I recently moved departments at work and while it seems like a good move so far there is one thing that is annoying me. I’m a fairly avid reader and like to always have a book on the go. In my last department I would keep a book on my desk and read a few pages during any downtime (not that there was much of that). It kept me entertained and acted as a good conversation starter when people would call by.
However not long after starting in my new department I got quietly pulled aside and told to remove the book from my desk and not to let new boss catch me reading it. Apparently he doesn’t like any non-work related material on employees desks. I was taken by surprise as its not something I imagined would cause any problems.
The boss seems a decent enough sort otherwise (not that I’ve had many dealings with him). But he’s obviously not a fan of literature…
No biggie but just something that I though I’d throw out there!
Unfortunately as the newbie my desk and monitor is in full view from the office of the aforementioned tyrannical dictator so he’d quickly work out what was happening as I frantically tried to close any suspect windows!
Also while we have access to the internet that itself is fairly closely restricted and monitored.
Knowledge is what makes you as an employee of value to the company. You are keeping your skills sharp and doing this on your free time. For the short run, you’ll have to keep it in a drawer or under your desk or in a backpack and you may have to limit reading and enhancing and improving your skillsets to your lunch hour and probably away from the desk. But, two things are very clear:
You are the employee, no matter how much of an asset you are.
He is the Boss, no matter how much of an ass he is.
So, it is the reading that he has a problem with, or just having the book on your desk? If it’s reading anything, I guess the computer isn’t a solution, with it being positioned as you say.
I guess you always have to be careful of the optics of what you’re doing during slow times - you might be the best employee ever, and productive as all hell, but putting your feet up on the desk and taking a nap for a few minutes during the day never goes over well*.
*Not that you do this - just an exaggeration for humourous effect.
To be fair from what little experience I have of him he seems decent enough in other respects, though I haven’t been here that long. I’d hate to think he has a bad impression of me from this!
Its reading anything non-work related that’s the problem apparently (ironically enough the particular book I was reading at the time was work related, though in a wider sense that he would probably like)
Actually I probably would do something like that, I’m of the ‘as long as the work gets done and you aren’t dealing with the public then do what you like’ ilk, though I recognise others may not feel this way…
On a serious note I believe there’s two kinds of people, those who like to work extremely hard for a short period of time and have time to yourself for the rest of the day and those who like to work at a sedate pace and drag things out for as long as possible.
Thats assuming ‘X’ amount of work needs to be done of course but I’m very much in the former camp, I like to have time to myself.
I grew up on a farm and while I didn’t (and don’t) mind hard work what drives me absolutely nuts is when I’m not told how much work has to be done. Even if it is a lot of work I don’t mind as long as I have a target to aim for.
I think having the book there suggests your interest in taking breaks. You seem to confirm this by saying you are the type that likes to get work done fast and keep time for yourself. I have no problem with this myself on jobs where the work is intermittent and the work is getting done. Your new boss just doesn’t like the impression it gives to him or anyone who passes by. He doesn’t want to appear to be allowing people to waste time. What if his boss passed by for example? Other employees also see the breaks.
So I suggest you go with the flow to make the boss comfortable. Stretch the work. Ask the boss for more work, more calls, extra fill-in assignments, whatever. View this opportunity as a way to think like the boss and maybe become one some day.
Reminds me of a job I once had where once a month or so, I had to copy something like 15 or 20 3.5" disks. This was back in the days when computers didn’t multitask, so I couldn’t do any other “real” work while I fed disks into the drive to be copied. I had no work-related reading material - I had asked for some magazine subscriptions and told “no” - so I’d read a book or a newspaper while I copied disks.
My boss pulled me aside after a couple months of this and told me one of the big bosses had complained that it didn’t look good that I was reading while at work. I re-iterated that I had asked for work-related reading materials and was denied. Boss told me it didn’t matter. I was aghast. After going back and forth a few times, I said “So I’m supposed to just stare at a wall for 2 hours while I copy these disks every month?” Her response “Well, they are paying you, you have to do what they want.”
