Believe it or not, there are managers who require employees to keep track of every minute while at work. If they talk on the phone, that time needs to go on the activity report. When they go to the bathroom, this too gets recorded on the report. Do you think you could handle such a rigorous approach for your time management?
While this may work in the short-term, you have to question the manager who is going to review these hours. Perhaps if they only have a few employees, it could work to some degree. However, what happens if they have fifty employees? Are they going to scrutinize each of those reports every day? If this is the case, a company should consider whether this is the most productive use of a manager’s time.
Some jobs require accountability for every minute an employee works. When you work on an assembly line, you will need to fulfill a quota, and others depend on you to get your work done. But, even here, employees are probably not recording each minute they work in a log book or journal. They are measured by the number of units they produce within a certain period, i.e., hourly, etc.
Another problem with tracking employees at this granularity is employees start to fudge the numbers. For instance, instead of writing down when they were on the phone for thirty minutes, they will shave five or ten minutes off and record the rest as some other work-related activity. There will always be busy work-related items that can be used as fillers. A manager may be able to pick up on this when there are only a few employees. But, it’s impossible to do when there are many.
If managers use this form of micromanagement to penalize employees, this will bring down morale and will likely increase turnover. There’s no indication that working in these conditions makes people more productive. Intuitively, the opposite is probably true.
On the other hand, if managers are going to use this time management technique, will they reward employees whose journals are exemplary? What measures would they use to determine that, and would they broadcast the criteria to the employees? This also sets the stage for abuse with employees doctoring their entries.
It is okay for managers to track what their employees are doing. However, it doesn’t need to be minute-by-minute. In most jobs, it is counterproductive and causes stress among the employees.
– Scott Blessing