Do you do the bare minimum at work?

Figbiscuithead

Yeah, I work way too hard for not enough. I'm a bit of a gob****e in that regard, actually.

thee glitz

I work hard, put in the overtime when required, and cover late shifts at home on US bank holidays. I also try to work smart, getting things done as efficiently as possible, to leave free time for misc projects. I'd go crazy doing the same thing every day with nothing to challenge me.

sbsquarepants

My job has gone from practically dead to the busiest it's ever been in the last year and a half or so. When things were bad the cut my wages and put me on a 3 day week, now things are busy they expected me to work longer hours + do more during those hours - I told them politely to fúck right off. You need my help, you need to buy it, I am not a volunteer end of story. Result is a pretty substantial increase in my wages (in return for a substantial increase in my workload).
Fair is fair at the end of the day - if I had been a company man - I'd be doing that work for a pat on the back. Pats on the back don't pay my mortgage.
All companies exist to make money and will happily let you work for free - it's up to you to demand as much as you can get and if you don't get it, go somewhere that will give it to you. It's a dog eat dog world.

Also, when I'm not in work, I'm not in work. I don't answer phone calls or respond to emails or any of that shít. When I'm being paid I work, when I'm not I do my own thing.

JamBur

eet fuk wrote: »

I ask the question as there are a few people that I work with who probably work about 3 hours of an 8 hour day. They spend the rest of the time looking busy or drinking tea. Nobody else is blind to this carry on, but it seems as though the employees in question are untouchable as they have permanent contract and have been there so long. It drives me mad as I love my work and I really want the company to do well, but it's amazing how much a knock on effect these lazy f*ckers can have when it comes to getting things done - There are delays in getting things out to our customers and important tools/parts getting misplaced due to pure ICouldn'tGiveAFuckery. The fact that the majority of us are left picking up the slack is such a pain in the arse.

I know that a portion of the blame lies with management, who seem to have been letting this go on since long before I started - but I just don't understand the attitude. It's not as if this is a sh*tty job or anything - It's a relatively well paying engineering company, and they really do treat their employees well. It seems to me that it's impossible to actually fire someone unless they defecate on the bosses desk and take a swing at him.

Anyway, do you just do enough to not get fired or do you take pride in your job?
Do you think that it should be easier to sack people? Or perhaps you think it should be more difficult?

We could be workmates from that description. There's a few oldtimers at my place that would be lucky to keep their jobs in other places.

timmy880

I don't work as hard as I should, I know that for a fact. I get alot of praise for the projects I work on but I've just turned 27 and find myself procrastinating alot more than I should. There used to be a team of 4 of us but now its just me and my boss and I'm alot less motivated than I used to be to the point where I'm considering changing jobs. Been here 2 years now and just feel very flat lately and have become quite lazy which is a shame as I used to work my @ss off and be very motivated!

inforfun

I used to work my arse off here.
Reward: Nada the last years.

CEO got $30 million worth of salary/stocks for what was described as a "mediocre performance" by the financial institutions.

So i am going to use that tactic now as well.
I ll be very mediocre at work.

BlimpyBoy

inforfun wrote: »

I used to work my arse off here.
Reward: Nada the last years.

CEO got $30 million worth of salary/stocks for what was described as a "mediocre performance" by the financial institutions.

So i am going to use that tactic now as well.
I ll be very mediocre at work.

I work for a multinational and last year the executives and CEO turned down their yearly bonuses due to poor performance of the company.

The CEO got still got around $12 million in salary/stocks/options instead of the expected $16 million. I felt so bad. Must have been a lean year for them.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Blackwell

Mister Vain wrote: »

I do what is required. Admittedly some days do be quite and I try to look busy but I'd have days where I'd be run off my feet too. lazy people annoy me though. I used to work with a guy in a warehouse who would sit in the forklift all day and wouldn't budge from the fecking thing. He'd sooner drive up to get canteen door and ask someone to get him a sandwich rather than get out and walk.

