I have a small team who sit slightly remotely from me.

Work is discussed and allocated. Work is delivered – not always perfectly but done.

Anyways someone felt the need to advise dept head that each time they passed one of my remote-ish team they appeared to be surfing the ‘net. This has resulted in IT being tasked to review internet access for this individual – reasonable or unreasonable assessment.

I’m a bit miffed – (A) the person ‘reporting’ did not come to me. (B) one of my team is potentially taking the p (C) makes me look a bit of a twunt too.

I trust folk to put in a decent days work, and don’t have time to micro manage every hour of every day. I also recognise that there is a spectrum of ‘working hard’.

So….what should I do? I guess the IT review will guide the immediate outcome but never had to deal with this type of situation before.

you work for talk talk then

don’t be an A hole boss, talk to the person on the level and say watch your internet use while other people can see your screen, minimise it to a letterbox or something. If they are able to turn in work on time and to a satisfactory standard then don’t feel the need to tell them they shouldn’t on the web at all otherwise they’ll hate you and just close the window whenever you walk by.

Does the team member produce good work? Do you want to keep them?

People perform better when they are relaxed and happy, and for some people *cough* surfing forms part of this. It may HELP his productivity and commitment. It does not follow that if you stop him surfing he’ll devote the extra time to happily slaving away for the man.

As jekkyl said – if he’s a good worker then advise him to be discrete and not take the piss.

Good lord, if I was always ‘on task’, I would flipping mental at my desk. STW saves both me, and others, a lot of unhappiness.

This person is not bad at all. Generally ask and it’s done.

That said if the IT logs show, for example, xhrs out of each day surfing the ‘net then we’ve got a problem. If this is the case then, TBH, I feel bad because I feel I’m not setting stretching enough tasks, keeping right on top of his work, etc, etc. I have no issues with folks(!) accessing the ‘net from work – but not taking the p….that is a different matter obviously, particularly when others are busting a gut.

Not necessarily. Because as said, doens’t mean that time would go into work if he wasn’t surfing.

If work is boring I simply can’t work all the time. So it’s either surf to help me deal with it or stare out of the window.

I got hauled over – gross misconduct – for personal IT use 3-4 years ago. Internet usage was monitored remotely, then it was passed to Internal Fraud who raised the charge…..all completely bypassing my line manager.

I was apparently spending 4-5 hours a day reading [mainly] this august forum. Which I doubt, it may have been open in the background, but I wouldn’t have been reading it that much.

They decided – possibly due to various breaches of procedure on their part, and possibly due to the fact that dismissing the second most productive staff member in the country would have opened a whole can of worms about WTAF was everyone else doing all day – to only give me a final warning and make me work extra hours to make up the time I had defrauded from them.

I took it on the chin, cos I’d been a dick and it was stupid of me.

Thank God for smart phones and 4G…. 8)

@MoreCashThanDash 😯

Makes me look fondly at my employer’s IT policy of “don’t look at p0rn on company time and try to avoid streaming Downton Abbey on 3G when abroad”. I sometimes wonder whether my monthly bill turns up in leather bound volumes a la Encyclopaedia Britannica but no one’s ever said anything.

Having said that, they’ve just blocked 3G access to Facebook and YouTube, but not STW yet (so it’s obviously not me they’re watching).

Edit: I don’t actually watch Downton Abbey.

They seemed to think that more than 50% of working time on STW was stretching “occasional personal use” beyond the limit. It was made clear that if it had been pron then I would have been dismissed immediately, but for 5 hours a day I’d have been blind anyway!

That said if the IT logs show, for example, xhrs out of each day surfing the ‘net then we’ve got a problem.

Why is it a problem if the work is getting done to a good standard?

If this is the case then, TBH, I feel bad because I feel I’m not setting stretching enough tasks, keeping right on top of his work, etc, etc.

Does the person get paid enough to be stretched?

I have no issues with folks(!) accessing the ‘net from work – but not taking the p….that is a different matter obviously, particularly when others are busting a gut.

