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Originally Posted by Undertoad
But the dynamic here is definitely I'm not supposed to be doing this and I am hiding it as well as possible because you are supposed to demerit me if you catch me.
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That's an interesting point. As I think about it more, I admit that it is a little conflicted. On the one hand, the people in my department (this is a paralegal department in a law firm) bill their time to the firm's client. They and the attorneys are the only income our firm has, so we want them to bill as much of their time as possible. On the other hand, my department only does litigations, which are very deadline driven. When you have a filing due at 5PM as the court closes, you have to make that deadline, or you get sued for malpractice. So we really spend a lot of effort focusing on the work product and meeting the deadlines. We don't focus so much on keeping people busy. It just happens on its own. But if we don't keep everyone busy, we don't make any money. So, as a manager, I'm conflicted. And so are the employees. More seasoned folks have figured out what the right balance is, and they will pull me in to show me something they found while surfing the web, because I know they were working hard until 10PM the night before. It's mostly the new people who are nervous when I walk in on them.
From an "official" point of view, we expect everyone to spend 6.5 to 7.0 hours of each 7.5 hour day doing work that will be billed to a client. The remaining 30-60 minutes is there to take care of general office paperwork, go to the bathroom, take coffee breaks, surf the web, whatever. If somebody only bills 4 hours on a particular day, they aren't going to get in trouble. But we do look at long term trends in hours billed to see if one particular case is over or understaffed.
And finally, from a practical standpoint, many of the folks in my department work so hard, and do so much overtime, that they easily make themselves valuable, even if they slack off for an hour or two each day. So that's why I pretend I don't see them surfing the web.