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Ask Slashdot: When Does Time Tracking at Work Go Too Far?
An anonymous reader writes "I work in a call center, full time, for a large mail order pharmacy. Recently, as part of their campaign to better track time spent both at and away from our desks, they have started tracking bathroom breaks. They use a Cisco phone system, and there is now a clock out option that says 'Bathroom.' My question is whether or not this is in any way acceptable in a large corporate environment (Around 800 people work at this same pharmacy) and is it even legal? How invasive would this really be considered, and beyond privacy concerns, how are they going to deal with the humiliation that their employees feel as a result of this? Has this happened to any of you?"
You need a union. It's the only way to fix this kind of thing.
Time to start sending out resumes.
Get another job. You are just being treated like cattle and there is NOTHING you can do. If you were to sue, they will find some reason to fire you. If you were to Unionize, there would be massive layoffs. In my company, I don't clock in, I don't clock out, I can work 5 hours per week overtime without approval. And I work for a fortune 300 company who you think would be soulless. I see how our CSRs are treated, and it is a damn sight better than anywhere else. And we have metrics in the upper 90% range for hold times (Less than 90 seconds) and call backs. Customer first will always make you profitable.
There Can Be Only One...
Your company should track all "Personal Breaks" together and not specify whether it's a bathroom break or not. A personal break would be a smoke break, getting water/food, bathroom, etc. There is no reason to break it down further in my opinion. I'm a call center manager, and at our company we lump all that stuff together. At the end of the month if someone is not meeting their percent time work goals we can see how much of the problem is attributed to personal breaks vs. other things, such as off the phone research. But I personally don't want to know that someone was taking a dump for 20 min.
A friend of mine worked in a call centre where they were smart enough to not label the button "bathroom" but just said "press aux 3 when you're going on break." I guess that way they can say they're not tracking bathroom breaks per se but telling the system when calls should not be routed to their phone.
of chinese/taco bell for lunch... They did this at my first job (tech support) a few years ago. I just did everything like I always did.. if I had to drop a huge deuce and it took 10-15 minutes... then whatever. What're they gonna say? "You're fired for taking big long dumps?" Besides, with those Cisco soft phones when you "log out" and choose the available options for why you're logging out, most people will select the most generic answer like "asking a question" or "helping a customer" or whatever. You'll eventually see that people in your apartment spend a LOT of time "asking questions/helping customers" and almost nobody has to poop anymore.
You're in a call center, so when you get up today, you already have to hit something to stop receiving calls that were in queue. I would say the purpose of that button is to separate out a bit more detail on the reporting side vs, checking up on individuals. I came from a prior call-center environment, on the backend network/telephony team, and having to "check-in/out" each time you walk away from the phone/cube was normal. This was a 600 person call center, also healthcare.
Every helpdesk and call center I have ever worked at (worked at a total of 5) they have always tracked this information. The company does not hire you to spend xx amount of time in the RR they hire you to be on the phones or working.
They are doing this to see if there are any habitual people that tend to go off in "Restroom" to go talk to their buddies on the other side of the building. This also allows them to better schedule breaks and lunches if they notice employee x goes to RR at 10:15 every day - why not schedule his break then - he can then use the RR on break.
They can set policy as they see fit - they are the company and as far as I know (i am not an attorney - they can track it if they want).
You can be pretty confident the management doesn't impose this on themselves.
It's up to a human manager to determine if you're abusing bathroom breaks or not. Sometimes there are good reasons. A robot isn't going to give any leeway.
I piss off bigots.
