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Your entire premise is incorrect. Companies hire people to make money for them, not to work for every second of their schedule. As someone with an extensive management background, I didn't care if employees played on their phone for 40 minutes out of every hr, as long as their production was there. I didn't care if they showed up 5 hours late.
Why should you care? Because it isn't about production with you at all, that's just the pretense. It's really about control.
WRONG again. It's about earning your money while you are there and following company rules and regulations. My job as the manager was to ensure production schedules were met, and that everyone was doing their job. If I didn't do that job well, I would be fired just like everyone else.
The customer asks for x amount of product in a specific lead time. The company develops a plan to meet the customer's schedule. If someone deviates from the plan, lead times cannot be met, and customer deliveries suffer. Which causes the supplier scorecard ratings to drop. Drop below a certain percent, and the customer drops the supplier altogether.
So shame on companies for actually asking employees to work a full 8 hour day. It boggles my mind how so many are quick to blame companies and management for being too tough on them and not let them do what they want for 8 hours a day. When you get hired, you already know the expectations. If you don't fulfill them, then you didn't meet your end of the agreement with the company.
You are conflating 2 separate issues:
1. production
2. micromanagement
I have news for you- 2 doesn't lead to an increase of 1, it often leads to a decrease of 1.
Why? Because employees inevitably fight back micromanagement and sabotage the company. Because no one likes to have their every second controlled.
I work doing customer service at an airport. One of their policies is not to have your cell out while working. Well, they caught me today with my cell out and sent me home. They also took my job-issued ID and told me not to come in tomorrow (They told me to call the head boss tomorrow). Im still new to the job and i already have one other write-up. I feel like crap knowing its pretty much over.
edit: i've been there almost 3 months now.
I could see why they have a rule like this. In a customer facing setting, having your phone out makes one appear inattentive, not to mention it's obnoxious.
At the same time, I consider this an infraction where I believe you should get 4 or even 5 chances i.e. a "strike" and not an "out."
In college, I worked front desk at a hotel in my college town. No one was at the hotel, so I left the desk and watched the game in the lobby directly across from the front desk. That said, management didn't like that so I was canned: only time I was ever fired. I picked myself up and got a job that paid $4 an hour more only 2 weeks later. Just pick yourself up and go get that next job.
The op says he's been written up before for a number of things, and he thinks it's all b.s., and he refers to the people who provided camera evidence to his employer as "fckers". He takes zero responsibility for his choices, blaming everyone else instead. If you think this attitude hasn't been exhibited to his employer by now, you're dreaming.
This is not a surprise - we see it in this forum all the time - and it speaks to the maturity of those whining about rules, companies, HR, hiring managers, etc. In their minds, there shouldn't be so many rules and those who follow them are butt kissers and corporate slaves. Do you really want a company filled with people who think like this? You think service is bad now? It's going to be a lot worse in another 20 years, given the high percentage of prima donna crybabies coming up.
Everyone has down time. Checking a phone every 50 minutes is extreme. Violating policy once can happen; doing it again is something else. Stating people should follow the rules doesn't translate into the expectation that they be robots working every second of every working hour, but some of you are using that argument to justify pouncing on NLambert, who simply did the math on the study I cited, which I posted to support the theory that people are spending too much time on their phones in the workplace and it's become a problem.
I'll bet a lot of the naysayers here are hourly and therefore, take breaks, but still think it's too hard to work two hours without checking email, texting, etc.
Oh and by the way, not once did I ever say people had to work non-stop like machines. But.... I took the math that I produced and showed my employees (who were constantly telling me 5 minutes didn't hurt) to SHOW them how it did. I then showed them how that money came from indirect, and once indirect reached a certain threshold, any monies available for bonuses were used to cover the additional expense.
It didn't 100% resolve the issue, but what it DID do, was get employees to think about every action having a consequence. Most decided to be at their work station on time so that we had funds available to get their bonuses.
Nlambert, serious question. Let's say you hire Employee X and they must have Y amount of production per day or they will be fired.
Employee X does indeed produce Y amount per day. However they are on their phone throughout the day a minute here and there. Maybe 30 min to 1 hour per day. Do you fire them because they could be producing more despite meeting the goals?
How about the same employee who gets talked to, and stops using the cell phone but production doesn't increase because they are unhappy now. Do they get in trouble for not increasing production since they could produce Y and still were "wasting" time.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
41,938 posts, read 36,935,179 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nlambert
No..... incorrect.
