Working from home and controlling staff: How does it work?

Discussion
1

Thankfully i have got to an age where i can say retired so the word work becomes something i no longer need to think about.

But…

This is for anyone still in work, with people who are working from home.

How is it controlled. .
What is in place to know who is doing what?
How is it monitored?

When i first started in computing i had a team of 20 girls doing key to disk data entry. I had a program they logged into it counted keystrokes over time. They had to clock out for toilet breaks, log in and out for lunch, home everything. They got paid on results , dont work dont get paid…

Then Some 30 years ago i had the chance to work from home. I was writing lesson plans and course material, producing books and exercises. I had the technology at home and a quiet place to work. Great could get on with the job and do whats needed. Like cutting the grass, going cycling, fiting a swim all the important things!

No one checked on me as long as when i turned up i could deliver the course, have hand outs and exercises to suit. Everyone was happy. Even managed to write a few books and have them published.

I then changed jobs and again had the opertunites for home working, data analysis on very large files 250 mb data (biggest usb at that time) 4gb memory largest you could have on a laptop. I dissappear for 2 days and do the job to go back in to the office to run a data extraction script and then a database sql to data map across 2 different databases to get the results needed, return home now armed with 2 usbs of data so i could do the reporting needed.

One week per month i could work from home doing this with just a visit mid week for the next bit.

No checks as the reports arrived as planned.

But now after covid and other such measures.
What happens ?
If selling are those call recorded and monitored, 5 calls per hour type idea
Keystrokes?
Time on line ?

Must be a real pain to control, just interested in user experiences as to how it works

2

Hi, @callpaul.eu

Having been self-employed for the past 25 years, this was new to me, and I am sure each field has its own ways of ensuring workers at home actually “work.” But in getting my husband to retire, I decided to take just such a job, in the medical field.

My background is accounting, but I was sick of having to do it all in the finance department. So I chose the accounts payable division of a well-established Locums company. For those that do not know the term–it seems even our hospitals and medical centers now hire doctors & CRNAs via Locums: think short-term contract with an agency who can place you where you want to work and with contract terms you agree to. Then, if you like it, you keep renewing the contract. If not, tell your agency to find you another position. Much like the temp agencies who provide everything from clerical staff to legal assistants and bookkeepers to businesses.

So medical students just coming out of college with massive debt can take jobs paying much more than they could getting hired on by a hospital directly.

My job is to approve the invoices those agencies send us where they have paid the doctors, etc. and I approve for payment via contract verification that the invoice meets the terms of agreement.

While I do have flexibility in my schedule, I clock in and out at start/end of day as well as lunches. Nothing else. I am working in their systems through a VPN. If I only completed 1-2 invoices per day, it would be obvious I am loafing on the company dime. So producing results is how my job security is measured–not by watching everything I do and monitoring my activities away from the computer. They can track when I am in different apps, doing research, composing emails, etc., but it is the number of “successful” AP invoices that I produce that tells them I am doing my job. Successful means it will not get kicked back by finance managers for missing some item or detail that does not adhere to contractual terms.

I am blessed to have the freedom to continue in my self-employed, work from home style, but I am now an employee of a corporation which found (during COVID) that their people do a better job by being in their own home, free from office distractions and they save money on office space as well.

Sheila

2 Likes
3

My analysis was around the medical system for urgency. We had 2 accident and emergency departments in 2 hospitals, covering one of the bigger cities in the uk.

We were interested in how they were used.
Arrival times
Time spent in urgency
Outcomes if admitted and length of stay
What was wrong
Area of the city
Home doctor
Age
Sex
Readmission

It was to be use to justify local health centres and location.
Staffing in the department

In the end it became a stick to beat the staff with !

1 Like
4

Working from home was never allowed in my research job. Government research bodies follow the public service rules to the letter. The best they could do was flextime.
I found the work environment impossibly disruptive.
The job description was so broad they could ask you to do absolutely anything the minister referred to us, and they did just that.
I spent time entertaining foreign diplomats, talking to senators about research projects, setting up a feed database, trying to run a wool measurement laboratory,
measuring dog hair, right down to helping the police dept get fingerprints from a corpse because their own forensic department was inadequate. What I was supposed to be doing was sheep breeding research.
The net result was I did most of my real research work at home after hours. It got worse over time, and after 30 years of 14 hour days I got out.
I suppose that is part of the price one pays for being able to conduct research with public money.
Retirement was a big change. We suddenly had many more hours to do our own thing.
The two most important things I gained in that job… my computer skills and learning to shear sheep.

1 Like
5

Forgive me for posting a link on your question, but saw / read this article just yesterday.
I was not surprised by the finding. Maybe you will find it interesting.

2 Likes
6

During covid lockdown my wife worked remotely, AKA “home office”.
Q1: Did she work all day for her eomplyer?
A1: No. She cooked, and did whatever a women can do at home :slight_smile:
Q2: Was her job done?
A2: YES!

As long as A2 == “YES” why does anyone worry wether she works all day or not?
I don’t see a real reason for that, but I may be wrong as usual…

If A2 == “NO”, then the employee could get fired, no matter not-working remotely, or on-site.

