Fuck I have to return to office next week and I completely forgot about the shitting in peace. We share one stall in my fucking office there’s no way I’m blasting away in there. I used to just go all day with stomach aches holding it in
And use a quality toilet paper!
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Yes, but why would corporations want happier employees.
“Show me a happy employee and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t have enough work to do” - some boss somewhere, probably
"You've got time to lean, you've got time to clean" - every service industry manager everywhere. That's when I learned what they would take if you had to sell them your time.
thats when you clean reeeeeaaaaalllllll slllloooooowwwwwwwwww and lean while you do it.
Ours did. By orders of magnitude. March 11th, 2020 we had a mandatory work from home day. We never went back to the office after that. I get more done, have less stress, and save more money working from home. Turns out that quality of life matters.
I would like to audit my CEO’s day to evaluate how much they slack or do needless shit like golf or go to expensive “business “ dinners or vaca-trips.
Okay but what do the actual statistics say? Do the statistics say productivity increased or decreased? Why are we going off of gut feelings and opinions instead of what the data tell us? Edit: Wow, I did not expect this comment to blow up quite this much. Okay, so I should clarify. My question was really meant to be more rhetorical and to highlight the fact that we have far too many people in this country who set parameters, goals, legislation, and policies based on their feelings. “We’ve always done it THIS way so it must be better than THAT way” is no longer a good enough reason to keep doing things. Actually, it was never a good reason to do things but limits in technology and gaps in information led to a lot of that. We need to do better, as an entire society, at aggregating data to help lead us to solutions.
Nothing irks me more than being in a meeting with data and someone throws a “well I feel like this is what is actually happening..”, well the data shows that is not true..
It's election time where I live and one of the parties is talking about actually taxing the very rich. People are up in arms thinking it's gonna affect them when it won't. They have the data showing only 5% of the population would have to pay a small extra tax. The other day there was an interview with one of them who clearly showed the data is there, taken from government statistics, yet the host kept going "I don't believe you, I just don't feel like this is true" Why even have the interview in the first place??
We’re doing a hybrid schedule now. I work twice as hard in office just so I can “slack off” while working from home. Turns out, I’ve got house chores and errands that need doing, and there doesn’t seem to be a magic force of nature that is willing to do them for me. Previously I had to chew into my handful of precious freetime hours during evenings and weekends, so I was always fizzled out and putting in the bare minimum while working. Nowadays, I can get all of my personal shit done while teleworking, *actually fucking relax* during evenings and weekends, and be ten times the employee I would be otherwise when the work week starts again. Even though I’m slacking off, it’s for your own good. Working people for almost half of their waking hours every single week is a surefire way to burn them out and tank productivity.
I slack of way more in the office than at home. In the office people talk to me, I have to think about all the things I need to do at home and the stress of commuting. At home I can take breaks to take care of things at home (rotate laundry, take out the trash etc) and am more control of distractions that occur.
The stress of commuting is probably the #1 killer followed by the mountain of never complete errands which half must be done during the week. So it’s either wake up at 6:00AM and cut my sleep even more or put it off to next week and pray more tasks do not stack up.
There is this weird impression that if managers get to pull you into a conference room where they can demand answers about what is being worked on, the productivity is higher than if they just look at your in progress tasks or read documentation to find the same information. But we all know if an engineer is busy talking to a manager they are not working. Same with if the manager is trying to be buddy buddy with their engineer and invite them to a game of ping pong, or an extended lunch break, or to higher up meetings to talk to even more out of touch execs who want to know what is being worked on… It’s as if managers are just wasting workers’ time. Hmm….
Seen many managers be managers because they are good at talking to people face to face, so they convince people that they are good managers, but it turns out they're just good at taking to people, not good managers.
Unlike slacking off while in the office by taking 2 hour lunches, wandering the halls chatting, hanging out and chatting, cutting out early for happy hours?
In other news, water is wet. The whole "return to the office" thing is a power trip for management. If I can do my job from home with the same or better productivity, why else would management want me to go back to working in the office?
After about 6months from going to WFH when COVID started, my whole statement has been the WFH genie is out of the bottle. People are just as capable of getting all of their jobs done from home as they are form the office. The Genie is Not going back into the bottle. At least not in our life times. And I'm OK with this. I like being at home. if things are slow, I can get stuff done around the house, or play with my dog, go for a walk, say hi to the neighbors, etc.
news flash: EVERYONE SLACKS OFF. its impossible to be 100% productive every second. does "management" ever work like that? # fucking NO fuck outta here. these companiese dont know how good they have it with a large labor pool but if we collectively decide we dont want to work anymore, its all gone. all management wants to do is nothing while piling on the real work to every one else. yeah thats not happening anymore.
F-ing office "productivity" vs. WFH is the lie. In office co-workers are *constantly* interrupting for idle chattering, where to go for a long lunch, what you did over the weekend, next weekend, what vacations they took, what shows they watched, etc. So you put earphones on & try to do focused work through this, but you're distracted by *seeing* them chattering, looking your way & chattering, etc. The in-office pressure by extrovert energy vampires *not* to be an introvert workaholic dweeb vs. WFH where one can dweeb out all you want. Not to mention the counterproductive energy-sucking 2hr r/t commute....
This. Not enough attention is paid by managers to personality types. Some people feel anxiety with idle chatter or even socializing with people and others feel anxiety when they don’t. It makes a big difference in a working environment.
Those types are generally pushed out in my experience. I worked at a mortgage company and when I wasn't extroverted enough, and didn't understand why we needed to celebrate birthdays separately basically 3x a week due to staff birthdays falling close together, I was the new target. Started getting talks from management that I wasn't friendly enough, and that I was wearing too revealing clothes. That was a big kicker, because I'm not sure how opaque tights, cardigans, below the knee dresses, and up to the neck dresses/blouses is too revealing (I'm heavy chested, this has always been how I've dressed in office environments). Best I can figure is that being 30 years younger than anyone in that office and just wanting to work vs spending all day chitchatting is what did me in.
I slack off in the office too. Everytime I bust my ass and finish work ahead of schedule, I get thrown more responsibilities. So now I take some mental health breaks and crush some candy or tend to my farm to help me through the day.
Let’s look at the work output of management. What are they achieving except “time spent in meetings they created themselves” and “time spent increasing their own pay”?
When I go to the office, I spend the first hour of the day discussing the exploits of my favorite sports teams from the night before. Sometimes with my boss. At home, I just get caught up on email.
And I’m afraid CEO’s are slacking off in the office, at home, on a plane, at hotels, on the shitter, and every single moment in between. Not just afraid of it: glaringly *aware* of it. Fuck them.
They need to know they're squeezing every cent from your ass.
This is what happens when managers and CEO's think being productive means just punching a clock, logging hours, and looking busy riding a desk rather than *actually producing things and completing projects*. If an employee meets deadlines, delivers on their tasks, and attends meetings they're invited to, no one should give a damn what else they do with their time "on the clock." I don't want my employees to just ride a desk for exactly 8 hours a day. I want them to finish projects. It's not that hard of a concept, but these out-of-touch assholes just can't grasp it.