> While most probably aren’t going to awol for a day at a time I know a LOT of people that now spend working hours doing leisure things

Oh, the horror!

> people are shifting work hours to ones more of convenience (again anecdotal)

They have no shame!

> But even some of my direct reports will slack significantly more if they think I’m not online. Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.I have to now probe for updates etc.

This all sounds very familiar. Let me give you another perspective on this.

It’s very stressful and disruptive to be pinged 20+ times a day. While some of those are people asking for my help, which I gladly do, a good chunk are managers and seniors asking for “updates” or checking in just to see “how it’s going”. Like we didn’t have a standup 4 hours ago. Sometimes it’s colleagues asked by the manager to check on others, so that it doesn’t look like they’re too annoying. I know because it’s obvious and I got asked to do the same many times.

The answer is that it’s going great, thank you very much. At least it was until you interrupted me for the nth time today and now I will have to waste time trying to remember what the hell I was doing in that debugging session. Actually no, a timer expired, so now I will have to restart the whole thing from scratch.

So yes, I sometimes stop answering the chat, or close it altogether. Because I want us to hit the deadline and ship on time, since I care about the team’s results instead of seeing how busy my subordinates are and feeling important for nagging people all day long.

A micromanager hurts the company by reducing productivity and team morale. Your subordinates are not “doing leisurely things” during working hours. They are probably brushing up their CV and doing leetcode to find another job.

Hey, I'm working on an app meant to help with this (well, it won't fix the instincts of bad managers, but it does provide an "at your convenience" place for topics that might have otherwise been a meeting or a shoulder tap. I'd be curious what you think about it. If you're up to share your thoughts there's a link and my email in my profile.

This is laudable, since I think recent apps like slack or teams are partially responsible for the increase in disruption.

Older ways of messaging, like IRC, were not focused so much on notifications and having a full message history that you had to go through when signing in. This forced people to use specialized forms of communication (video meetings, emails, wikis) for important information. Chat was used for casual stuff, for which it works well.

I think remote work will be an option for jobs where it's less about time in the chair and more about what tasks are accomplished. That should honestly be most jobs, and almost all white collar jobs.

Time theft is an interesting concept to me because it implies you're being paid for the time rather than for the utility of your labor. Why do you think time theft is important in your job?

>But even some of my direct reports will slack significantly more if they think I’m not online. Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.I have to now probe for updates etc. Much less time is spent on projects of interest (that also benefit the business) during periods of less “fires”. Instead it’s more bare minimum. I know many try to be understanding (myself included) because many have more than just work to deal with but it would need to be addressed if it’s becomes a norm.

Are you saying people are less productive generally? If I noticed the same I'd look into a few things: Are you sure that your KPI's focus on productivity properly? If people are performing at the minimum, are you setting the correct goals?

>Time theft is an interesting concept to me because it implies you're being paid for the time rather than for the utility of your labor. Why do you think time theft is important in your job?

It kind of goes both ways though, if you had a less productive day would you be expected to stay late to make up for it? Most of the time you would just leave at the normal time and it wouldn't matter too much as long as you look like you are trying your best.

>if you had a less productive day would you be expected to stay late to make up for it?

Not necessarily, no. If your KPI's and bonus are properly lined up, that could be something for your manager to keep an eye on but you can't expect every day to be peak productivity.

So on the same logic, if you had a more productive day you shouldn't expect to leave early. I'd say its fair to say your results are more important than time but it goes both ways.

There are a few problems with your logic. First, it only works if you're measured day by day and paid day by day. I don't get paid daily, I think it's most common to be paid bi-weekly.

Second, you still wouldn't be expected to stay late or leave early - you'd simply be paid less.

There's a simple way to set that up. If you performed above the minimum set for you, you wouldn't be fired or warned. If you consistently performed at peak productivity, you'll get a bonus based on how much you produce.

We already do this.

>I'd say its fair to say your results are more important than time but it goes both ways.

Why? What does the company gain by having you in your seat for more hours?

Has your team productivity actually dropped? You mention things that are supplemental to productivity but nothing about the actual productivity itself. If not, then I suspect there is no more "time theft"* than usual and you shouldn't get wound up by it.

* that is a hideously obnoxious and entitled phrase to use - instead of "distracted" or even simply just "not working".

