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Hey good on you if you’re signing over paychecks to employees that leave work to go shopping or take extended lunch breaks. Apparently I just don’t have that ki

Hey good on you if you’re signing over paychecks to employees that leave work to go shopping or take extended lunch breaks. Apparently I just don’t have that kind of cash to spend on non-productivity. I care very much how much time their backside is in the chair as that is significantly more correlated to productivity than shopping.

Silhouette 3y ago
I care very much how much time their backside is in the chair as that is significantly more correlated to productivity than shopping. I guess this is where our perspectives differ. I want the time when people are working to be productive. People have other things going on in their lives - sometimes very important things - and someone who is sitting in the chair with their mind on something else probably isn't going to be very productive. Of course they are there to do a job and it's important that the job gets done properly and the rest of the team shouldn't have to pick up the slack if someone is abusing the relationship. But the most reliable way to keep the work on track IME is to make sure there's a decent work-life balance and build the mutual respect that any good relationship needs. Sometimes that means trusting people to get things done without imposing too many rules on when or how they do it. I find the recent trend for experimenting with shorter working hours fascinating because so often the outcomes are counterintuitive - at least if you expected that shortening the hours would lead to a proportionate loss of productivity. One of the most interesting results I remember - I wish I'd thought to bookmark the paper but unfortunately I didn't - was working 9-3 every day with a half-hour allowed for lunch or something like that. It turned out that the company's performance actually went up during the period of the experiment. Participants reported that because everyone knew they had only that much time in the day to get things done the level of focus improved and there were fewer distractions and more awareness of not interrupting colleagues who were trying to concentrate. They managed to sustain that for something like 3 or 6 months and it's hard to argue it was just a novelty effect after so long.

Silhouette 3y ago

I care very much how much time their backside is in the chair as that is significantly more correlated to productivity than shopping. I guess this is where our perspectives differ. I want the time when people are working to be productive. People have other things going on in their lives - sometimes very important things - and someone who is sitting in the chair with their mind on something else probably isn't going to be very productive. Of course they are there to do a job and it's important that the job gets done properly and the rest of the team shouldn't have to pick up the slack if someone is abusing the relationship. But the most reliable way to keep the work on track IME is to make sure there's a decent work-life balance and build the mutual respect that any good relationship needs. Sometimes that means trusting people to get things done without imposing too many rules on when or how they do it. I find the recent trend for experimenting with shorter working hours fascinating because so often the outcomes are counterintuitive - at least if you expected that shortening the hours would lead to a proportionate loss of productivity. One of the most interesting results I remember - I wish I'd thought to bookmark the paper but unfortunately I didn't - was working 9-3 every day with a half-hour allowed for lunch or something like that. It turned out that the company's performance actually went up during the period of the experiment. Participants reported that because everyone knew they had only that much time in the day to get things done the level of focus improved and there were fewer distractions and more awareness of not interrupting colleagues who were trying to concentrate. They managed to sustain that for something like 3 or 6 months and it's hard to argue it was just a novelty effect after so long.