I am on Salary, and expected to be in the office from 730-4. I can take a lunch if I choose, but I often don’t. I have things that need to be accomplished each day, and as long as those things are accomplished then my managers don’t care what I am physically doing every single minute of the day.
As an example, I came in today and was working at 730, I finished everything that has needed to be accomplished (so far) by 815, and have been waiting for more requests to come in. On Fridays I have set it up so that most requests that do come in are handled automatically, meaning I will have very little to do today. This will change at about 2pm, when I will need to get ready for Monday. However the amount of actual work I will do today will be about 3-4 hrs in my 8.5 hour day.
I don’t feel guilty about this in any way. The person who did this job previously was here for a lot more hours then I have ever been, yet in all of our measurables my performance is much better. I view it as the company is willing to pay X to accomplish Y, and they wouldn’t care if it took me 12 hours a day, I wouldn’t get paid more, so why should I worry if it takes me only 4?
What you’re talking about is fractional employment. While it takes a special case for it to work for any given person in the current system, it’s a viable alternative for full employment in a world with higher automation, higher ‘production efficiency’ in most fields and thus a surplus of workers.
In Germany, judges aren’t required to be present at their office in the court house except (obviously) when presiding over a trial which may be once or twice a week, or perhaps significantly less than that.
How judges organize their work at their home office is completely up to them. In the past, there were stories about judges who crammed their week’s work into one ore two days.
These days, however, the typical caseload for a judge in Germany is way to high get away with such a bohemian work ethic.
There are plenty of office jobs I know where you are judged on your output and although you are filling out a time card, no one is monitoring you to see what you are doing every minute of the day. So if you are producing at a satisfactory level, then no one will either notice nor care whether and when you are at your desk or what you are doing there any any given moment.
So, there’s a very big possibility that you might spend a good amount of time at work goofing off or conducting personal business.
On the other hand, there’s also an expectation that if there are spikes in project needs and you have to put in a lot more time than usual, or even exceed the normal work hours, that you are not going to claim overtime.
Not really. Fractional employment would be like an independent consultant who works here and there for different clients at different times.
What the OP is talking about is full time jobs where the workload tends to be inconsistent such that you may have long stretches of inactivity. Usually this is because the nature of much office work is project based, not transaction based. A call center operator would be expected to man the phones for their entire shift. Their performance would be based on quatifyable metrics like calls per hour or length of call. His manager, OTOH, would probably have a lot of down time. Maybe the end of the month is busy as he prepares his teams performance metrics reports and whatnot. And he may need to respond to various issues, meetings and whatnot at various times. But the nature of the manager’s job is such that he might not be busy every minute of the day like his staff. The manager’s “output” is the performance of his team, not how many Powerpoint decks he generates.
But typically the expectation for working professionals is that they use such down time to find stuff to do that provides either a benefit to the company or improves their professional knowledge.
Usually if you spend most of your time at your office job fucking off, you are a]not salaried and b]not doing anything all that important. I had a desk job for a while where I barely dud any work; I was a glorified receptionist/minor salesperson at a tiny business, with no supervisor.
Mine kind of works this way too. I’m in IT, and there’s already a certain feast or famine nature to what I do (business analysis), but on some of the things I do that aren’t strictly in my job description, I’m very good at automating and getting things to run smoothly and with minimal intervention. So there tend to be stretches where I’m busy and having a hard time tracking everything that needs doing, and stretches where there’s just not much to do because things are in other people’s courts and I’m waiting on them, or waiting on some other phase of a project or things like that.
So the upshot is that the famine stages are extremely slow, and the feast parts are pretty hectic, but not necessarily 12 hour days or anything like that. Basically what makes it super-busy is when I’d normally be adequately busy, and something breaks, or some other crisis occurs.
But in 12 years of IT, I haven’t ever had a job that’s consistently kept me 8 hours a day busy- there’s always been weeks of boredom, and weeks of frantic work that alternate. On average over that time, I’d say I tend to actually work about 4-5 hrs a day, which isn’t all that much lower than everyone else- the averages I’ve seen are more like 6 hours a day of actual work for people who work all day.
Keep in mind that getting a soda, taking a crap, talking to co-workers is all counted in that time you’re not actually doing work, and that tends to build up faster than you might think.
Understood, but it also applies to the notion of dividing up jobs among more workers. I know it more from that usage than from your example.
Again understood. That’s been a characteristic of probably 90% of my salaried employment. I think it’s also becoming more common across the employment spectrum in jobs that don’t (essentially) consist of shoveling an unending pile of stuff from one place to another. Which is why I injected the comment; I believe fractional employment is the only workable solution to a decreasing need for workers.
ETA: Remember, it was once argued that a reduction to 8-hour days and a 40-hour week was impossible featherbedding and socialist job-mongering. Much the same will be said about a reduction to 10-hour weeks, and it will be just as wrong, given the evolution of employment and work management.
I’ve had a couple jobs like that, one salaried, one an hourly temp position. When I was a salaried photographer for a business weekly I could, in theory, have all my work done by Wednesday afternoon, and then just wait around for last-minute assignments to come in. Most of the time, there was work to do from Monday through Thursday (and we’d put the paper to bed Thursday night), but that work would be rather staggered. I would guess out of a 40-hour week, there was maybe 20 hours’ worth of actual work typically. Sometimes less, sometimes more. I would usually just come into the office in the morning to make an appearance, check my emails, and then go right out. If I didn’t have an assignment, I’d go hang out at a coffeeshop or something and wait for my pager to go off if anything interesting is happening.