The customer asks for x amount of product in a specific lead time. The company develops a plan to meet the customer's schedule. If someone deviates from the plan, lead times cannot be met, and customer deliveries suffer. Which causes the supplier scorecard ratings to drop. Drop below a certain percent, and the customer drops the supplier altogether.
So shame on companies for actually asking employees to work a full 8 hour day. It boggles my mind how so many are quick to blame companies and management for being too tough on them and not let them do what they want for 8 hours a day. When you get hired, you already know the expectations. If you don't fulfill them, then you didn't meet your end of the agreement with the company.
If you know what you're doing in project management, you account for unexpected delays, downtime of systems, sick time, vacation, etc. You never assume or produce and estimate on full 8 hr non stop productive days.
Oh and by the way, not once did I ever say people had to work non-stop like machines. But.... I took the math that I produced and showed my employees (who were constantly telling me 5 minutes didn't hurt) to SHOW them how it did. I then showed them how that money came from indirect, and once indirect reached a certain threshold, any monies available for bonuses were used to cover the additional expense.
It didn't 100% resolve the issue, but what it DID do, was get employees to think about every action having a consequence. Most decided to be at their work station on time so that we had funds available to get their bonuses.
Just to take your theory and turn it upside down, my most productive workers that I ever had worked either 35 or 30 hours a week. That's right, I'm making an argument that less working hours often equals= more production.
I think many people are failing to realize that this OP isn't about productivity. Obviously if the OP has passengers in front of him, he can't use his phone. The OP works in an airport and in this day and age, everyone needs to be aware of their surroundings. At least that's how I'm looking at it, not whether or not he's productive. He clearly said he didn't have any passengers so it didn't affect work flow.
I'll use my company as an example. We employ around 85,00. people.
Let's factor in an 85% productivity rate since some say people can't be productive all the time (this is definitely true in our industry as we are waiting on others before we can do our work).
Now let's do the math again. If we work 8 hr days at 85% productivity, that's 408 minutes per day.
42,500 people (1/2 of 85,000) * 408 minutes = 17,340,000 minutes per day that should be productive.
If half the work force plays on their phones for 5 minutes every 15 minutes, that's 24 instances per day. 5 min x 24 instances = 120 min per person per day.
If the average pay rate is $22/hr (it's actually higher) then that's $0.36 per minute. $.036 x 120 minutes = $43.20 per person, per day.
$43.20 x 42,500 people = $1,836,000 per DAY.
$1,836,000 x 5 days = $9,180,000 per WEEK.
$9,180,000 x 48 weeks (let's say 2 weeks vacation are taken by everyone, 1 week sick time, and 1 week holidays) = $440,640,000 per YEAR spent on people sitting around playing on their phones.
But you're factoring all those instances into only the 6 should-be-productive hours. If we're assuming that a total of an hour is goofed off per day, that probably captures much of their phone browsing. Half of it, according to your calculations.
So, essentially halve the grand total of wasted money.
However, the assumption that half the work force goofs off for 1/3 the work day (5 min every 15) is extreme. Realistically it's probably more like 5 minutes per hour. If that's the case, the unavoidable 'goof off allowance' more than covers that, which means that no money is being avoidably wasted by allowing Joe Worker to peek at his phone every once in a while.
This entire conversation is kind of irrelevant to the OP's situation. His job isn't(wasn't) a production based job.
If it was solely customer service, there would be little harm done by checking a phone while there were no customers. "Paying attention" to an empty room doesn't increase value for the company. For example, if a cashier at McDonald's is required to stand at their register the entire time, there's nothing they can do while waiting for a customer, so no harm in using your phone briefly.
But that's not quite the situation here either because most airport employees are also expected to be watching for suspicious activity, and that isn't something that can be done while using your phone. By the very nature of the requirement, you're not likely to notice someone who's trying to avoid being noticed unless you're paying attention.
Overall though, it still goes back to the number one problem, which is this was a violation of policy. Even if taking a break somehow made the employee more effective in this role, that's something that should be discussed before hand, not directly violated. This policy could have been put in place for any number of reasons(keeping people attentive, appearances, security risks, etc.) but the point remains that it was a policy and that was broken.
Everyone knows that airports take procedures seriously since 9/11. You can't equate this to most other jobs.
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