It became very apparent to me that I needed to quit that job. And I did, about a month later, before I had to stare at the wall while I copied disks again.
I also once worked at a place where the owner got pissy because one of my coworkers used to spend his lunch hour at his desk, reading while eating his lunch. Owner thought it was just plain weird that anyone would want to do such a crazy thing. :rolleyes:
I used to work at a movie theater, usually in the box office. The first boss in that theater had absolutely no problem with me keeping a book or magazine in a drawer, to read when I wasn’t selling tickets or doing whatever else presented itself. Now, most of the other things that I needed to do for the job consisted of answering the phone and cleaning up the box office. I couldn’t leave the box office without someone to relieve me. So, after I’d cleaned up the place, there was NOTHING for me to do in that room other than wait for the next batch of showtimes, which tended to be either feast or famine for some reason. I don’t know why the theater didn’t stagger the showtimes, but we’d have a group of movies starting at 11 AM, another group at 1 PM, and so forth. The second boss absolutely HATED to see me read in the box office. He worked day shift, as I did, and he was OK with people doing their homework on the evening shift. But for some reason, he was offended by the sight of me reading. He was also offended by the notion of me going back to college. He hated the fact that I wanted to keep my purse in the box office, and was horrified when I told him that yes, in fact, I DID need to keep it with me, because I needed sanitary supplies because of period problems (I never knew when I’d start spotting or outright bleeding) and because we had a thief among the employees. He had no problem with me doing janitorial work, though. I think it was a cultural thing, he had immigrated from the Middle East.
Is this “all work, all the time” attitude unusual or something for you? I don’t know of any workplace that would look well upon an employee who openly participated in non-work activities during working hours. Sure, we’ve all done things like snatch a quick read of a page in a book we’ve just bought, or had friendly conversations with co-workers on the fly. But in general, you’re there to work, not fool around. Reading at work is fooling around. That’s the prevailing attitude at the majority of workplaces I’ve encountered. Nobody really likes that attitude but that’s the way it is.
The last department I worked in didn’t see it as a problem and I’ve never had any complaints about not pulling my weight. Its not stealing company time and in my opinion actually led to a more relaxed and comfortable working atmosphere while not impacting production.
But if the boss doesn’t want me to read on the job I won’t read on the job, its not something I agree with because I don’t see where its doing anyone any harm but there you go. It’s not really a big deal, just something I thought was worth discussing.
I’d have to get a new job. But that’s me. I don’t have patience for anyone that’s going to criticize my process. I’m goal oriented, and if reading a book for a while helps me attain that goal, I’m going to do it.
If you can stand it, well then it’s part of the job. But I wouldn’t want to work in that kind of enviroment. I don’t really believe in these parochial concepts of work environments.
When I was young and just entering the working world I heard two ‘Captains of Industry’ give totally opposite opinions of a worker’s desk. One claimed that good employees had clean and neat desks. Lots of papers out indicated disorganization and would lead to mistakes, confusion, and a loss of productivity. The other claimed that a clean desk was a bad sign, indicating that an employee couldn’t handle more than one thing at a time, and spent excess time cleaning and filing papers instead of keeping them easily within reach. Of course they were both wrong, each person is going to have their individual styles, and a good manager will leave room for employees to operate optimally within their own comfort zone.
That’s what I normally work with, too. If someone was reading a book during work hours, I’d assume that their supervisor will go find them some more work - book reading is for your breaks, not for work time.
I’ll certainly allow the possibility that other jobs work other ways, where if you’re waiting on a process or waiting for more work to come in, there isn’t anything else you could be doing that is work-related and your supervisors are fine with that. It sounds like you’ve moved from one environment to the other, Disposable Hero.
Yeah, I am an expert at *looking *busy. If I sat at my desk and read a book or a magazine, no matter how far ahead I was on *my *project, I would quickly be told, “If you’re not busy enough, you can help Mike with the scanning or Barry with the databasing or Lisa with her project or here’s some filing that needs doing . . .”
