My team are slacking off! | Fish Percolator

Your team members are not spending all day working at their desks. What can you do about it?

Years ago, I was mentoring a junior manager in an office environment. One day, they called me into a meeting room to talk about one of the individuals they were managing.

Quinn, I need to talk to you about Shane. I regularly look over at his desk and he is playing video games! On company time!

My colleague was concerned that this was, in and of itself, a bad thing. Employees are here to work and, when they’re at work, they should be working, right? Fun activities are for break times and evenings, right?

Maybe you’re familiar with this story. You have team members who come to work later, who leave earlier, who do non-work activities on work time, who spend a lot of their day chatting… the list goes on.

So what do you do about it? How do you deal with employees who are slacking off?

What’s the desired outcome?

Any good product manager will tell that when you’re designing something, you want to start from outcomes - what is the meaningful change we desire as a result of our intervention?

I asked my colleague a series of prompt questions:

Is the quality of Shane’s work lower than you’d expect from someone at his level?

Does Shane deliver less work than you’d expect from someone at his level?

Are you worried that Shane’s example is going to have an impact on other team members?

What I was doing here was trying to get my colleague to frame their concerns in terms of a desired outcome. This takes the conversation away from “my team member is playing video games” to something measurable that might have a business impact.

In doing so, we can help to eliminate prejudice on the part of the manager. Those of us who grew up in strict home or school environments might have had a value instilled into us that is based more on a kind of relative morality than it is on the value to a business.

Specifically, I believe it is a flawed premise that slacking off is a bad thing. In many cases, it may have a business impact. In many cases it may not.

So my advice is to focus on the business impact and not the slacking off. If you can’t find a business impact, maybe there’s no reason to change anything about the behaviour!

What if slacking off was actually good for business?

When I’m not on a contract with a client, I get to set my own hours and decide how much time I spend at my desk each day.

Some days I internally beat myself up for “being lazy” - I feel that I should be at my desk at the start of the work day and be “visibly working” (whatever that is) for the whole work day apart from the lunch break, and inevitably I never actually do that.

One thing I notice is that on the days where I’m not beating myself up - where I give myself permission to be at my desk really late, to watch YouTube videos or play a video game, to take a nap or a long lunch break - are often the days where I do the actual individual pieces of work that I’m most proud of.

This comes back to something I was taught on my first ever management training course that has stuck with me for decades:

Fordist management is ineffective on thought workers

In the movies, coders are sitting in front of a green terminal tapping away as code appears on the screen at high speed. But in reality, the best modern software engineers might spend a whole day staring at a class definition on their screen, thinking hard, and then making a 5-line change at the end of the day that has a radical impact on their assignment.

Fordist management is all about building efficient production lines. In many jobs, it’s essential to plan every staff member’s day really carefully because their work is a piece of a very complex human puzzle. But in jobs where people are primarily paid to think, this doesn’t have the same effect - in those situations, people work more effectively when their barriers to clear thinking are removed.

Strictly managing someone’s work environment such as the hours they spend at their desk could be a barrier to clear thinking. For example, I’m autistic and I know that I do some of my best thinking when I’m distracted or not focussing - for example when singing along to a song or chatting to a colleague. Even your neurotypical colleagues might find they do their best thinking on the walk back from a long lunch break, or in that absent-minded shower that caused them to be late for work.

There are other barriers to people doing their best thinking away from their desks too, for example restricting their access to work systems away from their desks. That’s something for another story!

The accessibility angle

In addition to the above, being open about working arrangements helps increase access to your workplace, which creates a more equitable and inclusive workplace, leading to a greater diversity of thought and higher quality outcomes for your clients.

Some examples that I’ve encountered in my travels:

Some employees with ADHD had whole days they couldn’t come into work because they were facing challenges with executive function. Those same employees could log on at 9pm on a weekend and bash out more high quality work in an hour than some neurotypical employees could manage in a week. This shouldn’t be taken as evidence that all ADHD people are like this - just that there’s enormous value in letting people set their own hours even if those hours seem unreasonable to you.
People with complex home lives such as parents might have needs during the work day that you don’t have. Being flexible about allowing them to work around those needs will likely result in more and higher quality work from those team members.
Disabled and chronically ill people who are routinely sidelined in society for their perceived inability to do something may produce higher quality work when it’s clear that you’re valuing them for their expertise and brain power rather than judging them for an arbitrary physical quality.
And everyone benefits from an atmosphere of trust. I know I talk about trust a lot on this blog but it really is key!

A personal bugbear: “be in the office 2 days a week”

The early days of the Covid pandemic taught us that many roles can work effectively when people work from home. We learnt how to have effective video calls, how to socialise remotely and how to build a virtual office culture where everyone is physically separated.

But so many organisations have gone back to requiring people to be in the office, at least for one or two days a week.

If you ask the leadership of those organisations why, you often don’t get an outcomes-focussed answer. You usually get one of these two:

In-person meetings and collaboration sessions are so much more productive than virtual ones

Some people have expressed a desire to be back in the office but this only works if everyone is in the office for them to work with

The first one, OK, I’ll concede. There is quite a lot of evidence that in-person meetings and workshops are often more productive than online ones. But if that was the main reason, you’d require people to come into the office if possible on days where such a meeting was planned, not some arbitrary time like 2 days every week.

The second one tells me that you haven’t invested enough in building a great virtual office culture. A virtual office can be just as collaborative and just as social as a physical office, but it does take effort to make it this way. (Did I tell you that you could hire me to help you with your virtual office culture???)

So often, these kinds of policies are instituted without any clear idea about what outcome they’re trying to achieve or how to measure whether it’s working. I hear countless stories from people saying “we now have to go into the office only to be on video calls with colleagues in other offices all day”!

Making performance management meaningful

OK, so hopefully in this blog post I’ve convinced you that slacking off is not necessarily the reason your employees are underperforming. And in many cases, it might actually be prejudice and your team is performing at peak efficiency in spite of the slacking off (or even because of it!)

That is not to say that work performance issues don’t exist. You might have team members whose work quality or pace is below what you’d expect from a person of their level.

Performance management exists for a reason, and it is a valuable tool in working together with an employee to find solutions for their performance challenges, or to support them to transition to a different role if they can’t be addressed.

But eliminating the idea that “you’re distracted” or “you’re slacking off” is, by itself, a performance issue helps you to have more meaningful conversations with your team members about performance. You can focus on the actual outcomes that are falling behind their KPIs as a consequence of this team member’s performance. This will help them to understand the actual meaning behind the performance management, to take charge of the plan for addressing it, and also potentially be less likely to resent being placed in this situation.

In those conversations, you might find that distractions are an issue for that employee. In that case you can work together to help eliminate distractions, but don’t assume that what worked for this person will work for everyone that you perceive as distracted at work.

This post isn’t about performance management so I’ll save my other performance management tips for another day!

PS.

Happy new year! Maybe make yourself an easy resolution to subscribe to my newsletter?

Fish Percolator is a technical leadership consultancy based in Yorkshire.

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