Right, somehow I missed the time “theft” part. He thinks of his people as if they’re criminals.

This is like a textbook example of manager red flags that you should check for and avoid when joining a company.

I wasn’t necessarily talking about my team. In fact mine has remained productive. But it has taken more effort on my part to keep them organized and on task. I’m the opposite of a micromanager, I hate that stuff. But the fact is I’m having to probe more and more as time goes on to keep things moving. Heck it not cuts into my productivity which also cuts into my teams.

Heck Just last week I had an admin that it took 45 minutes to get a hold of during an outage mid day because he was trying to renovate a bathroom and had setup a workstation in his garage.

Time theft is just a common term and I used it for that reason.

And I’ve seen it elsewhere in my workplace and across my communities. We have seen an increase in AV/app whitelisitng reporting attempts to install mouse shakers, auto responses, running video all day to avoid idle timeouts on teams Statius etc.

People calling into meeting while out fishing, hunting, shopping doing home improvement etc and usbeing asked to locate them at xyz time.

On a personal level idgaf about personal time. I heavily encourage my employees to take it. I heavily encourage mental health awareness and having hobbies and interests outside of work. Heck I regularly take off for such things myself. And I work to give my employees projects that fit their interests and strengths.

But what would your prefer I call it when people are trying to do these things and not claiming vacation time?

If I hire someone on a salary and expect him to do X, and he meets that expectation, I wouldn’t care if he did it in 40 hours or if he did it in 10 hours and spent the remaining 30 hours fishing. I hired him to do X and he did. Why should I care how many hours he’s staring at a screen?

Now if he’s on an hourly contract, I’d expect the hours to be accurate.

For some jobs the expectation is literally “be reachable and physically at this workstation when a fire ignites”. Can’t do that while fishing. But lots of jobs are “do this batch of things, and come to these meetings at these times.” If someone can do this effectively from the middle of a lake, who cares?

Emotionally, I see "time theft" and I have to work extra hard to continue to be objective, because I associate it with the "higher productivity with static wages" problem that I don't see getting solved the way I'd hope.

FWIW I understand where you're coming from generally, I don't want to make these concerns about you or your team specifically.

When you ask or expect an employee to work late or longer (say, sending them a message at 530), do you think of yourself/your company as a "thief" of their time?

I do....And im very cognizant of that. In many cases i will be doing catch up or research, alpha testing something that may have a use case at work. I often spend nights reading things like net sec blogs etc and sometimes it will pertain to work. For example CISA guidance posts on Sparrow and CTR etc. Rather than post them as a reminder to looking into them in the am, I will hold messages BECAUSE i dont want to give the impression that i want them to read it or respond during personal time.

And in fact I have interjected into late sessions i wasnt a party to to ask parties to suspend their tshooting when i found out it was happening and it wasnt really....critical. My developers specifically can work some odd hours, which is perfectly fine, but they cant abuse my on call ops shifts for it at their leisure.

Or in cases where its needed, they are given comp time starting at 1.5x time to make up for it. Often times it more than that.

Not all work places act like the employee is cattle. Many do see the people as an asset.

Just out of curiosity, I fully agree with, but do you let employees take off time as needed? Because most people are in the 9-to-5 grind, and the 15 days yearly paid vacation aren't nearly enough.

From this and another post, I got the impression that some of the employees might not be salaried. If that’s the case (getting paid hourly and giving the impression of working while actually doing something else), I would consider that stealing from the company.

You call it time theft, I call it work life balance.

If I'm struggling with a problem, sitting on my ass for 5 hours is not going to make the solution come quicker. Going for a walk, playing video games, or calling somebody are a great way to recharge, and as long as I'm not blocking anybody or producing worse output, it's a net plus over time for productivity.

In return, I'm happy to throw in a few extra hours in the evening or over the weekend if I suddenly have a breakthrough, but I'm doing that on my terms.