I do have to say I do feel a bit of empathy for OP. I'm sure if I had to 'time' my bathroom breaks after going to a Mongolian grill for lunch, I'd be a bit embarrassed to mark that down as well. All jokes aside, I do go back and forth on this subject of time tracking. I'd say inherently, company time gets more abused than treated as a flexible privilege. At my work in salaried careers, I see people taking 'multiple' breaks during the day that total up to 'hours' (yes not an hour, hours), plus smoke breaks, plus water cooler talk, plus BS about random subjects at their desk, 2+ hour lunch breaks, showing-up-late-leave-early enough, work-from-home-because-I'm-expecting-the-UPS-guy, etc. that I start to question who tracks all this or even matches this all up on their time sheet at the end of the pay period. I don't have enough experience in call centers to really say why they are really driven on 'time' as their measurement medium. Bottom line, I like to keep things simple: Either some suit thought it would be a good idea to do that so they get a bonus for meeting some silly 'goal' they had to dream up or it's been enough of a abuse problem because employees have figured out bathroom breaks aren't measured against you and do not effect your bonus incentives, so to get an extra break, they claim a weak blatter.
If you care about your rights, working in a call center is not the right job for you. Only drones can tolerate it for long. It seems you have hit your limit, so go take a permanent bathroom break and find yourself a new job.
I worked for a couple years in a helpdesk organization where breaks were tracked. In my country you are legally entitled to 10 minutes break every hour. You can take 10x 1 minute, or 1x 10 minute, or even skip a few breaks and take a larger one. At the end of the day though, you should not have more than 90 minutes of breaks.
This was tracked through Avaya CMS and usually there was no action taken even if those breaks were exceeded, as long as the offended didn't blatantly exceed his break quota for an extended amount of days.
It depends a lot on how does the employer interpret that data. In my company, the processes and procedures are lax, there's usually no follow up unless someone really abuses breaks.
Another reason for monitoring is capacity management. You wouldn't want all your employees to go on breaks at the same time (some tend to group up when going for a smoke, that affects call flow and customers). There was a live report publicly displayed on every center using projectors, so that everyone could see whether they affect call flow or not by going in a break. Sometimes agents had a particularly nasty call and they needed to lay off the pressure by stepping away for a few minutes, and all they needed to do was ask for an exception, that was always granted. There was a guy who tried abusing that as well, so I had to talk to him for a few times and he finally got back in line.
Monitoring your behavior while at work is okay. being absurd about the data is not. Fine line between those two.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
"The Reckoning" by David Halberstam has a very interesting, and somewhat scary, description of how bathroom breaks were handled at Ford, before unionization. It's indicative of just how brutally management thinks they can squeeze workers.
At my last company, I was salaried (IT support, not a call center), yet I had to have a daily meeting going over everything I did the day before (and if not enough was on the list, answering to why I did so little on a public call in front of the rest of the group), make sure every case I worked on was filled out immediately and in great detail in a ticket, and then at the end of every week, fill out a timesheet accounting for every second of my week, which was then compared to everything else I said/did.
The short answer is, middle management is scared for their jobs. They're asked questions about your time by upper management that they're woefully incapable of answering (or have enough of a backbone to say, "ya know, we really don't need those numbers") and in a frenzy to find a way to answer them, dump a half-assed way of tracking time to the second on your lap, and then monitor like a hawk in hopes of getting answers they're looking for (generally, that someone or some small group is not doing everything right, so they can "fix" it and report back to upper management that they did something to justify their meaningless existences.
Others have said it already, but the answer really is to get out of there. I stupidly stuck with my last job for probably a year longer than I should have, given the conditions, and it really cost me a lot, mentally (I was quite unhappy during that time, contemplating getting out of IT altogether). After I got a new job, I've been much happier.
I interviewed at a couple of places that do this. One was even worse. They actually place a limit on the amount of time in a day when you can be away from your phone using that button. After that you be counted as just AWOL. They also had another button for 'personal time' but that was limited too. The other place would permit unlimited 'personal time' or 'bathroom break' but they would be tracking it and anyone who used too much would get a talking to. They were both completely open and upfront about how their systems worked.
Somebody somewhere in the organization is abusing the flexibility you all enjoy. So instead of addressing that one individual problem, management tried to "fix" the situation in the way you describe. This is simply management choosing not to do their jobs.
