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https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-da

https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... Considering that your average employee in the US (and it’s safe to assume that numbers in Canada are similar) is productive for less than 3 hours in your average 8 hour work day, this is kind of ridiculous. If you’re paying a consultant, sure you want to get an hour work for an hour pay but an employee? Reach CPA can consider this a win short term but I anticipate they’ll be out of business in 3 years or less. They’ll lose employees and nobody is going to apply to replace them. Seems like a stupidly small amount of money to alienate your present and future workforce over to me. Edit: not to mention that this is a cowardly and badly broken way to “manage” employees. An effective manager would have actually managed her and counseled her on what the company expected. Instead they went the chicken shit route of management, didn’t work with her and instead used tech to look for excuses to fire her. This company needs to go down in flames. If you can’t be bothered to manage your employees, you shouldn’t be in business. Period.

willio58 4y ago
Yeah this just demonstrates the courts being out of touch with reality when it comes to labor issues like this.
rcme 4y ago
I feel like there's a difference between slacking off at work and lying about how you spend your time.
feoren 4y ago
Bullshit. As a consultant, if I'm productive for 3 hours in an 8 hour day, I charge 3 hours, maybe a little more if it was due to context switching. According to this article, this woman admitted to falsifying hours and the repayment was in part due to the frivolous lawsuit she brought after being fired for falsifying timesheets, which is literally criminal fraud. She got off way, way easy. The "tracking software" sounds dangerous and stupid but in this case it sounds like it got one right.
- kraussvonespy 4y ago
  From my post: "If you’re paying a consultant, sure you want to get an hour work for an hour pay but an employee?" It seems like we agree on the consulting bit but she wasn’t a consultant, she was an employee. Expecting 8 hours of work from an employee in an 8 hour day isn’t the way things work.
  - feoren 4y ago
    It said she was an accountant, so I don't know, but I assumed most people who fill out timesheets are employees of consulting companies. This is not some niche, this is millions or tens of millions of Americans (I know she's Canadian but it's very similar there). We don't make "independent consultant" money, we just make regular employee money, but if I slack off for an hour, who am I going to charge that to? It's fraud to charge that time.
  - olliej 4y ago
    If your job requires reporting hours you work, you have to report those hours accurately. This doesn't seem to be "got distracted by the internet for 30-40 minutes a day" but rather it's long term consistent non-work - something she actually admits (she explicitly said she recorded hours she knew she should not have been) In some other cases there can be a transitive issue: plenty of companies/industries bill by the hour, so need to be able to track how many hours each employee has worked on each job. One of those employees over-reporting hours worked would presumably open the employer to legal action for over charging. Accounting is one of those industries. So in those cases it's not necessarily a matter she reported X hours, she gets paid X*$Y. Just that the accurate recording of hours is important for other legal reasons.
cldellow 4y ago
You can read the tribunal decision here [1] What should Reach have done? They fronted her money to set up a WFH office. They were paying her professional fees. After five months, when her productivity was lower than expected, they began having weekly discussions about productivity. They installed TimeCamp, with her knowledge. But... then, even when she presumably knew she was being monitored--she falsified her time sheets. In her words: "Clearly, it’s, I’ve plugged hours that I shouldn’t have plugged to files um when I wasn’t working on them and like, I can’t hide that" She's a white-collar employee in the finance industry. If you can't trust her, you can't keep her. Ultimately, they fired her. They would have probably let it go there. But then _she_ sued them for $5,000 in wrongful termination claims. That's... pretty brazen! [1]: https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/523029/index.do https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/5230...
olliej 4y ago
She literally admitted falsifying her timesheets, and the only reason she got a court order to repay Reach was that she filed a fraudulent lawsuit claiming unfair dismissal - presumably assuming they'd just pay to have her go away.

willio58 4y ago

Yeah this just demonstrates the courts being out of touch with reality when it comes to labor issues like this.

rcme 4y ago

I feel like there's a difference between slacking off at work and lying about how you spend your time.

feoren 4y ago

Bullshit. As a consultant, if I'm productive for 3 hours in an 8 hour day, I charge 3 hours, maybe a little more if it was due to context switching. According to this article, this woman admitted to falsifying hours and the repayment was in part due to the frivolous lawsuit she brought after being fired for falsifying timesheets, which is literally criminal fraud. She got off way, way easy. The "tracking software" sounds dangerous and stupid but in this case it sounds like it got one right.

kraussvonespy 4y ago
From my post: "If you’re paying a consultant, sure you want to get an hour work for an hour pay but an employee?" It seems like we agree on the consulting bit but she wasn’t a consultant, she was an employee. Expecting 8 hours of work from an employee in an 8 hour day isn’t the way things work.
- feoren 4y ago
  It said she was an accountant, so I don't know, but I assumed most people who fill out timesheets are employees of consulting companies. This is not some niche, this is millions or tens of millions of Americans (I know she's Canadian but it's very similar there). We don't make "independent consultant" money, we just make regular employee money, but if I slack off for an hour, who am I going to charge that to? It's fraud to charge that time.
- olliej 4y ago
  If your job requires reporting hours you work, you have to report those hours accurately. This doesn't seem to be "got distracted by the internet for 30-40 minutes a day" but rather it's long term consistent non-work - something she actually admits (she explicitly said she recorded hours she knew she should not have been) In some other cases there can be a transitive issue: plenty of companies/industries bill by the hour, so need to be able to track how many hours each employee has worked on each job. One of those employees over-reporting hours worked would presumably open the employer to legal action for over charging. Accounting is one of those industries. So in those cases it's not necessarily a matter she reported X hours, she gets paid X*$Y. Just that the accurate recording of hours is important for other legal reasons.

cldellow 4y ago

You can read the tribunal decision here [1] What should Reach have done? They fronted her money to set up a WFH office. They were paying her professional fees. After five months, when her productivity was lower than expected, they began having weekly discussions about productivity. They installed TimeCamp, with her knowledge. But... then, even when she presumably knew she was being monitored--she falsified her time sheets. In her words: "Clearly, it’s, I’ve plugged hours that I shouldn’t have plugged to files um when I wasn’t working on them and like, I can’t hide that" She's a white-collar employee in the finance industry. If you can't trust her, you can't keep her. Ultimately, they fired her. They would have probably let it go there. But then _she_ sued them for $5,000 in wrongful termination claims. That's... pretty brazen! [1]: https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/523029/index.do https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/5230...

olliej 4y ago

She literally admitted falsifying her timesheets, and the only reason she got a court order to repay Reach was that she filed a fraudulent lawsuit claiming unfair dismissal - presumably assuming they'd just pay to have her go away.