I think I know that guy too...

I get the work done, that's the point of the job after all. If that means being in at 8:30 and leaving at 10pm for a week or two so be it but if I can come in at 10am and leave at 5 with 2 hours for lunch the following week as things have got quite then I'll do that too. I won't go looking for extra work either, I see people who work the same jobs, keeping asking to take on more work and working 14 hour days to get it done and at the end of the year they get the same pay increase as people who take on a sensible amount of work and work normal hours.

I never skip lunch or anything like that either, in fact I would take minimum an hour and usually 1.5 hours along with a few breaks for chats/tea/internet browsing during the day. I might end up having to work a bit later because of this but I'd rather that than be constantly working hard trying to fit the work into a shorter time.

osarusan

I actually enjoy what I do, so I'm happy enough to do what I'm asked. I've mostly worked for bosses who made me feel like my abilities, experience and input were valued and I was respected, and I've tried to do the same when I've been in charge of people.

Also, what I'm asked to do is kind of undefined at times as there are simply things that will come up, and there is time set aside for these even if it isn't always know exactly what these things will be.




Ive seen plenty of lazy losers who do nothing and then whine about how others are getting increases or promotions instead of them, and make laughable comments about how it's all a fix and office politics and so on, to justify their laziness.

But I've also seen terrible bosses who do nothing to foster any kind of positive atmosphere at all, couldn't care less about the people they are in charge of, treat them like crap, and then bitch and moan when staff are not willing to go the extra mile for them, oblivious to their own role in the development of such a negative environment.

Fukuyama

In a previous office job I was assigned a responsibility by a manager who, frankly, had no business being a manager.

This "task" was to be mindless data entry of the Copy & Paste variety. I was stunned that the company had been, for years, assigning this responsibility to new entry level staff members. I gingerly suggested that this was really something that should be automated but was more less told to shush and be a good little newbie. Management had no appreciation of ingenuity and just wanting thing to "get done". :rolleyes:

So anyways, I wrote a VBA script that did 5 hours of daily work in less than a minute. I said nothing. I wasn't really closely supervised and when asked what I was doing I'd just say I was doing the manual data entry.

I spent most of my day goofing off, studying and napping with my eyes open.

I eventually professed to others in the office that I "love data entry because I find it soothing". Eventually I was like a data entry god in my department. Everyone thought I was some kind of weird excel prophet and because everyone wanted to be rid of their boring work they didn't ask questions.

After a few months I felt guilty. Not sure why as at this point I was technically saving the company money tenfold even though I was doing very little work. I again tried to bring up the idea but was rebuffed. In hindsight I think my manager was terrified of any change. She had been in her job for 20+ years and would be romped by anyone with basic excel skills.

I even managed to automated some inboxes I was in charge of by flagging keywords and generating auto drafts for my approval before sending them with tiny edits. Response time went down from 2 days to like 20 minutes. Even still I was only doing 2 hours of actual work per day and most of that was telephone calls so can't be avoided really.

So yeah. Basically worked for like 4 months like this until eventually I left because (i) boredom set in (ii) they only offered a token raise despite promoting me. I deleted all the scripts, batch files etc... and left. I can only imagine that the work I was doing is now being done by 3 or 4 people.

Paramite Pie

runnerholic wrote: »

Why work when you can paid for not working? Management are responsible for this.

Bit of a simple attitude don't ya think? You signed contract to work - i'm a bit old fashioned for a young lad but I like to keep my word. Plus the management usually leave me alone compared to a lot of staff. Which is a reward in itself.