I can give you an answer, but it'll have to take less than three minutes to explain. More than three minutes gets rounded to six minutes, a billable tenth of an hour.
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
I suspect that if, prior to this button being added to your desk phone, your manger saw you walking back to your desk and asked you where you were, you would have said you went to tgebathroom and never thought twice about it. Now, for some reason, because your employer put a button on your phone you think they are getting all 'big brother' on you...
If the button offends you, don't push it - there must be another way to 'clock out' from your desk - use that. BUT if there is a policy that requires you to use the bathroom button under penalty of loss of employment, then the decision is yours.
Personally, I've worked in call centers and I've been required to clock out everytime I step away from my desk, and on a monthly basis I was asked to defend any excessive time in the companies opinion. They didn't care 'why' I stepped away from my desk, they cared that I wasn't there to answer calls.
Your employer has a valid reason for knowing when you are away from your desk - call routing decisions are influenced by this - if they added a bathroom button they probably had a reason (employees abusing honor-based system).
Talk of unionizing are cute, but this really isn't that big an issue - is it?
Ken
Your company should gives you wireless phones with headset, so you could be able to continue to answer calls while you are in the bathroom. And add a computer at each toilet to record the orders.
I have worked place where a few people spent 50% of their time in the break room, at lunch, in the bathroom, on the phone, "talking to HR", or any other excuse to leave their desk. There seemed to be a correlation between who did/didn't do this and who didn't/did get good end of year evaluations. But it's still not good for day-to-day moral.
The only time I've seen tracking used was when a contractor was let go for spending OVER 80% of his hours on the phone. In a job that required no phone (i.e. he worked only with us in the office and nobody outside the office). It was a pretty easy talk for the manager since he had the detailed phone usage report.
I worked at a call center like this. They did not have tacking specifically for bathroom breaks, but we were paid by the time spent on the phone. If we logged out of the phone, we did not get paid. Basically the phone was our time-lock. I live in a right-to-work state. Even here this was illegal. I only worked there for a few months, but I still got a check in the mail months later when someone turned them in to the state and they had to pay out a settlement.
I worked in a Apple Call Centre. Apple the computer and iPhone company. Doing front line tech support. (1-800-APL-CARE). You know, Steve Jobs, etc. A real company, with 60 BILLION in the bank. We got 4 min a day for bathroom breaks. It was labeled "9. Aux" on the softphone, but when the only time you go in the code is to leave your desk, for something not covered by 1-8 and the only time you can leave your desk without a managers specific approval is to use the washroom, we all knew what they were doing.
Most countries this is 100% legal. They can also listen in on all phone conversations work related or not. They can also place a video camera pointed at your face from 1 foot away.
Is it good for the people working there. NOPE.
Does it instil a sense of corporate loyalty. NOPE.
I've been through these call centres. I feel depressed just entering the floor. It's a cattle station with better flooring.
Get a trade, skill, education, anything and move on out.
Better than unionizing -- just take your wireless headset to the toilet. You can stay on your calls, and there can be an LCD monitor in the stall if you need to reference information, read from a script, check your Facebook page, etc.
At the end of a particularly annoying call, the sound of a toilet flushing would be entirely appropriate, too!http://slashdot.org/story/12/09/16/1213226/ask-slashdot-when-does-time-tracking-at-work-go-too-far#
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Lots of companies force employees to track their time. Even salary employees who legally do not have to punch a clock to get paid. That's fine. It helps them for future estimates and proposals involving labor hours. It can be a very valuable tool.
However, all too often management begins to use these time tracking systems to try and shift overhead expenses to something billable to a customer. You walk in and read e-mails on billing guidance on how regular staff meetings, training, and even fire drills are billable to customers. Then another e-mail on billing guidance informs you that the normal overhead related billing is now forbidden unless given explicit authorization (that you will never get). Essentially, they are lying to themselves, that they have zero overhead when running their business. That nothing ever goes wrong and no one has to wait for anything.
