Sorry, I guess I wasn’t clear. There’s nothing prohibiting us from making a visit at 3 am if it’s *necessary *( and sometimes it is). And there’s no problem with visiting on the way to or from a party on Saturday or Sunday afternoon, before or after working in the office ,etc. But there are considerations to be taken into account other than the employee’s convenience- in my example, waking the whole house up at 3 am for no reason other than my convenience. I guess my point is much the same as yours because in my opinion, good employees take these issues into account without needing rules regarding prior approval for work between certain hours.
I think a lot of it has to do with WHAT you do.
For software developers, engineers and other jobs where there’s a specific, particular task that needs doing as part of a project, working your own hours might work well- it ultimately doesn’t matter if you work on it from 5 pm - 1 am every day or 8 am - 5 pm, so long as it’s done on time and well.
However, for a lot of jobs, there’s either a time-sensitive component (a lot of support type jobs), or a large face-to-face component. For example, bank people can’t just do their stuff at 3 am because they feel like it- there are daily cycles and what-not that more or less require that a lot of things are done in the afternoons. IT support people tend to have to be on call or manning a desk during certain times of the day. And my job as a business analyst can require a lot of face-to-face time with the business and the IT department. It would be damn near impossible to do well if I couldn’t coordinate that kind of thing without having to deal with people at the beach on vacation for the first 2 weeks of the month, or who take every Tuesday off, or only work from 11 pm - 7 am.
You can say that it’s their responsibility to fit in with my needs, but in practice, they’ll balk at that, and I’d end up being the asshole who threw them under the bus because they couldn’t make my 1 pm Tuesday meeting.
For software developers, another advantage is that is discourages over-engineering, which IMO is one of the biggest diseases afflicting modern code.
IME many software companies are moving towards more flexible ways of working, but a completely free-form working environment is a long way off for most.
If you’re paying $70,000 for a software engineer it’s reassuring to see them in their familiar place, apparently doing something. Seeing an empty chair is as disconcerting as seeing an empty space in your kitchen where you expected your fridge to be (and the comparison of an employee to an appliance is deliberate).
I work in a ROWE. Specifically ROWE, not telecommuting or simply ‘work from home’ situation, as a government worker.
It was a difficult roll over for many, especially for those in management who were of the “warm bodies = work being done” mindset. Micromanagers had to give up a lot of control, and some left. Some workers also could not handle having such autonomy, and still go into office every day. That’s their choice.
We are limited in that our program is in production mode for 12 hours/day. You can work after 7pm, but you can’t do actual work in the program. I tend to do referrals, letters, general cleaning if I chose to work after 7pm. We have core client hours that require us to be available by phone and in person. Our team rotates phone coverage, so I take calls for all of us maybe 3x/month. I am required to be in office one day out of maybe 10 to send mail out that clerical won’t handle. It’s my responsibility to appear in office for meetings and conferences, and to handle mail that the coverage person cannot. I see walk in clients a few times per month, a job that is now shared by all of us in my division.
There are some who are not allowed to ROWE, and that was their decision to remain in those jobs when ROWE began. Usually, they’re the clerical workers who must be present to pull from printers and the reception staff.
The biggest issue I have had with this environment is having management quantifying our jobs. Much of my job is working with people to obtain an ideal outcome. How I do that may be different than someone else, which is perfectly okay in our system. It can be annoying to have to justify why your caseload looks like X when they’re scoring for Y. But, I do it. And yes, we do have slackers (I posted a minirant in the Workplace thread very recently about an abuser). However, that’s not on ME, that’s on her supervisor. All I can do is work my job.
I don’t want to go back to the way things used to be done. I actually have sick leave now, as I can work late to “make up” for doctor appointments. I find that I am MUCH more productive (so much so that I’m here, as I’m caught up). Yes, it can be depressing to be the only person on your side of the building when you go into office. It does suck that other areas we deal with won’t work with this style, and still make demands that under ROWE we’re not required to do, but if we want to get our work done we have to comply (does that make sense?).