This is not unusual for daily metro newspaper photographers, either. You may be scheduled for regular 8-hour shifts, but if there isn’t anything major going on, you might just be driving around in the city for 8 hours waiting for the desk to call you, or even just hanging out at a cafe.
The hourly job I had like that was a menial accounting temp job. There was, literally, no more than 2 hours of work a day, more like one hour. I’d clock in at 8, do the accounts receivable stuff I had to do, then wait until the mail came in at 2:30 or so to process the checks and send them out with the courier at 4 p.m. I was there for two months. For the first two weeks, I just started finding work for myself, like organizing all the files and labeling them. After that project was over and my requests to my immediate supervisor asking about any additional work to do came up empty, I just gave up and surfed the net for about six hours. I didn’t even bother to try to cover it up. After 8 weeks, my stint ended, I was offered a job, and declined (I have no interest in accounting.) At the exit interview, they asked me about the workload, job responsibilities, etc., and whether they could add a few responsibilities to the description for the new hire (that I was training.) I told them very honestly how much work I actually had and that there shouldn’t be any issue in adding tasks to the job.
IT is good for this. As bump said, it’s often feast or famine. I do DB support help desk and I can be screaming busy for all 8 hours one day, then have 30-60 minutes of work to do on each of the next ten before it picks up again.
I should note that I get paid hourly, but that makes no difference. I’m paid to be here.
That’s the key difference. Hourly employees are paid to be on site no matter what needs to be done. Salaried employees are paid to do A, B and C within the timeframe given by Big Boss(wo)man or their duties as per the job description.
I would say most IT jobs are like this. (Server maintenance, etc. Not development or technical support.)
My general philosophy is that if your IT guy is spending 6 hours a day playing video games or surfing the web, and maybe two days a month coming in after-hours to do upgrades, that’s how you tell he’s good at his job. Good IT people automate all their day-to-day, solve problems proactively, and only work on periodic upgrades and for emergencies. Bad IT people automate nothing and are constantly in the emergency state.
I had a lot period at my last employer where my assigned work totaled maybe 10 hours a week max. I spent the extra time developing a new product, but I couldn’t get any funding or management support for it, so eventually I gave up and did the web surfing thing for a couple months until I left the position to find greener pastures.
Then I learned months later they asked my coworker/replacement to dig up the source code and try to get my product working again-- apparently now they think there’s a huge demand for it! Hah.
I’d say outsourcing and globalization contributes to this phenomenon. I once had a job that required me to edit files that were written by our subsidiary in China. As our office was in Montreal, by the time I arrived in the morning, the people who’d created the files had already gone home. If they sent only a few short files, or if the files were so badly written that I couldn’t continue without feedback, there was little to do until the next day.
I’m doing it now. I’m hired to do a certain amount of writing each day. I get a salary. Most days (today for example) I finish by 11:30. So full time pay for about 3 hours or work. I go trolling for other freelance jobs for the afternoon.
It still kills me, but one of the toughest things to explain to higher-ups is why it’s important to have support around. That person’s salary is a drop in the bucket (less than my boss’s annual bonus, which was scaled to 15% of her salary), but we processed $500m+ in transaction every shift with numerous deadlines and if we blow one the shit hits the fan. My boss literally has to fly to another country with her boss, meet with the board, and explain how it happened and how she will prevent it happening in the future. She’s done this. She hates this. Yet every year, I had to explain why we need that guy who plays Minesweeper and watches anime most of the time so she doesn’t wind up doing it again. It’s $1.5B a day vs. $150k a year, and they couldn’t stand it. :rolleyes:
That’s the thing. You have to plan for peak, and then factor in absences. You can’t assume that you hire N people and they’re ALWAYS there.
A while back our manager said something about us contractors being only a temporary measure and not being sure she would renew the positions when our contracts expired. My team lead responded with how they couldn’t run this team with the three of them given vacations and sick days and two people working 4 days a week and rotating hours to cover more than an 8 hour shift, etc. Manager’s response. “Oh” (silence)
A few weeks back, one of the (4/week) employees was out for two weeks on vacation, another only works 4 days a week, and the last one needed a couple of days for medical reasons. There was more than one day where us two contractors were the only people here. I don’t think having no one here would have worked too well.
So yeah, some days I spend hours sitting around reading the dope, Fark, etc. Because sometimes, like right now, I’m the only one here.
Yeah, there is the ebb and flow of the work schedule. And there’s a lot about having critical knowledge available when it’s needed too. As I mentioned above, part of what I get paid for is to be available when the shit hits the fan. And that could happen any hour of the day or night, weekdays, weekends, and holidays, and we have customers all over the world. It’s not about getting paid for an hour of some specific work at some particular time, it’s about getting the job done that’s needed.
Another factor in many of these jobs is that you can’t always get any more productivity out of a person in a day, even if only a portion of it is spent actively working. Some problems require a lot of thought before a solution can be arrived at. Sometimes you just have to wait for something else to happen before you can proceed with something. And when you are waiting it can be counter-productive to get distracted by something, or start something you won’t be able to finish. And smart employers also know not to burn out their employees.
It depends on the scale of the organisation - the above logic works for companies with a rack or two of servers - you need a minimum size tech team to cover shift patterns, leave etc, but if you scale up to a large data centre, you probably won’t employ four dozen people to sit around for three quarters of the day.