But the one thing they forget is that by charging their customers for everything, they are charging them too much for services. The business is now vulnerable to any other business that can provide the same service and not charge their overhead to the customer.
I have come across a lot of managers that want to use Bathroom, Smoking, etc and I always recommend that they stick with "Break", "Lunch" and ask their legal dept if they should be tracking it to that fine grain a level.
The system needs to know when you are Ready and Not Ready to take calls since it cannot see you. When you are Not Ready the manager wants to know why since you are paid to be ready or taking calls for 8 hours, minus your legally allotted breaks. Yes it is brutal to be ON for 8 hours but that is the semi-skilled job you have. If you do not like it, I would bide your time, save money and get training for a better job.
Ultimately, you question is one for the dept of labor in your state. Google them, call them and ask if it is legal. Then give an anonymous tip. Do not confront HR or management about this as it will go on your record and then 6 months later you will be laid off with others. Guaranteed.
I once worked in a Directv call center and I'd never work another call center job ever again. You get screamed at by frustrated customers all day long and abused by companies that run these thing - National Electronics Warranty or NEW ran the one I worked in. They are horrible human beings insisting that you can deal with the elderly, uncooperative and technologically incompetent in an average of 700 seconds or less. Which is impossible, but achieved by most CSRs by telling customers to do something that typically doesn't work, like hit the red reset button and giving them the bums rush off the phone. The whole thing is structured with tedious grading systems and spreadsheets and monitoring tracking your every second inside these buildings. The place I worked was like a high-school study hall left in the charge of the most viciously cliquish kids in the class. Don't get me totally wrong though, some of it was entertaining. Constant visits to the parking lot of trailer trash spouses and lovers that resulted in the police being called to break up these domestic violence away from home incidents. The best was the original manager's wife causing an eruption of screaming, throwing & breaking everything in reach tantrums when she caught the 50-something manager was screwing around with a 20 something CSR. Or the day some chick decided to leave the job in spectacular fashion by writing obscenities on the ladies room wall in her on feces. It was like working in the monkey house of a zoo. The hell of "Office Space" looked tame compared to my call center. Bottom line, most of the people that work in a call center aren't smart enough to want a labor union and corporations that run these junk job centers are sufficiently evil that they are confident that they can keep it that way.
I used to work for a call center around 2008 that had this same policy. I had to tell a supervisor (a kid given my age) that after I finished the call, I would go to the bathroom. I worked part-time (6 hours a day) so I was allowed two bath breaks of 2 minutes each and one break of 15 minutes. I don't remember being denied the right to go to the bathroom but getting the break allowed was a different story. We had an union; not one related to telephone operator but one generic for shop employees. When I left this place, I went to the union to talk about the abuse employees receive there but I was told that it was my decision and my responsibility since I took the job in the first place. About the humiliation and privacy infringement, I was not smart enough to complain when I was still there. I just left that place the day after they suspended me for using Opera browser. Two weeks later I got my first IT job. As a side note, I worked for Teleperformance, that was hired by Accenture, that was hired by AT&T. I was assigned to high speed Internet support team, taking calls from Spanish speakers in United States. Oh, man... How much I loved that granny with no computer knowledge that translated everything to English to her computer savvy grandson (instead of the latter taking the call). Happened every day.
If the guy pushing the lawn mower runs the landscaping service, he may be landing much more money than you do or will.
Be careful before "assuming".
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Honestly they probably only want to track it so they can separate it out from other activities. For example, if a person takes a whole hour of personal breaks one day there is a good chance they'll ask that person why, at which point the person would have to explain they had some bad burritos for lunch. Alternately if they can see that the majority of that time was spent on multiple bathroom trips starting after lunch, they know they probably don't want to know any more than that and no body has to waste anyone's time asking questions with embarrassing answers. As long as they aren't giving you or anyone else (that isn't clearly abusing the button) a hard time about the amount of time spent in that mode, and as long as they aren't posting the information where everyone can see, It's probably something you should just ignore.