Am I wrong?

2 Likes
7

My stepson was working from home, he is a IT developer on linux boxes configuration etc so remote working is no big deal for him. The company want to stop home working and so are now offering 80 % contracts, how it works i dont understand, something about he works 80 % of the week but gets paid 90 % . Some weeks he goes in every day then other weeks not. Tax benefits for him he gets pension top ups as if he is i. Fulltime plus pays less tax due to being below the high earners limit.

But still returns to my … how do you measure productivity and if they are really working

8

Maybe because I have been self-employed for so long, but I do not take naps, shower, scan social media or anything else while on the clock. I don’t know how I could do that (laundry, unload the dishwasher, etc.) and be working. Sure I can work off the clock later if I used time ‘on the clock’ for some quick personal stuff, but my company can see when I am on. And they seem to be pretty adamant that I do not work “off the clock.”

You absolutely cannot change the screensaver, timeout settings on their Windows computers. And it is like 10 min max. And when the computer screensaver comes on–it reports to everyone else that your computer is idle. Now if that is just a few minutes for a bathroom break, no big deal. But I could not go “shopping” and expect them not to see an idle computer for the time I was gone. Then there would be questions to answer :wink: So I have to clock out of their online timekeeping system in order to take lunch, an appt or even nap.

But the bottom line in my type of job is this: I cannot just not work any for a few days and expect my numbers to justify my job. As I said earlier, if I do not produce, I will not keep my job.

Sheila

3 Likes
9

I don’t know about you, Sheila, but if I were tempted to stray from my work while at home, I’d use a different computer/tablet/phone. But, since I retired before working at home was a thing, I’m not sure how they would catch me. That said, my guilty conscience would probably keep my nose to the grindstone while on the clock.

2 Likes
10

LOL @berninghausen

I do use my own computer if I need to do something (4 of them are in the same room ::slight_smile: ) but like I said, they know when you are away from your computer because it tells them it is idle.

I have my Surface tablet with Pop OS sitting right next to me and I use the GS Connect (Gnome version of KDE Connect to your phone) to have text messages appear on it, so I can reply by just shifting to its keyboard and typing. Likewise with emails in case anything important needs to be dealt with.

And like you, my ethics will not allow me to just fluff while on the clock. So I keep working. And I enjoy the work most days, so it is easy to get caught up in my research and the time flies.

Sheila

4 Likes
11

You are correct, but
what you say tends to make managers redundant
manage the work, not the people

3 Likes
12

It’s as easy as answering the question: is the job done on time?

When the workers do their job at a dedicated workplace (office?), managers just do the same.
A job needs to be done, the manager assigns it to an employee, also with a deadline, so a given timeframe is open to complete the tasks…
I agree, not all kind of jobs can be done remotely.
Like cutting grass for example :slight_smile:
And not every human is able to work remotely, some need a tight control, they need a barrette :smiley:
This kind of people will just loose their jobs when (trying to) work remotely.

Then those who work say 8:00 to 16:00 (even from home office!) and then put down the lute for the rest of the day, are any worse than those who work a bit from 8:00 to 11:00, then cook some dinner, then work again from 13:00 to 16:00, have some pause, do some house keeping, then work from 18:00 to 20:00?

I think the managers need to know the habit of their workers, and let them to work remotely or strictly require them to get to the office (or other workplace).

2 Likes
13

The idea is fine. I guess most of us are of an age where we work, to get paid but also take a pride in what we do so fair days work for fair days pay.

But imagine a 16, 18 year old scholl leaver where they have been told what to do for the lats 10 years or so just starting out with little or no interaction or guidance. Either because the managers or co workers are working from home as well

1 Like
14

Currently I see ~95% of them is interested in parties only.
So just have fun, let’s party, and such. Only a minority cares for future and work.
This makes me sad.

1 Like
15

Same here in Australia.
Is there something about our modern world that encourages this?
Or are the youth of very generation the same?

I have never read anything like an historical study of the attitudes of youth.
It there such a book?

Perhaps Margaret Mead … American cultural anthropologist

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

According to this

teenagers did not exist a few hundred years ago.
So maybe our modern world has created this phenomenon.

1 Like
16

If we were to blame someone or something for this would it be parents or teachers ?

Did we have it strict from our own parents so decided to go easy on our kids.

Is it education that is not strict or disciplined

My wife was a teacher and some days had almost no control over the teenages in her class, if they did not do homework or sit exams she could not mark zero had to give a minimum result no child was allowed to fail.

I had similar experiences so gave up education of young and move to teach adults.

We live in a blame society now sadly, someone is at fault

17

Not someone, it is the values which our modern society holds and the things we believe in.
The ‘world view’ of a culture determines what it will be like to live in.
If you look across different societies and different periods of history, you see a whole spectrum of things people believe in and value. There is no single right view, there have been a few very wrong views.
The modern western world values a very materialistic outlook. Look there for the causes of our youth phenomenon.

1 Like