Treat Your Employees Like Adults

Timing employee toilet breaks

Over the past year or so, I have been sent way too many signs and stories from people working at companies where the management team have decided to enforce timed toilet breaks.
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Some companies seem to simply hang signs and reminders up, others have gone as far as to carry out “sniff tests” when employees have spent too much time in the loo (I really wish I was making that one up).
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Whatever the approach, I would say this...
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Regardless of what business or industry you’re in; there must be bigger issues and more important things to do than worry about tracking your employee's toilet time.

WFH Employees are sleeping on the job

Last week, I shared a news story where it had been discovered that approximately 1 in 10 employees had admitted to having a nap whilst working from home.
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As usual, this sparked some backlash and had people blaming the WFH system and employees who are sleeping on the job.
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But if you ask me, they’ve missed the mark.
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If managers are leading teams where employees are sleeping all day, or not getting their work done etc. it’s on them to manage the situation and ensure that the team are delivering results.
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The issue is not with working from home.

The issue is poor management.

Check out the clip discussed here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DC4nO6wo7qs/

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Quality of work vs hours worked

One final thought before we close out this week's issue. Almost all of the problems we’ve covered today (from managing employees working from home to worrying about people spending too long in the toilet) can all be solved by focusing on the quality of work produced rather than the number of hours people are working.

Personally, I’m a big believer in measuring outputs over time spent at the desk.

And in my experience, if you give people control over the way they manage their own time, they still deliver. But they do so in a much happier and healthier way.

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