I've noticed that when companies start to go overboard with the amount of time and/or project tracking detail people need to record, employees resort to just making stuff up. I'm not saying they out-right lie, but because it's impossible to have a system detailed enough to record every little thing that may happen in a work day, people will often just pick a generic bucket to dump time into for things they don't remember or don't know how to categorize.
This defeats the purpose of installing these types of systems. Instead of simply not knowing exactly what employees are spending their time on, they now have an inaccurate or down-right false picture of what employees are doing. This can lead the management to make the wrong decisions on things such as when to hire or how to allocate resources, especially when they believe the data over their lower level managers.
I'm a manager at a call center. We track time away from calls, not because we care how long it takes you to take a smoke, or to take a crap, but for metrics. We have over 25,000 people on the phones world wide and how many minutes a call takes vs. how many workers are available for a call vs. how many workers are away from their desk (for whatever reason, we don't care) is critical to improving wait time.
As usual for the paranoia gang around here, it's not really about you. It's a big wad of data that is considered on the whole to make better business decisions.
Now back to your extended shitter break.
If you don't like it, start looking for work elsewhere. Have they gone too far? It depends. If everyone stays and just gripes about it a bit, then the programs a success.
Having setup systems like these before, I have a fairly good idea why you have "Bathroom" on your phone. Management wants to track your time... you're a phone operator. They likely have a stat for you that goes something like:
Employee in "Ready to take call" state > 90%
You have to set your phone to a "not ready" state to do anything other than take calls. Otherwise your phone will ring while you're not there.
They realize you can't be at your desk 100% of the time. They also realize you need time between calls to close up your ticket, whatever you do... as well as for bathroom. In fact, it likely came up in a meeting between management "How do they log out to use the restroom? I can't have my people peeing in bottles for christs sake!" to which someone said "Oh... um... lets just put in a code for bathroom" and that was that.
This very same thing happened where I work... and there was an uproar. "You're tracking when we pee!?!?!" finally wiser heads prevailed and they change the code to "Personal" It has the same effect, you are away from your desk... maybe in the bathroom, maybe getting a soda... whatever... but you wont get a call now, and they can calculate your stats... AND the idle code doesn't have the ridiculous name anymore.
I've worked in call centers for many years and what you're describing is common practice among all inbound call centers (i.e. they take inbound calls as the majority of their business) because all time scheduled is actually forecast by interval (usually 30 min but some go as fine as 15 mins) based on historical data+any expected shifts in business (holidays, promotions, media coverage, etc.)
I don't pretend to be a lawyer but odds are there is nothing 'legally' you can do about it. Labor is 70% of any call centers' business, successfully unionizing will only prompt the company running it to shut it down or move the call center elsewhere. Keep in mind, many (most?) states do not have a law or regulation requiring a business give breaks at all so the fact that they are being allowed is often seen as 'more than enough' from a labor dispute standpoint. These tend to be the same states that do not support or protect unionized labor which is where many call centers will set up to avoid inflated wages.
"Build It And They Will Come." Field Of Dreams
I can still remember the HR meeting at the typical DC beltway bandit place I worked. Huge company, thousands of employees. They were switching all timesheets to use increments of 1/100 of an hour for everything. So, every 36 seconds needed to be tracked. For that first month, I tracked every single thing too. These were computer based, and I enjoyed submitting a large stack of timesheets with detailed descriptions of walking between offices, my intimate bathroom details, and of course, several times a day, filling out the timesheet. Payroll also didn't enjoy the repeated calls to find out charge numbers for my various activities. All this lasted only a few months till they went to 1/10 of an hour...
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
http://www.mtv.com/videos/beavis-and-butt-head-season-9-ep-5-supersize-me-bathroom-break/1674558/playlist.jhtml
Practices like this indicate not only indicate a disregard for basic human decency, but a general incompetence in managing employees as well: micromanaging your employees like this will only make them work hard enough to avoid getting fired. My advice is to avoid giving these incompetence assholes any more of your life's time, and start sending out resumes.
