Just as bad are those abusing flextime or flexible hours. I see every day, government employees who say they got to work at 4 or 5 AM, but do nothing but go get coffee and/or other breakfast items, sit at their desk surfing the internet or yacking with other lazy idiots until their boss comes in at 830 or 9 AM. By this time they have already “worked” 4 or even 5 hours, or so they say. Their bosses usually have to go to meetings by then so only see their employees for 2, maybe 3 hours out of the day. This is actually true, seen by my own eyes.
I also work flextime and its one of the few smart work policies we have.
I work 4-10hr days and tend to actually work 1-10,2-12 to 14hr days and another 11hr day for the week (without being paid OT)
We get more done by working continuously than interrupting with 8hr work schedules. It also cuts down on commute cost.
I also suggest there is more time wasted on 5day work schedules than 4 day schedules because the first and last 30min of each workday tend to be the least productive anyways. That’s about 1 hr in 10 wasted vs 1 hr in 8 wasted for 5 day schedules.
QC managers for years have observed this corporate weakness. An old QC adage of TIC-TOC tries to make it more productive, focusing the 1st 30 minutes on Training, Implement, and Communicate, and the last 30 min with Timesheet, Organize, and Cleanup. The 1st 30 minutes people tend to readjust from one culture to their office culture, and the last 30 minutes is to wrap up the day’s work so the following day has less confusion and lost time due to misplaced or forgotten tasks.
I’ve seen some of the inefficiencies of which you write, though in our local culture, it might rotate with maybe one out of 10 employees being that unfocused, but the others tend to be more than less focused with flextime.
Flextime is one of the better policies. The less capable managers don’t like their employees to be on flextime, because they don’t intuitively plan their operations then communicate their direction to their juniors. Instead, those who don;t like flextime tend to just pass their taskers on to their juniors directly, without managing their resources accountably.