Workaholics, or model workers?

"trust us"

Why its not bad to allow employees to scr*w around on the internet a bit, work remotely and enjoy a non-traditional workplace.

I totally agree with this school of thought. Employees are going to daydream and not be 100% productive all the time anyway. I know I’m taking a bit of a detour from the infographic (and point of the post) pasted below, but tangents are what drives this blog.

/OnTangent

A happy employee is a productive employee. Arbitrary work hours, meetings for the sake of meetings and busy-work have no place in the a workplace in the year 2011. As long as an employee is doing their job, being creative (if the job calls for that) and responds to inquiries, I don’t see the harm in letting them set their activities or even work location during the day.

Honestly, I’ve always worked faster and more efficiently when working out-of-office for 2 main reasons.

-Less distraction: I know it sounds the opposite of what should be true, but when you’re home, etc doing your work, at least in my experience, you have less things that can pull you from each task.

-Without having to drive/commute, you’re work day is actually shorter, why not work faster and extend it even further. Subconciously EVERYBODY* works slower in an office, in order to fill the entire work day. I’ve gotten DAYS of work done in an 8 hour period off-site, mostly because I wanted the extra time to relax and work on my car, walk the pup, sleep or fill-in-activity-here-______. You sit down, crank it out, everybody is happier because things are submitted ahead of schedule and you have the rest of the day to yourself. It’s a win-win.

Then there’s the flip side. A few winters ago when DC got the UNBELIEVABLE amount of snow, my company’s VPN servers couldn’t handle the increased traffic (1000% above capacity on some estimates) so while 1 out of 10 logins were successful, nobody could actually reach any resources due to the bottlenecks… Those kind of issues (like once in a while 100% offisite workforce) will always be an issue, but until companies embrace it from a top-down mentality instead of once in a while, specific tasks/people, there will always be busywork.

If higher ups can’t trust their employees to be productive organically (or trust them at all) why hire them in the first place?

Don’t you think people in the early 1900’s felt the same way about the workplace when telephones began to replace face to face meetings?

/EndTangent

…or you could turn your actual work INTO a game. 

Source (not even remotely for the post content, ha)-> http://www.geekosystem.com/play-at-work-infographic/