Quantifying jobs is a big one. I’ve been in environments where they really weren’t sure what they specifically wanted me or anyone else to get done that (month, week, day, until the next weekly meeting, etc.). Managers allocated work based on what they thought you could get done in 8 hours. If you ran out, you were expected to go begging, “please sir, can I have a little more work?” So, there was also little incentive to improve your own efficiency and work smarter (not harder), since as long as you were at least meeting deadlines since the reward for getting stuff done early was more work, not extended lunches or beach time. Once in a while, managers had to assign “make-work” in order to get someone up to the minimum expected number of hours so they didn’t have to be docked by HR.
My girlfriend works for a company in which everyone works from home, so in fact it does exist. And they still need managers and HR people.
I work something like this (research in academia). Nobody cares when I come in, or when I leave (apart from when we have a meeting, or days when I’m teaching during term time). I can work from home when I like. All that matters is that I get my work done. I’d say it works OK as everybody is motivated to do their work anyway.
So basically, freelance work on a fixed salary?
I think there are very few jobs where this is feasible. It certainly wouldn’t work for any real-time customer service roles. And it would only work for roles where outputs can be easily quantified, otherwise there is too much room for interpretation. It’s also highly individualistic and doesn’t account for jobs where you need to collaborate with others to get stuff done.
In my own job, my contract states that I work from Monday to Friday and should be at work (physically or virtually) between 10am and 3pm, but the rest of my 36.5 hour working week is up to me to schedule. My manager is very hands-off and is out of the office a lot himself, so there is no one ‘monitoring’ my presence (or lack-of) on a day to day basis.
Good point. The general rule in development seems to be that the engineering time expands to fill the time allocated, plus a little bit. If you give a developer a task to finish the TQR Module Phase 3 Enhancements by next Friday in a normal environment, he’s going to take his time at the beginning and may do more presenteeism than actual work, knowing he has plenty of time and that there’s really no reward for getting done early because he’s still expected to work 8 hours a day. Then, of course, something goes wrong at the end and development spills over the deadline because there are issues.
One thing I would love to see is an environment that isn’t a true ROWE, but at least doesn’t have the daggone timesheets. Managers love to nitpick hours on timesheets, but the reasons they raise aren’t what you might guess. Only once in my career has a manager ever questioned the number of hours I really worked in the sense of saying, “robert_columbia, you put X hours down but I was watching you and I think you only worked Y”. Timesheets get held up because the numbers don’t match what was planned and that messes up management’s precious statistics, and that’s A Bad Thing 
. One time, I had worked extra late to get some really important stuff done and then left early the next day, after the “core hours” period when people were fair game for meetings and were expected to be at their desks had ended and the people who show up at 7 in the morning were already going home. When I submitted my timesheet, it didn’t matter what I had accomplished. The problem, and the only problem, was that the manager also wanted the name of the manager I had spoken to to get authorization to work a nonstandard schedule. Nothing else mattered to him. Nothing in the policies as far as I was able to tell actually said that you have to work at least 8 hours a day, only that you were expected to put in a full time workweek - it was only an unwritten sort of assumption that “work 40 hours” meant 8-8-8-8-8 and not 11-5-8-8 which could be ignored for good cause shown.
Sure, but also, as I say, over-engineering.
It’s often better to have a programmer idle some of the time, than have them try to make themselves useful by making the code more powerful or generalized than it needs to be. Because often such improvements lead to bloat and difficult to understand code. And of course, developers always believe everything needs to be refactored.
For those reasons I gave up honestly filling out timesheets long ago. Every day I just put down 7.5 hours, 8:30 - 5:00, no matter what (well, aside absence of course :)).
I feel bad for the contractors, who obviously must give an accurate record, as every manager seems to have a different strong opinion on how flexible hours should be.