Wanderer2010 wrote: »

I just do the bare minimum to get by, why the hell would I do any more? Life is way too short to be a little company man or woman slogging for twelve hours a day just for the chance to climb a stupid corporate ladder where your only reward is more stress and longer hours. You work to live not the other way around. And where I work there is zero incentive to do any more work and you get no thanks for it so I don't

I find the day goes by a lot faster -- I only worked jobs were promotion was not an option but I still worked hard. It often went unnoticed but I knew and at the end of the day that was good enough.:)Quiet days were torture. But I did make it clear to my bosses that I wasn't 'on call' -- I'm out the door when I'm out the door.
I don't know you're definition of 'bare minimum' so I won't rush to judge you entirely but you do sound a bit entitled - why should you expect "thanks"? Is your ego honestly that delicate?

To be honest, from my experience the people who do the 'bare minimum' is that they also live life outside of work by the 'bare minimum' too.

kjl

Hmmm, Ill admit, I don't do 8 hours a day that's for sure. Would be lucky to do 3.

The thing is, I never miss a deadline and my work is always to a high standard.

I work as a developer and just because I am not physically at my desk it doesn't mean I am not thinking about a problem. I can be in bed at night and working if I am thinking of solutions to a problem. The actual transcribing of the code from my brain to the computer does not take too long.

I work from home a lot and I am always ready to take a call or whatever, but the bulk of my work gets done in marathon sessions. I will not work all week then stay up all Thursday night and produce more and better quality code than anyone who is sitting at a desk 9-5 Monday to Friday.

Fukuyama

Paramite Pie wrote: »

Bit of a simple attitude don't ya think? You signed contract to work - i'm a bit old fashioned for a young lad but I like to keep my word. Plus the management usually leave me alone compared to a lot of staff. Which is a reward in itself.



I find the day goes by a lot faster -- I only worked jobs were promotion was not an option but I still worked hard. It often went unnoticed but I knew and at the end of the day that was good enough.:)Quiet days were torture. But I did make it clear to my bosses that I wasn't 'on call' -- I'm out the door when I'm out the door.
I don't know you're definition of 'bare minimum' so I won't rush to judge you entirely but you do sound a bit entitled - why should you expect "thanks"? Is your ego honestly that delicate?

To be honest, from my experience the people who do the 'bare minimum' is that they also live life outside of work by the 'bare minimum' too.

There'll always be a small minority of people who wouldn't move fast in a house fire.

However, IME, most of the time when staff are under-performing it's due to management. Irish managers (particularly the "old school" variety) are quite adept at crushing the motivation out of workers.

I've seen pretty scummy things done by managers to low-level staff in the name of grinding 0.5% more efficiency out of a workforce while crushing any sense of teamwork and group morale. It looks great on the TPS reports, sure. But at the end of the day it hurts the company.

Last place I worked for started hemorrhaging staff right after last Chirstmas. Lots of new changes were made in December which just crushed the staff. Everyone was demoralized and missed the "old" company they used to work for. Management thought they'd gotten away with it and obviously the Head Office in the UK was pleased. Of course, the staff just didn't want to be job hunting so close to Christmas.

By March the following year it was a running joke to tally up all the long-termers (most very skilled) who had left. There'd often be leaving drinks for 2-3 people on a single Friday. There was effectively open revolt with people applying for new jobs right there on work PCs and openly taking the piss out of the company in large group conversation instead of working.

All totally caused by management mistreating staff.

Of course, management then refused to replace this staff so the problem snowballed. People got over worked and things started to grind to a halt. Only when the milk was well and truly sour did management hold what were evidently emergency meetings and even tried to get old staff back.

They tried to cajole the staff into even more changes. Often by ambushing them in meetings etc... A few agreed and were laboured with even more work for a few measly extra grand the promise of a promotion within a year.

So management got their way in the end. Massive budget cuts and improved staff efficiency by playing on the hard working fools.

My motto: work smart and know your worth. Always be prepared and ready to leave. And if a company treats you right, work your ass off for them.

jmayo

Aongus Von Bismarck wrote: »

There are some disgraceful attitudes on display in this thread. If you have such contempt for your job then I'd suggest you find another one. Having such a feckless disregard for a place you spend a significant portion of your waking day suggests a complete and utter lack of motivation.

