If my employees are spending a lot of their time goofing off, that’s an indication that I’m doing a poor job keeping them motivated and is an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re doing and how.
The idea of weaponizing “time theft” as a first recourse is just sickening to me. Your employees are not slaves nor drones, they are human beings and you have an obligation to treat them as such.
Then she sued for wrongful termination and got that result.
Because the first thing I thought was: What kind of petty employer sues for $2000 instead of just letting them go.
[1] https://decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca/crt/crtd/en/item/5230...
I really wanted to be upset with the company here, but it sounds like she shot herself in the foot.
Both of these things can be valid at the same time. She was certainly technically in the wrong and made some questionable choices (with the huge caveat that it’s possible context we don’t have may change the story entirely), but I still think the company is overbearing to the point of absurdity.
If she slacked off for 50 hours over 6 weeks, that’s like an hour and a half a day (which may not have been contiguous). I can’t think of a job I’ve ever had where I didn’t have an hour of down time a day on average. Even working crappy manual labor jobs I’m sure I dicked around with my coworkers for like an hour a day.
She may be a bit on the high end there, but not so much that I wouldn’t have worked with her to correct it before firing her.
Sorta like software outsourcing, actually.
Yeah. It is called an article. Typically provides the context for the title.
The article is beautifully written and links to the actual small claims decision. Which is honestly so rare that I don’t even know when have I seen in non-specialist media.
What the headline needs is people reading beyond it, and not reacting from first instinct. Grumble grumble :)
Nothing in the article contradicts my post. The lady was almost certainly billing time she didn’t work, but I would still ask myself what I’ve done to enable that before I just fired her.
I’m disinclined to assume the good faith and intention of a company using invasive software to monitor every minute of the day.
I was not sure that you didn’t read the article. I was just suspecting it.
> Nothing in the article contradicts my post.
Au contraire. You wrote: “The idea of weaponizing ‘time theft’ as a first recourse is just sickening to me.”
That is not what happened in this case at all.
The company was unhappy with her performance and they let her go. She sued them. Does that sound like the company weaponised anything?
So why are you talking about “weaponising” and “first recourse”? How can it be “weaponised” when she was the one who was suing the company What is first recourse about this?
In fact if you read the small claims court case (linked from the article), you can see that she started working in October 12, 2021. They first talked about performance problems with her manager in February the next year. That is when they installed the time tracking software! She was put on a PIP in March 16. And she was dismissed on March 29th.
So clearly they were not weaponizing time theft, nor was it their first recourse.
Maybe you were just commenting in general how sickening it is to weaponise time theft as a first recourse. In which case I would have expected some mention that you are just speaking in general, noting that in this specific case that did not happen. Since you didn’t say that I suspected that you either didn’t read the article carefull enough to understand the case, or didn’t read it at all.
- The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee.
- The manager should have initiated them, not the employee.
- When the employee asked for help, the response was to install time monitoring software on her computer
From my perspective, the time software was absolutely weaponized against the employee. I call this a “first recourse” because it precluded an improvement plan. I’m reading this as “oh, you’re not getting enough work done huh? Well let me just stand over your desk and scrutinize your minute to minute work for a month to make sure you’re not slacking off”. Sure, it’s legal and a court didn’t find issue with it, but that doesn’t make it ethical, and it has zero chance of helping a struggling employee.
If I had one of my direct reports reach out to me and say they felt unproductive I can simply not fathom responding to that by treating them like a delinquent.
Edit because I clearly don’t know how HN formatting works
> The 1-1s should have been happening from day 1 of employment, especially for a remote employee.
I agree with you on this here. On the other hand I can’t find any source to tell if they had 1-1s from the begining or not. If they hadn’t that is a serious mistake. (If you see this somewhere mentioned I’ happy to see a reference. But do not worry either way, no pressure.)
> The manager should have initiated them, not the employee.
I agree with that too! Again I don’t know if that happened or not. The court case suggest that it was the employee who initiated the chat. I can also imagine that if I am an employer and I am being sued I would stick to the hard facts. The things I can prove. And if there are enough of these hard facts to show that I did not commit what I am accused of (unfair dismissal) the I wouldn’t bring up all the informal and thus undocumented instances where we talked about performance.
It is possible in my mind either way, and I can’t say for sure. Maybe it is an instance of bad management, paird with over reliance on a time traking software. Maybe it is good management paired with a regetably underpeforming employee. Maybe something in between!
But here is the thing: This is not the reason why this case was thrust into the public spotlight.
It is in the public spotlight because the outcome has the appearance as if she got sued by the company to extract money from her. I certainly started reading with that assumption! But then reading the article I have noticed that this is not the case. I have also noticed that many commenters, not necessarily you, seems to have fallen into the same idea and did not read the article carefull enough to see that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Which perhaps is the fault of the article. (But of course we all understand that “woman sues company, company vindicated” is not such a catchy title, so I even understand why they went for the angle they did.)
Truth to be told on the general managerial advice and recommendations I agree very much with you. Cheers
From the court findings: “In February 2022, Miss Besse began having weekly meetings with her manager to help her better manage her files. She says she initiated the meetings because she felt unproductive and that she was not performing as well as she should have been. On February 21, 2022, Reach installed a time-tracking program called TimeCamp on Miss Besse’s work laptop.”