Better yet, start developing a skill set that will enable you to be self-employed someday. It's not an easy life and there are a lot of sacrifices to be made, but not having to put up with this kind of garbage on a daily basis more than makes up for it, IMO.
This is the real evil of overly draconian regulations or laws. Sure, the subjects can choose to ignore them, and the authorities can choose not to enforce them -- but the authorities can also choose to enforce them, at their own discretion, and with no apparent legal recourse for those they single out. As far as I can tell, "everybody else was doing it" is not a valid defense.
I guess I am desensitized... I realize this is a pharmaceutical company, but this is all very standard behavior in the tech support / call center world. I've seen this sort of thing since 1998, so it really isn't that new to me. In both cases it sounds like management is being asked to predict productivity and deliverables based on time. Is your job function serial in nature at all? Does someone have to do something to a product before its passed to you and do you pass it to someone after that?
ever notice how much most software engineering work areas look like a call center?
some people do their best thinking on the toilet
When I worked in a call center, it was the reps' responsibility to hit a button on the phone so that after the call our phone would be put into a special mode, not dropped right back into the queue. This let us have enough time to document the call. After documenting the call, we were supposed to hit the button again to be dropped back into the queue to get another call.
We had to have an average of less than 30 seconds per call in this mode.
At the times of day when we weren't getting calls, I wouldn't hit the button. I'd go straight back into the queue and know with about 90% certainty that I wasn't going to get a call.
I kept track of the number of times I went straight back into the queue, and at the times when we were getting slammed the hardest, I'd use up the extra time I had saved up, and stay out of the queue for a minute or 90 seconds, until we stopped being slammed again.
I was really good at the job, and my average call time was about half of the average of most people on the floor, and for the ~6 months I was there, my lowest review was 97%.
" where time is a key measurement"
which is why phone support is at the frontiers of sucking
I think you need to find a new job more than the OP does.
This first happened to me in 2008. I consider it standard practice today.
In a previous job, I helped setup large call centers. In order for those call centers to best track staffing levels that were needed (on a 15 minute, hour, day, day of week, basis), they needed to know when people were available to answer the calls. If the stats came back that they were loosing 1 FTE between all the bathroom breaks between 10 and 11 every day, then they knew they needed to fill it with additional resources.
If you get put into the situation where your boss sits you down and says you are taking too many breaks, then you know the data has become specific to you -- but I doubt that they are collecting it for those reasons.
Take pictures every time you go, if you have to urinate, always use a stool instead of a urinal. This way if your "bathroom breaks" exceed the normal and they try to discipline you, you can show them a bunch of pictures of your shit to verified that every break is neccessary.
Disagreeing with you does not make me a troll.
This is my opinion, but when you're on the clock you have no expectation of privacy.
When you're working, you're being paid to do a job. When you work for 8 hours, you're selling your time to an employer. Your employer has every right to monitor what you're doing with the time you've sold them.
In the call center I work in, we really don't have a "Bathroom" idle code, and its pretty redundant. Instead we have codes such as Lunch, Break, System Problem, End of Day (for doing time sheet), Unavailable, Meeting, Training, etc. We're expected to take our bathroom breaks using our allotted "Break" time (which is 30 minutes over a 8 hour day) or during our Lunch. If we have to take a bathroom break and we've used all of our break time, we can use unavailable, but its heavily discouraged.
This allows the call center to maintain their SLAs by keeping their workforce accountable for their time used, which is 100% okay.
I'm very happy with the way my workplace keeps tabs on how I use my time.
And I'd never work for an employer that think spending more time with the company is more important than being more innovative.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
How invasive would this really be considered, and beyond privacy concerns, how are they going to deal with the humiliation that their employees feel as a result of this?
Maybe the first thing to do is figure out why some people would be "humiliated" if other people found out that they use the restroom.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
If they're going to treat you like a small child, act like one.
