Managers earn more money (generally!) than individual contributors because it’s harder. Organizing a group of people, managing their work, and being responsible for the results is generally harder than doing the tasks. That’s fair. But managers often make their work much more difficult than it needs to be.
Human Resources Executive Jordan George has enough experience in the people business to know what matters and what doesn’t. He came up with the following list of 10 things that managers should just stop worrying about.
- Watching what time people arrive to work
- Watching what time people leave work
- Watching how long someone’s lunch break is
- Requiring people to “request” time off
To keep reading, click here: 10 Things Managers Should Stop Worrying About
Also, being draconian about breaks. I worked at a place where, if your break time was 10:00 am, you had better drop what you’re doing, take that break, and be back at exactly 10:15 or there was hell to pay. Which I can understand if it was an assembly line job, or a heavy customer-facing job. But this was an office job. So, yea, stop typing that document mid-thought. It’s break time. And heaven help you if you need to pee at some time other than your designated break time.
Unfortunately a lot of places it’s the coworkers watching your time. There is a real do unto others before they do unto you mentality in a lot of these open offices. Frustrating to be sure.
Yes, the main concern should be the performance/ productivity of the employee, as the manager’s main job is to supervise those under him/her while giving feedback on performance level. But that list covers factors which hinder the manager’s role because of those factors distracting from performance levels on the team effort. The manager is the clog in the middle of the wheel of work and if one spoke in the wheel isn’t properly working the whole wheel doesn’t perform.
If people in the workforce want to be individuals, then they should become a sole contractor so that how they perform their work and get paid effects only them, not a group. (Hence that list)
I used to work under a manager who did most — if not all — of those things. In fact, he would email out the printouts of everyone’s badge swipes, which showed when everyone first got to work in the morning, when everyone entered the rest room and when they re-entered the office — in essence — showing how long people were in the bathrooms or were out to lunch, etc. Needless to say, transferring to a new job was like getting out of prison.