But it is a two way street.
Lots of employers and managers often treat staff appallingly.
Also nepotism and favouritism destroy morale.

Fukuyama wrote: »

...
By March the following year it was a running joke to tally up all the long-termers (most very skilled) who had left. There'd often be leaving drinks for 2-3 people on a single Friday. There was effectively open revolt with people applying for new jobs right there on work PCs and openly taking the piss out of the company in large group conversation instead of working.

All totally caused by management mistreating staff.

...
My motto: work smart and know your worth. Always be prepared and ready to leave. And if a company treats you right, work your ass off for them.

Agree.
I have worked in numerous companies and being self employed.

I busted my nuts in one company, got screwed over and nearly hung out to dry a couple of times, and then all the extra time put in got me the exact same statutory redundancy as everyone else including my asshole managers when they helped drive the company into the ground. :mad:

You live and learn.
Always remember most if not all companies will drop you like a hot snot if they have to, so be prepared to do likewise.

I have also worked somewhere where management definitely had their favourities and the place became septic.

Some people got away with doing shag all, slacking off, continously making the same mistakes and nothing was done about it by top management when line managers brought it to their attention.
Result is line manager and other department staff just gives up and department goes downhill.

Other line managers refused to tackle troublesome employees instead picking on easy targets, even in front of the rest of staff.

Morale hits the floor, bitching grows, once productive employees get resentful and start plotting their exit.
Higher management may still pretend that everyone is part of one big happy family, but it is one dysfunctional family where half the people hate each others guts.
And it does get very personal.

ancapailldorcha

I tend to come into work at 10-11am and finish at about 8-11pm. I wouldn't say that I do the bare minimum as things are quite hectic and I'm the only person here who can do my job. However, my boss expects that I do 6-12 hours unpaid every week of extra work as he has nobody else to order around and dangles a possible PhD vacancy above my head. I've stayed late a fair few times as not to do so would ruin my whole day's work but unless there is something tangible to be gained by doing OT then I don't see the point.

FWIW, I'm very grateful for the hard-won workers' rights we in the UK, Ireland and Europe enjoy. I don't know how relevant trade unions are now but thank feck they sorted this out so I didn't have to worry about it. I'd also never take a sick day unless actually sick. My landlord uses all of his as extra holiday.

FTA69

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

I tend to come into work at 10-11am and finish at about 8-11pm. I wouldn't say that I do the bare minimum as things are quite hectic and I'm the only person here who can do my job. However, my boss expects that I do 6-12 hours unpaid every week of extra work as he has nobody else to order around and dangles a possible PhD vacancy above my head. I've stayed late a fair few times as not to do so would ruin my whole day's work but unless there is something tangible to be gained by doing OT then I don't see the point.

FWIW, I'm very grateful for the hard-won workers' rights we in the UK, Ireland and Europe enjoy. I don't know how relevant trade unions are now but thank feck they sorted this out so I didn't have to worry about it. I'd also never take a sick day unless actually sick. My landlord uses all of his as extra holiday.

If you're getting absolutely flaad for a load of unpaid work a week it sounds like ye could do with a strong union in your workplace.

ancapailldorcha

FTA69 wrote: »

If you're getting absolutely flaad for a load of unpaid work a week it sounds like ye could do with a strong union in your workplace.

I wish. I'm a scientist who, if I get a PhD has 10-15 years of 2-3 year temporary contracts to look forward to assuming I don't just get an industry job. I've been complimented in that the quality of the data I've generated is very high. However, the work I'm doing has a few bemusing methodological flaws which means I can't just "do extra work". I've asked my boss about this multiple times but he continually picks some random, minor detail to obsess on. It's one thing to go the extra mile in a collaborative, supportive environment (I used to offer help to all and sundry in my last job) but when you're on your own and you get that gut feeling that someone's out for a freebie and you're it, it's hard to want to put your own free time in.