It's part of the human condition to need a bathroom break every so often. Sure their time recording system might record you going for a dump or a pee, so what? They can't fire people for doing what they biologically need to do or they would have to fire everybody.
If you dont like it find another job....
Maybe he can't. But he has nothing to be embarrassed about., every single IT professional takes bathroom breaks.
Toilet Office Chairs (http://www.bored.com/photos/toiletofficechair.html)
Wow. That's a new one.
After reading through much of the posts I see what a good job the US divisive left has done in fulminating class warfare where classes do not exist. Well played left. Well played.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
Couldn't you just, you know, go to the bathroom at home before you go in to work, again on your mid-shift meal break (which should be at least 30 minutes), and again when you get home after work?
If they're working you more than about five hours at a time between breaks, then that's the real problem you should be complaining about. That's very bad for productivity and worse for morale, plus it sucks.
On the other hand, if you can't usually wait five hours between bathroom breaks, then you should see a doctor about that, because it's probably a symptom of a serious medical condition, such as a bladder infection or prostate cancer, either of which is potentially lethal if left untreated.
(Exception: if you're currently pregnant, then having to go to the bathroom constantly is totally normal in that case, on account of the fact that the bladder is being actively squeezed by another organ, which has grown to a significantly larger size than it would usually be, in order to accommodate your prenatal offspring. In this situation if your employer questions you about needing to visit the facilities frequently, you can just point to your lower abdomen and say, "The doctor says I'm probably going to have this issue until [rough estimate of due date]." When you get to the point where you can't work -- this usually lasts at least three days no matter what, longer if it's your first time, even longer if the nature of your work involves a lot of physical exertion, and potentially much longer if there are complications -- that's what the FMLA is for.)
(Second exception: if you're a primary-school-aged child, needing to go to the bathroom every couple of hours is normal. However, in that case you should be in school, rather than working some other job. Elementary schools generally make copious allowances for frequent bathroom needs, especially in the lower grades, because it is well understood that children have this issue.)
If it's just an occasional thing (e.g., you ate too much plum pie at mom's birthday celebration and now you've got the runs today), then don't worry about it. Nobody's going to think anything about your going to the bathroom a couple of extra times a couple of times a quarter. Everybody has a day like that once in a while. This isn't what your employer is trying to catch or prevent. It won't even get noticed, because it won't differentiate you from everyone else. (What ARE they trying to catch or prevent? There are people out there who go to the bathroom for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, three or four times an hour throughout the entire work day, in order to get out of ever having to do any actual work. This practice is even worse for productivity and morale than long shifts with no breaks.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Well, it is not bad now. When they add a button "What Color", then
you know its getting personal and abusive.
Yes, yes it is, tho it may not be good for morale
You get x minutes of break time according to your contract/law. Bathroom breaks come out of that time, not the companies time.
If you ever worked on an assembly line, or a construction job site you would already know this is how it works. Office people really don't have a clue these days on what real work is it seems.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is one of those things you have to research about the company prior to interviewing with them, and keep an eye out for warning signs during the interview. Warning signs in the lobby that bringing guns onto the site is illegal are good signs to watch out for, for example. The interview is as much you deciding you want to work there as it is them deciding they want to hire you. If it's a shitty place to work, you can refuse. Or add enough digits to your initial asking salary that you wouldn't mind working in a shitty environment for a while.
If the culture changed after you arrived, I'd suggest either start sending resumes out again or, as someone else suggested, unionize. Most companies will shit a brick when employees start seriously talking about the U word. And sure, there are negative aspects to unions just like everything else in life. But if for some reason you want to stay where you are, it's really the only way to break the absolute power that management currently wields against its employees. Without balance, they'll just keep wiping their ass with people, and no doubt have access to a never ending stream of suckers who are willing to work there (Or are desperate enough to take any job, no matter how bad it is.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That would eliminate the problem with people not taking all their PTO in the year.
On the other hand, companies often allocate two 15-minute breaks which are intended for things like grabbing some air, or having a cig etc. These are fairly predicable and can be scheduled accordingly.
