Since the transition to work from home in March of 2020, there have been plenty of concerns surrounding employee shirking. Historically combative practices against shirking include monitoring, shorter contracts/frequent check-ins, having a well-defined output, and choice alternatives. Clearly, in-office work is a more practical setting to monitor employee behavior and ensure regular supervisor check-ins. Therefore, companies have attempted to find methods to recreate that since going fully online. The toy-brand company, Mattel, required job applicants to have a distraction-free environment (with no children, pets, or noise), a secluded office space dedicated to work, and an uncompensated supply of office supplies. The company also required at-home visits. These visits were described as unplanned visits to the employee’s home by a supervisor. These practices give less slack in an environment typically associated with slack, discouraging workers from misbehaving without consequence. While I understand that this is in attempt to prevent employees shirking, the recent success of productivity at home makes such drastic measures seem unnecessary. Working at home may lead to supervisors assuming laziness in their employees, but the trend shows quite the opposite. Sending in supervisors to check in on employees – inspecting their work environment and productivity – seems like an invasion of privacy that wasn’t present during in-office work. There are much better methods for management to ensure employee productivity and success without a breaching of trust like open and frequent communication through online check-ins and clear expectations about the job position. Employees should not be put in a position where their supervisors enter their homes to guarantee work completion.
1 comment:
Hi Nikki, thanks for sharing this story. I think it is really appalling that this is what the remote work environment has come to. I could not agree more with you that this is not the most effective method of preventing employee shirking, as frequent online meetings and clear completion standards would be much more efficient. I am going to discuss why I believe this solution to employee shirking is not practical through an economic lens.
I find it very hard to believe that the increase employee productivity due to this intense monitoring outweighs the costs associated with this method. The opportunity cost of the time that management is spending on going to employee houses plus the costs to the company of reimbursing them for transportation are the biggest costs of this monitoring. Company management is using its valuable time to make sure that employees are doing their work as opposed to doing actual work themselves. There is absolutely no way that this significant amount of time spent away from work by management is worth checking in on employees who might or might not even be distracted while working from home. The potential benefit for increase in production by lower level employees is not equal to this significant cost of time spent away from work by the upper level management in undertaking this monitoring.
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