LDN_Irish

Fukuyama wrote: »

So anyways, I wrote a VBA script that did 5 hours of daily work in less than a minute. I said nothing. I wasn't really closely supervised and when asked what I was doing I'd just say I was doing the manual data entry.

I spent most of my day goofing off, studying and napping with my eyes open.

Reminds me of this chap who outsourced his job to China and paid a fifth of his salary to them. They called it a scam but I think it was genius.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693

Wanderer2010

Paramite Pie wrote: »

I don't know you're definition of 'bare minimum' so I won't rush to judge you entirely but you do sound a bit entitled - why should you expect "thanks"? Is your ego honestly that delicate?

To be honest, from my experience the people who do the 'bare minimum' is that they also live life outside of work by the 'bare minimum' too.

You don't know anything about my life outside of work but just for the sake of this argument I enjoy it and that's because I have the energy to focus on friends, family and hobbies etc. I'm not burned out from 14 hours in front of a computer trying to climb a ladder which requires political skills to navigate. I learned a long time ago that the person who works hard and tries to impress is just used and gets the exact same bonus and the person who does the bare minimum. Life is too short to be killing yourself working.

Deathwish4

9am to 1pm - Productive
2pm to 530pm - Slump

Lather, Rinse & Repeat.

The Randy Riverbeast

Im expected to do work like corrections and lab supervision for free so yes, the bare minimum.

imitation

LDN_Irish wrote: »

Reminds me of this chap who outsourced his job to China and paid a fifth of his salary to them. They called it a scam but I think it was genius.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693

1 fella does it hes a fraudulent criminal, a whole company does it and they are innovative cost savers..

LDN_Irish

imitation wrote: »

1 fella does it hes a fraudulent criminal, a whole company does it and they are innovative cost savers..

I was thinking that but tbh I'm being a bit hypocritical because I called him genius but if the whole company had done it I'd be calling them scumbags

Edit: actually, I'd be calling them scumbags even they'd only outsourced his job and let him go so I'm a little ball of conflicted ideas on this, obviously.

Rezident

Have to work 3-4 hours unpaid overtime a day these days. Which is why everyone is leaving. Both our bosses seem to be workaholics who cannot possibly see their families much. I am also leaving asap. A lot of people unhappy but can't complain as they are on temporary contracts or want to get promoted etc. It's depressing.

eet fuk

Okay, so I've got a general feel for people's attitudes towards their own jobs now. Largely what I expected tbh.

I'd be interested to know how much ye would be willing to help out a co-worker (not superior) with their job. I work with electronics but I'm always willing to help our shipping manager to get stuff out on time, or to generally help out with things that aren't necessarily in my job description. I do this as I like the people I work with and I believe it breeds a good atmosphere. Also, if I knew that someone was depending on me to get my job done, I'd be sure to let them know that I'm aware of the situation and that I won't leave them high and dry.

My colleagues that I mentioned in the OP would never ever use their own initiative to help someone out. Some afternoons can be manic with people clearly under a lot of pressure, yet these boyos would happily sit there watching the clock. It might be for the best though, as their work tends to bee sub-par (even for the most basic of things like taping up a parcel, or putting together some paperwork). I guess I just hate the whole 'work to rule' bollox - by all means, only work the hours your paid for but at least help out the people you work with.

Pintman Paddy Losty

Corpus Twisty wrote: »

This, pretty much. I work hard, and I always did, but apart from money you have no time to spend, the upside is rubbish. Everything gets dumped in your lap and you become responsible for everything..while others coast. Would I recommend slogging? No, not really. You get feck all thanks in the end, and even your family start whinging that "sure he's always bloomin working, the b0llix"..

I've always found the people who shout the loudest about being a hard worker and grafters are generally the biggest spoofers of the lot.

KERSPLAT!

I do a good days work. It's an 8 hour day, I suppose I'd be hard at it for 5-6 of those and just tipping away for the other 2-3 depending on what needs to be done and if there are any issues. Certainly not the bare minimum anyway

Robsweezie

I do do the doo doo, that's what I do!