I would have been happy to work at something, ANYTHING, in the box office. But during the lulls in selling the tickets, I couldn’t have done anything but stare into space, read, or masturbate. And I really do think that my boss would not have been happy if I’d played with myself in the box office, even if the customers could only see me from the waist up (I was in a slightly raised room).
I left my last job over similar bullshit. I’d never noticed how much downtime I had because I was able to spend my time surfing the internet, sometimes on the dope or checking email but mostly keeping up with industry news and updates which, considering it was a health insurance company, were constant. They had always been strict with time at the office (if you were more than 59 seconds late for work or back from lunch you were written up, they timed bathroom breaks, etc.) but they’d never cared about internet usage before. Then they noticed me online and pulled me aside and told me never to use the internet again, not even for work related things.
I sucked it up and did exactly as they asked and despite my constant searching for more work I found I only had about 2 hours of work to do in a given day. That 2 hours was spread out over the course of an 8 hour period and I worked crazy hard for that 2 hours but that was all the work that needed to be done. After 3 weeks of literally just staring at the wall for 6 hours a day I went on maternity leave. When I came back 8 weeks later I checked all my emails and answered my voicemail and did everything I needed to do in about 3 hours and was left with nothing to do again. After spending 5 hours doing nothing useful when I could have been at home with my gorgeous daughter I went home to be told that my childcare arrangements had fallen through and I would be without a babysitter for more than a week. I took it as a sign from fate and quit my job the next day. It was the best decision I’ve ever made.
I had one of those jobs. I got a job as a receptionist for this little place that never had anyone actually come IN to the business 1) because they couldn’t find us, and 2) because we did scut work for big financial and medical lawyers, and even their interns were too good for us, so we always had to send couriers to and from them to pick up the business.
So - I sat at the desk, answered the phones maybe 6 times over the course of the day, and read books. I helped the office people when I could, but half the time they were reading themselves (or got sent home for lack of work) so there really wasn’t much I could do otherwise. It wasn’t like the phone cared about the books or magazines.
Then several of my friends also got hired as office drones, and whenever they would be forced off the clock, they’d hang around in the office and play Magic with me until something came up, and since they were there, they always got to be the first ones back on the clock instead of the people who went home.
That was an awesome job. Until the owner realized that he couldn’t manage his way out of a wet paper bag, hired an efficiency expert, who hired an office manager, and we all got fired the next week.
I visit the owner every once in a while, and he’s doing a lot better. I am a bit peeved that he laid us all off the week before a holiday, but really - he was running things into the ground, so I can’t really blame him for trying to fix it.
My current job is very tolerant of reading and internet surfing on the job - unfortunately, while I have decent amount of time where I can internet surf, finding time to read unmolested is quite rare. I get the feeling they knew this, and so didn’t worry about making an unpopular rule since they knew no one would be able to “waste” too much time reading anyway.
My previous job was in a small call-centre doing telefundraising for various charities. Working from an auto-dialler meant there was often long lags between active calls, and being a word-puzzle and sudoku addict I found the best way to stay awake and relatively alert was to have some puzzles on the desk in front of me. Nothing too engrossing, just something to help while away the hours.
Now my boss (who was otherwise a lovely bloke) did not take kindly to what he saw as a ‘distraction’ to my work. No matter how many times I tried to explain that it was in fact better for me to keep from becoming otherwise comatose, he just didn’t get it. I learned to hide the puzzles under worksheets when he was around, and had a few stooges scattered around the office to warn me of his movements, but every now and again I’d get caught…and it was time for another lecture in his office. I’d promise never to do it again: once a whole month went by before being sprung.
Now I do essentially the same job but from home, and the management encourage workers to play on the net, read, do puzzles, do whatever it takes to keep yourself sane.
Funny - the place I describe is the only place I’ve ever worked that was also really strict about time in the office. Not so much about bathroom breaks, but I remember having to get special permission to take an hour and fifteen minute lunch twice a week to take a dance class (and, of course, work an extra fifteen minutes at night to make it up.) You also had to sign yourself in and out with a timestamp every time you came or left the office.
I’ve been working professionally for almost 25 years now, and that’s the only office that’s ever had those kinds of rules.
