Down Time
As part of the plan to return to office, my company has done a lot of re-designating of who can permanently work from home, who can hybrid, etc. I really wanted to work from home full time. I hate the office with a burning passion—it’s distracting, it’s a long commute, there’s no benefit to being there, so on and so forth. I’d just rather be at home.
Well, when we thought May was going to be go back to office time, they started giving out the new designations. I got designated as in-office full time. It made no sense to me. I work on a team of 8 people and each of us is in a different office somewhere in the country. I’ve literally never been to an in-person meeting or needed to do in-person work in 3 years at this company. It gets more infuriating than that.
Every single other person on my team got designated to work from home. So I brought it up with my boss and asked to work from home. When I started at this company and lived elsewhere, I got to work from home for four months before I moved, and the past 14 months I have been at home, so 18/36 months at the company have been WFH. What I was told is that I “go idle” too often in chat to trust me to work from home.
Basically, we have a company-wide IM system that shows you as available, idle, or in a meeting. If you don’t touch your keyboard for 5 minutes, you show as idle. So they’ve decided to use this as a measure for who is working and who isn’t. The thing is, like many people in many types of jobs, I don’t have stuff to do for a full 8 hours every single day. The amount of work I have to do on a typical day takes 3-5 hours of actual attention.
There simply isn’t something to do ALL the time. My performance numbers actually went up working from home, by all objective KPI numbers I’m a better worker at home. In fact, in the KPIs that I don’t flat out lead the team in, I come in second. There isn’t work to do that I’m neglecting or procrastinating, when something comes up I simply do it until it’s done or until I can’t do anymore due to waiting on someone else, then stop.
And I’ve done that method long enough that my work queue stays empty because I worked to get my queue down to the point where when something comes up I can immediately address it and be done with it. But because I have other ways to spend my time in down time instead of messing around online at my cube pretending to be working, I’m a worse worker apparently.
I was told if it weren’t for that they would let me work at home. So I came up with a plan. I wrote a six line PowerShell script that virtually inputs the period key every 4 minutes and that starts running every day at 8 am and stops at 5 pm. So now I literally never go idle. I do the same amount of work and still read books, watch TV, and play video games on the side.
But I have a shiny green check next to my name all day. I just had a meeting with my boss and he said over the waiting time, they’ve noticed I go idle a lot less than I used to so they’re changing my designation to work from home, all because of a little icon in some software. This concludes my TED talk on why low- to middle-level managers are the dumbest, most useless do-nothing positions in all of corporate America.