The team cohesion part can be a real issue, but defaulting to asynchronous communication can really help here.

my experience is that there is FAAAAR more time theft in the office. coffee, extended breaks, walks, catching up, meetings running long to shoot the shit, " oh hey, did you see this happen last week", those quick "what do you think about... that turns into 30m convos. I clocked over 2 hours of wasted time every day for the average person for the 4 teams I am able to observe from where I sit. all expectations were met, and on time and on quality with this 20% time wasting. wfh has freed up 1.5 to 2h a day for me because people don't walk up to my desk a literal 6 times a day to go get coffee or see what's up. also the volume of "can I run something past you" had plummeted to only 10% of what it use to be. that use to happen once or twice daily, and now happens like once a week. if people don't see me sitting there, they don't ask me how to do their job. it's amazing.

not to mention I can now walk on a treadmill while at my desk, save time commuting, save money on dry-cleaning and gas, and I can be productive with my life during all those meetings you are forced to attend but don't involve you in any way. wireless headsets with the camera off is great. I can talk when needed, mute myself for 50 of the 60 minutes, and do a mindless task like vacuum, dust, dishes, fold laundry, etc, while listening to people debate pointless shit.

Caring about the specific hours an employee is working rather than the quality of their output is something I hope dies along with mandatory physical presence in an office.

The post seemed to state both hours and output have dropped.

Quality of work is something people can argue about until they're blue in the face, but hours put are objective.

Objective in the sense that someone sitting at a desk for 8 hours without moving a muscle has sat at a desk for 8 hours. But useful to the company employing them - not so much.

The GP writes:

> Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.I have to now probe for updates etc.

I think that's rather objective and affects teamwork/project cohesion.

> someone sitting at a desk for 8 hours without moving a muscle

And this is also what will ruin your health in a few decades.

...which will then reduce your productivity.

...which will then get you fired.

...which will then make you lose your health insurance.

...which will then make you lose your savings to pay for all the healthcare bills.

Luckily, none of this will be your employer's problem, because there is another person with healthy enough spine that can replace you at your desk.

Just because something is easy to measure doesn't mean it's a valuable metric. You can make the same argument about LOC.

But the results of the hours put aren't objective, so I don't get your point.

I've known people who became masters at imitating work 8 hours a day.

I don't see how them imitating 8 hour work a day in say 2 actual hours is any improvement.

You immediately assume people don't work which is not what I am seeing. Sure, some absolutely do, but you are making it look like everyone is more lazy in WFH conditions.

I don't assume anything, just going by with your hypothetical 8-hour slacker.

My bad then, but I still disagree that hours put are an objective metric. Yeah, sure, 8h have passed <- this can be measured objectively, but it's basically the only thing that can be measured objectively in a work setting.

Hours of asses in chairs isn't really a measurement of goals being meet. The quality of the time spent is what gets the goals met.

Sure, most employers would take 8 hours of quality work over 4 hours of quality work for the same salary.

Most employers aren't actually operating with efficiency as the main goal.

Look at it this way:

worker A makes 10 widgets an hour. In 8 hours, he makes 80 widets.

worker B makes 20 widgets an hour. In 4 hours, he makes 80 widgets.

Why should the employer care about which one works more hours?

How many widgets will worker B make in 8 hours?

Also, how many widgets will worker A make in 4 hours?

In my experience:

If worker worker A is not at risk of termination, bar any incentive program rewarding excess production, worker B will likely produce 80 widgets in 8 hours.

worker B will make 80 widgets in 8 hours and be unhappy because he knows the employer expects 80 and he's not going to work harder for no reward.

Worker A will make 40 widgets in 4 hours.

Let's say worker B draws 2x salary of worker A, because he is known to be twice more experienced/skilled/productive.

Ah, but didn't you say it was impossible to measure quality of work? You could only measure the time spent in the seat, right?

Now you're saying people should be judged on their outputs. Interesting change of pace.

In reality he's unlikely to draw 2x the salary for 2x the output, though, because he's operating from a deficit of information and again, the manager/hr person's main goal isn't actually efficiency.

If they're smart, though, they'll give him a performance bonus based on productivity over a minimum marker, maybe staged as productivity goes up without a quality drop to squeeze out as much as possible. At a certain point, though, money becomes less of a driver for most people so that's not the only thing they'll do. They will also tie his performance to the team as a whole, create opportunities for building 'team unity' and maybe put together artificial competition so he actually cares about team performance. Then his colleagues will push him to perform better.

You made a ton of implicit assumptions with your widget factory at home, it's not really like you caught me on anything here. I just brought in a bit of realism into your model.

Point is you expected to do an honest day of work for your pay with a good effort. That's the social contract which may well be changed in the future, but so far it isn't.