Busting a gut at work doesn’t sound healthy. It’s a poor manager that has people busting guts.

gets ridiculous when it’s IT, could be looking something up on stackoverflow.com or what ever even facebook has “useful” user groups. We had a surf “nanny” at one place I worked and we always needed reference material images and such like… so we just circumvented with our ISPs proxy server. When I worked at codemasters some of the guys would watch tv/films while they worked 🙂

And the award for vaguest forum thread title (October 2015) goes to … this one!

(A) From my reading of this, you’re a bit miffed that you’ve been bypassed, even though you’re the team leader. Perhaps speak to your dept head first, particularly if you have a good working relationship with them, just to check the other person didn’t realise it was something they should speak to you about. It may be that your dept head has to gently remind the person that they should report concerns to you, as the team leader.

(C) You can’t be expected to keep an eye on everyone all the time and you have to have a certain level of trust in your team. Put your concerns about ‘A’ to one side, get up to date with what was reported and how HR are going to get involved (this is probably not something IT should be solely investigating), and give your team member the reassurance/support they need if they’re a hard worker.

If this is the case then, TBH, I feel bad because I feel I’m not setting stretching enough tasks, keeping right on top of his work, etc, etc.

Does the person get paid enough to be stretched?

[/quote]

Hypotheticals… if the person can complete the work easily within the time then yes give them more work, probably a little pay rise too. The working world has too many coasters doing just enough.

It’s one of the pitfalls of remote working/management that you can’t pick up on the things day to day which would probably have told you that you were not giving enough work to that person.

I’d also be asking what the rest of them were up to and what is stopping them delivering and surfing the net for xhrs/day!

As bad as it sounds to some when your in work you’re paid to work.

The working world has too many coasters doing just enough.

What’s wrong with coasting at work?

You pay me to do a job, I’ll do the job. However, unless you’re paying me at a level that buys all of my abilities and effort levels then you’ll not be getting them. Tell me what’s wrong with that.

I’ll pay you for the hours you work then… whats wrong with that?

Employment is different for lots of people, I’m employed to deliver the skills and abilities I have rather than complete x button presses/min. It’s always something a smart employee can use as a bargaining chip during pay negotiations or promotion/progression. For me those that do the bare minimum and have the pay me more I’ll do more during the working week go to the bottom of the pile when it comes to moving forward.

I’ll pay you for the hours you work then… whats wrong with that?

Depends what the rate of pay is and what the job is.

Sorry no help but “twunt” is my new favourite word ever!

It’s not a good sign that the company has decided to go down the ‘track him’ route rather than having a quiet chat – stinks of silly authoritarian ‘we own employees and will treat them like children if we don’t like what they do’ old-fashioned attitudes…

If this guy is generally doing a good job then overall all is good. However, if he is spending hours a day on t’internet then you have to ask why he’d rather do that than work – is his workload too low, is workload not equally distributed across the team, is he capable of far more or more challenging work?

If HR procedure allows you, I would have a quiet word and get his side of the story and if he has spare capacity discuss how else his time could be used productively in a way which he would find motivating, would benefit you and would benefit the company…

MoreCashThanDash – Member

I was apparently spending 4-5 hours a day reading [mainly] this august forum. Which I doubt, it may have been open in the background, but I wouldn’t have been reading it that much.

I got exactly this line in a previous job… I’d have some sort of internet thing going on in the background pretty much all day and hit it for a couple of minutes every so often, in dead spaces or to blow off steam or whatever, but that got interpreted as “You’re on the internet all day”. Luckily our work was also internet based so I could disprove it by showing simultaneous “access”, and phone logs, but it was pretty nasty (and idiot boss at the time really wasn’t for listening, I had to go a long way to get anyone to accept the flaw in the argument)

Does the individual get the job done? You might not have seen their usage but you’d be aware if their internetting was leaving a gap in performance, right?

Looks over shoulder

I worked somewhere where the build process to test your code took about half an hour. So make a change, build, wait, make another, build, wait, and so on. During the waits, we’d open websites. Then (as we were all contractors) they tried to subtract the time spent surfing from the hours we invoiced.

That boss was an utter bastard though, or at least he acted like one because he thought it made him a good boss. He must’ve had a hard upbringing, that’s all I can say.

I actually asked IT support to add STW to the blocked site list, and they thought I was insane. And didn’t do it.

Just while I’ve got time, I have had this issue before, and I found the really easy solution was to ask the pers