This is actually the point where I got angry and felt that I needed to comment. Usually these articles are filled with one-sides opinions, but here we have a formal accounting of events from the court. According to the court, Besse went to her manager because she was struggling and the response could be called intimidation.
I’ve been managing for long enough that this, to me, calls into question the cause of the events here. It’s possible this lady was just lazy and is entirely at fault; but when I see a paper trail indicating a failure of management to engage I wonder if the whole thing could have been avoided with some empathy and servant leadership.
Hours were certainly logged fraudulently, I’m not debating that. I’m saying that rather than firing her, I would have asked a lot of questions about the situation and if I pushed her to feel like she needed to.
The software they were using sounds like what I have seen myself in the past, and it is a huge burden to try and justify every moment of every day the way they want you to. It’s basically a guarantee for burnout and lack of loyalty.
So even if she were not being paid hourly (though the court ordered repayment implies she was?), the company would have required accurate recording for billing clients.
The company also didn't just arbitrarily install the monitoring software. She was already underperforming, and on some PIP-equivalent setup when they got her consent to add monitoring software - I would guess that they were already thinking she was falsifying her time sheets at this point.
Not proud of this fact, but my father got caught punching in the time clock at the Heinz ketchup factory, and then going back home to sleep a few times every week. They were faster to catch him because of the clock.
Your ticket updates were expected to be to the exact minute, and there was a counter at the top to tell you how close you were to your 8 hours.
Many starting out would end up needing 10-12h to make that 8.
Some professions require employees to track time in smaller increments than 10 minutes (IIRC most lawyers at firms in the US bill in six-minute increments), but that's for the purpose of billing that time to the correct client, not as a way of micromanaging the employee.
There’s a mental cost to being tracked so rigidly, and the burnout it leads to may be -why- hours get logged fraudulently.
Sounds like a good soundbite from a management book or something. You don't think there's a possibility that someone, idk, doesn't want to work and prefers doing something else? I've been guilty of playing video games during the workday and its not due to lack of motivation or the manager doing something wrong ... I simply want to do something thats not work. Not the managers fault.
It's possible, but that's really what the interview process is supposed to be for. In programming, this is kind of a necessity, because from the outside, deep work looks exactly like "loafing". You can't threaten, harass, cajole or otherwise motivate somebody to actually mentally focus on something the way you could, say, threaten to chop off their hands if they stop digging for diamonds. You might want to, but even you would eventually have to conclude that it didn't work. Ultimately, you have to trust the people responsible for doing the work.
Worse, from the outside causing major problems that will only show up later looks exactly like typing really intently.
I remember one horrible problem I had dumped on me where I spent a week reading stuff online and doodling. Once I had a doodle I liked I threw together a multithreaded user authentication system in a week then spent a week making sure it actually worked. CIO was very impressed but afterwards admitted the first week drove him quietly insane. Luckily my team leader kept saying "that's what thinking looks like". Some managers completely miss point of thinking, and not just when other people are doing it /s
That’s why it’s an “indication” and not a “guarantee”.
Employers must forget the 40 hour week as a measure of someone's productivity and instead set goals to be achieved.
Manage/Treat people like people,be kind, but firm, if you can't trust someone in your team, you hired wrong or you have trust issues yourself. Its not rocket science, no matter how much BS the Simon Sinek`s of the world spout out.
Someone should notify HR about this injustice.
"How are you today, Mr. 142,620?"
"I'm fine, nameless, faceless script-reading CSR rep. How are you?"
For task based jobs by all means figure out a cost and bill by the item. Some professionals do this. I paid my accountant $600 and didn’t care how long it took her.
The company in question is an accounting firm; imagine if you hired that firm to do your personal taxes, and the person who was doing them inflated the number of hours it took, and then the firm billed you more than it actually cost them to do the work. I know I'd be outraged if that happened. I'd sue them, never use them again, and tell everyone I know not to use them.
Or a more apt example, considering your profession: imagine you're a software engineering manager at a software consulting firm. Your reports do work for a variety of your company's clients, and they have to record how much time they spend working on each client's work so that the client can be billed appropriately. Let's say that your reports are even paid a salary, and aren't paid hourly, even though they have to track their time. I personally don't think it's ok to bill a client for the time someone is doomscrolling Twitter or replying to personal email. But I agree with you that it should be fine that your people aren't generating billable hours every minute of every day. But they have to be honest about that on their timesheets.
The issue that I have here is that it sounds like the company is set up for failure. Rigidly monitoring your employees is a great way to burn them out and kills loyalty. If you want people to work hard, offering a little trust goes a long way.
It’s always worth asking what you could have done better as a leader and starting with an assumption that they’re not just criminals.
I don't think all his managers and leads were bad.
I think I agree but it isn’t that simple in many countries/legal jurisdictions. You can’t always just fire someone and performance managing an employee is utterly gruelling if the individual wants to make it so.
My point was that low productivity is fault of manager sometimes, but other times it is fully fault of the low producing person. Especially when you a single low producing person in otherwise normally effective team.
step 2 - disavow perverse management methodologies, because "you're not like those other managers".
step 3 - do it anyway because the higher-ups said so.
step 4 - convince yourself you're not part of the problem ;)
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Also, it wasn't their first recourse. They fired her, but then she sued and they took their documentation to court and counter-sued. It was factually their last recourse.