You say time in the seat is the only thing you can measure objectively. I don't agree, then give a simple example that shows you can measure productivity and you immediately switch to measuring productivity. I don't think you introduced any realism at all, you were just wrong at the start.

By the way, I've never seen someone be rewarded 2x the pay for being 2x as productive without a commission model.

And if they are on commission, nobody cares how much time is spent in the office.

>Point is you expected to do an honest day of work for your pay with a good effort. That's the social contract which may well be changed in the future, but so far it isn't.

I don't think that's true. I've worked construction jobs and you're expected to do what you're expected to get done in a day of work, not work hard necessarily. Sometimes you work hard, sometimes you don't. A lot of time is spent uselessly. I found the same thing in corporate environments.

An honest day's work for an honest day's pay would actually be pretty unusual, especially given that for it to be honest the workers would have to understand the labor market implicitly, what they could get at competing companies and what their labor was actually worth to the company employing them. Most of the time none of that happens.

Worker A and B not being interchangeable in this context, and understanding the reason for their distinction, worker B will attain the quota they've been given within the alotted time period, up to 80 units as is their capacity.

Because most people aren’t as productive as Worker B.

Having Worker B come in late and leave early sets a bad example for all the Worker As (and breeds resentment among them). Worker B staying all day and screwing around half the time and distracting Worker A so they get 8 widgets done an hour instead of 10 is bad, too.

Give me 10 average people over 5 great ones any day. Average people can get better when they work together. Great people get bored and move on. Average people are just fine for most jobs.

And I assure you that I’m decidedly average and unspectacular in every way.

How about 10 average vs 1 great?

For the huge majority of jobs, 10 average people are better, in my opinion.

Sounds like an explanation of why labor costs are a employer's largest expense.

Are you honestly suggesting your managers are unable to assess minimum levels of quality in the work of your teams?

Thank you for sharing. I find it incredible how so far all responces to your post are in-denial.

Being productive while remote is hard work and requires a high level of self-awareness and self-control. We cannot "will it into existence" by denying the negative experiences of employers.

Time theft is a real concept businesses care about. Business think they are buying time, with an eye to capture the results. If any one reads this gets confused or angry about this: go contractor. If you want to be selling results not your time then you best move into a working relationship where you sell results. Salary is a time-selling relationship.

As a remote contractor, with my own remote employee, I can say I expect the time logged to be productive time. I don't care if my employee stops work mid day to paint his house: but he better log that time. Flexibility is a responsibility, if people continue to abuse work from home you can bet companies across the world are going to return to office at the fastest opportunity.

I think the idea that businesses are buying your time (particularly in a salary context) and hoping they see results by maximizing your hours sitting in your chair is changing, and that's where the disagreement is coming from. It's not so much that they are in denial of reality but that the view of employees as time thieves or that there is just no way to understand if salaried employees produce results is already becoming a bit old fashioned.

Time theft is about the most dystopian concept I have ever heard.

A huge chunk of my time (40% approx) is consumed by pointless cargo cult corporate activities which have no direct correlation on revenue, reputation or longevity but merely serve to sustain positions or activities in the company which someone felt needed to exist otherwise it wouldn’t be a real company. This is a universal truth for all companies with more than about 50 employees I’ve worked for.

Who’s the time thief? There’s only one and it’s efficiency or lack thereof.

At best I’m good for 4 hours a day, probably in separate 1 hour long bursts with downtime between them. No mandated attendance, hours, management technique, motivational theory is going to improve that. Pay me for what I can do not when I can do it.

>A huge chunk of my time (40% approx) is consumed by pointless cargo cult corporate activities which have no direct correlation on revenue, reputation or longevity but merely serve to sustain positions or activities in the company which someone felt needed to exist otherwise it wouldn’t be a real company. This is a universal truth for all companies with more than about 50 employees I’ve worked for.

I've found it isn't so much the cargo cult stuff that causes inefficiency as it is administrative hiring and artificially increased complexity.

Kind of twisted to be upset with people for working less when productivity has increased and wages have stagnated for fifty years.

Most of the difference in value was captured by banks and central banks giving out low interest loans. I think it will revert in the next 15 years though.

> While this is entirely anecdotal I have observed a LOT of time theft by employees.

