Working Like A Dog

Where did that phrase come from? I've rarely seen a dog work (dog sleds and seeing-eye dogs being the exceptions). Mostly, they just eat, sleep and evacuate.

Anyhow, our Project Team Leaders (which I'm a member of) agreed to have on-site Fridays. This doesn't affect me much, but it affects my work team. The on-site Fridays isn't too bad of a concept - it promotes cross-team working and keeps our team members productive on Fridays. The problem that I have with it is the enforcement of a 4pm end time on Fridays.

Though this doesn't affect me (I stay the whole day on Fridays because I'm "local"), it does affect some of my team members. I'm not too concerned about the ones that I suspect are less productive on Fridays. However, I know that I have a few team members that bust their butts when they are off-site and the only flights available to them are at 3:30pm. Their next available flight isn't until 9pm. Getting home at midnight on a Friday isn't a good way to reward your good workers. It's punishing all employees for the sins of the few.

The truth is that on a project of this size, you get plenty of productive people and a few unproductive people. The unproductive people need get their rears in gear or get off the project. Their manager needs to address the issue early and curb the behavior. If they don't, they end up in the situation that we're in now, punishing the whole for the sins of the few.

The last company I worked at put a policy in place that said that all Exempt employees needed to work 50 hour weeks. The reason for this policy was to address issues with a few employees who would show up at 10am, go to lunch at 11am, then leave work at 2pm and go to a Cubs game. All the policy did was piss off the people who were busting their butts. In other words the overachievers were being punished because some managers didn't have the backbone to tell their employees to work a decent working day.

That's what I'd call making your employees work like dogs, except dogs occassionally get a biscuit when they've done a good job. If we're going to ask our employees to work a little harder perhaps we should find a few more biscuits to hand out.