What do you do when your boss is away?

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I was reading this article the other day about this subject and I was wondering how true it is…
Do people tend to slink from work when their boss is away?
I would say they are two different points here:
1. It depends on the boss
2. It depends on the employee
A thief of work time would do that even when the boss is in and doesn`t see him or her.
And what do people do? They chat or surf the internet, they take longer breaks, they play computer games, they blog or communicate on forums, they chat on the phone, read magazines, they come in late or leave early.I have seen companies that have very strong regulations and companies that have more liberty.
There are companies that do not have internet access at all due to security issues, and companies that have restricted access, and companies that have it all, including areas for fun.
I’ve seen one interested last year with restricted access. Due to the type of business that they were doing most administrative departments needed internet access – so it was like that – no chatting except the one authorized by the company ( you still could add your personal friends in there), no access to any personal e-mail like Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, no access to send e-mails from the company e-mail outside the company, unless you added the person in the company address book and someone from IT authorized the entry, no access to YouTube, blogs, social sites or online games or other things like that. Guess what? Break time! You had access to your favorite sites from 12.30 to 13.30 and after 5.00 when normally the program was ending.
There was a favored department that had access to YouTube, blogs and social site all day long (lucky them – you would say), hm, but they got work to do – Communication and Marketing.

The things that some employees miss to understand is that playing online games or watching videos, slows down the server – and some of your colleagues may have troubles working.

Source picture Scutu/Senior interactive-advertising for job employment

I don`t like very strict companies. I worked once in a company – where I felt I was in a jail and all my friends laughed at me saying I work for very secret projects. No, not at all, far from that – there was no internet access, no cell phone network – you had to punch in and out even if you went to the washroom. And every department was closed like that. At a certain point I had access to see if they really counted these things, and they did. You could see one person itinerary in the company, in which department he/ she was, when he/ she was in the cafeteria, in the smoking area or at the washroom. The policies or very strict saying that one should come in 15 minutes earlier to allow time to settle for work, have a 15 minutes break at 10-10.30 another around 3-3.30 and the one hour lunch break between 12.00 to 14.00. If someone got over this one hour and a half allowed break with more then 15 minutes per day that would be cut off from the working hours. If for personal reasons one had to break this rules – he/ she had to speak with the manager that had to write a note to the department in charge for this tracking. Plus every manager had to write a report every month about a different tracking - that was installed on the computer – and counted when the system was opened and time really worked.
What happened when the boss was out? The fact is that the first manager, I worked with, he also disagreed with all these strict polices, so I was lucky – when the Director was out – we were having parties in the office – we were buying jus and cakes and play on the system between us, so it didn`t log off. He caught us once, ha- ha, and the manager said it`s someone’s birthday and we all sang “Happy birthday” out of the blue to the lucky guy.

The idea that I`m trying to raise here – is not who is doing what when the boss is away, but do coercive regulations increase productivity?

The company that I told you about was not very productive, because the high management tended to invest in things like tracking hours, instead of making happy its employees.

I got this answer once: “What does the company care how I organize my time at work 8 hours a day, as long as I am doing my job. I`m allowed to eat, drink and relax, that will make me more productive. If I`m stressed out – I`ll do a poor job and I won`t neither care about what`s happening. When I`m doing a poor job and they did everything for me – there is a problem there.”

So, it`s the boss fault when employees play computer games all day long when he is out of the office?

Note: This was written one morning when my boss was away and I was all alone in the company. I hope he doesn`t mind – I still prepared those three business proposals I was in charge of. Sssttt! All my other colleagues came in at 10, instead of 9, and I was there at 8.30 – poor me.