Are these employees paid hourly? If not, it’s not really time theft if the work gets done on time.

In many cases yes. I do have hourly employees that are paid for specific support time slots. Part of their job is to be available and responsive during certain hours.

And that’s my point. It’s not getting done on time.

Projects that are well planned and have long histories of identical executions are taking longer and simply being dropped if I’m not probing.

Not sure where you live, but in most places in the world the workweek is regulated.

> But I still see the need for brick and mortar work for certain....job types

Maybe you wanted to say "certain people"? Working from home is definitely more difficult for some people's work style than others, plus a ton of other factors like how well one's home is suited to working in, how much skill a person has working in that environment, etc.

Time theft is a bummer, especially on the team-level where you just want to get things done. I wonder what causes it? Off the top of my head I can think of:

- People are naturally lazy (I really disagree with this, but it feels like the default "robber baron" answer)

- People are having trouble adjusting to different and various work environments (probably a good amount of this)

- The nature of how we work in America is fundamentally unnatural for many people, and the lack of supervision allows people to assume a better work/life balance

#3 is maybe just my experience in the workplace, but it feels pretty true — I wonder how widespread that experience is.

In any case, I'm glad the pandemic forced many people to reevaluate what "going to work" looks like, and hopefully we settle on something closer to how we'd each like to work.

>Time theft is a bummer, especially on the team-level where you just want to get things done.

I've dealt with this in execs and team leaders before - why do you care about time theft? If it's about the productivity loss, that should be measurable in its own right.

Most of the time, I find that people just want to be able to see the team working for them and don't like the idea of paying people 'not to work' despite the fact that what they're really paying for are outputs.

Totally agree — I was trying to frame my comment in the terms of the GP. For better or worse, managers are often forced to think in terms of time rather than output, and I wanted to respond on that level.

For jobs where time spent correlates with output, time is a good way to think about it (and should be paid hourly), but obviously this isn't 99% of white collar jobs.

It’s estimated that your average worker is only putting in 3.5hrs of work a day. It’s unclear whether or not “time theft” (a term I despise) is worse in remote jobs, or if managers are responding to the inability of workers to fake being busy.

> But even some of my direct reports will slack significantly more if they think I’m not online. Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.

Make expectations on response times clear. I'm guessing you want it to depend on the medium used and not depend on your (appeared?) online status. Talk with your team about it. Bonus points for summary e-mail after talk.

You usually got a reponse in minutes (I assume IM or mail), lucky.

That is changing: you think it's because they slack. Maybe they much more often enter flow-state* while WFH which is so easely interrupted (or rarely gained) at the office. I know I do.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

> But even some of my direct reports will slack significantly more if they think I’m not online. Responses that are normally in minutes take hours etc.

That seems entirely reasonable to me. If I've been asked something by a coworker and for whatever reason I believe that they're AFK/offline, then responding to their message/email is going to be a lower priority for me.

I'm not going to stop whatever I'm in the middle of doing to give an immediate response if whoever asked me isn't going to read it immediately. I'll finish what I'm working on, or reply when I'm taking a break.

Network security in a WFH environment is not an issue when your infrastructure + identity & access are designed correctly.

Has work output decreased? Have you properly communicated expected response times and set an interval for requiring updates? If not, that seems like a mistake in management.

There is a way to look at the slacking part more simply, I think - if you have an employee that you sincerely have no way to tell if they are producing anything or not, and neither can anyone else at your company, then why do you have them? What was the job description meant to have been when you hired them and how did you end up here?

A solution for this could be managing to outcomes, and setting more clear expectations around their role.

One of the points that I think is underlying your post is that this is not normal remote working conditions. People are stuck at home, with kids, spouses, etc., and all other social outlets shut off. Or they are completely alone and isolated. On the flip side an all-remote team keeps the in-office people from having the advantage of hallways conversations and other low-friction means of communication that end up excluding remote employees.

It’s often difficult to gauge employee productivity. I do think that as managers we kid ourselves that we can actually improve individual productivity in any significant, sustainable way, other than helping people remove roadblocks like, you know, the kids screaming in the background while you are trying to code.

Time theft? Is that part of the Time theory of value?

How are you currently tracking against your KPIs/targets? Have they also dropped as well?

How is taking more time to respond slacking?