Using the can because the cafeteria's food gave you gastrointestinal distress, or because you have IBS, whatever is a bit of a different beast. It's a need that varies in schedule and duration, and shouldn't be grouped together with other breaks.
Folks above a certain title or pay grade don't have to bother with this sh*t, though shareholders should ask for it to be instituted company wide.
They might be surprised where the real bang for their buck comes from.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Unless you work purely on commission, they are paying you for your time. How you spend it is a metric they're entitled to.
Some businesses will say "I don't care if you leave early, if you have your work done and didn't get sloppy because you were in a hurry, then go home.". Those places may be paying hourly, but they're effectively still working on commission.
But the majority of jobs out there are paying for your time there as a warm body doing the work they need done, and want you to be as productive as possible every day. You like to keep an eye on what they're paying you, and naturally they want to keep an eye on what they're getting for their money. "We'll quit tracking your bathroom breaks if we start just telling you *about* how much we're paying you." How would you like some of that?
And in many cases they're not merely justified in doing it, they NEED to be doing it. I've seen my share of coworkers that walk in the door and clock in, and always head directly to the bathroom for the next 15-20 minutes. And somehow also manage to be in the bathroom for the last 20-25 minutes of most work days. Funny, they all seem to bring their smartphones with them. And the other 4-6 long bathroom breaks they seem to need throughout the day. And on the rare occasion I'm int here at the same time all I hear is yakyakyak on the phone. Employees abuse it, company starts to buckle down. Big surprise there. One guy bought a kindle recently and it somehow has had a profound effect on the amount of bathroom time he needs, imagine that. Basically you have a few bad apples ruining the barrel. Stop blaming the barrel.
And if you've ever been short-staffed on the sales floor and have to deal with one of the clerks being missing during rushes all the time, it starts getting on your nerves too. "Three more just came in, have you seen Brian?" "Take one guess where he is." "Great. Go tell him to hurry up!" Go pound on the door, "hurry up we have a rush here" and somehow they can always emerge within 30 seconds. Amazing bodily control they have, don't you think?
I have a much bigger beef with smoke breaks though. We've had our share of abusers here. They like to go out back for "a quick cig" that turns into a 15-20 minute long break as they yak on their cell phone, repeat every 45-60 minutes. At best, a 15 minute break every hour, you do the math. Though after a number of times of the manager stepping out back looking for Joe and seeing him with no lit cigarette and on the phone and sparks tend to start flying. Managers don't have quite that level of monitoring for bathroom breaks, and that's what encourages their abuse.
If I were the manager here, employees would be clocking out for cigarette breaks, and that would end the problem right quick. But I don't think that would necessarily be a good solution for toilet breaks. The majority of people need 1-3 toilet breaks a day. (I'm personally at 0-2 a day, my manager actually averages 4-8) Cigarette smokers like a hit once an hour or more, so there's much more reason for insisting on clocking out for them, it's arguably more controllable and is usually longer. At the very least, phones/ipads/etc would be forbidden on *paid* breaks, cigarette AND toilet. And before you flinch.... MY time, MY rules.
Anyway, that's my 2c worth. And I'm a salaried employee but I'm the only one that really does the specific things I do there.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You work in a call center.... if you're a call center rep for answering calls, you're paid to be there at your desk, and take every call that comes in immediately
If you're not ready to do so, then you're not working, and your employer is entitled to know that.
Now the use of the term "bathroom break" might be offensive; but this could work either for you or against you.
They should probably have just specified a generic break reason of "Personal reasons"; "Personal hygiene";; or "Personal matter"
It would accomplish the objective of knowing when an employee is not at their terminal, without the embarrassment of having to identify a short respite as "toilet break"
Ever work in a shop without enough bathrooms? Time gets wasted waiting in line or walking around the building looking for an open one.
Glad I don't have to track bathroom breaks, but a silver lining might be metrics in support of sufficient restrooms.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Try THAT here, and said boss would be in prison very quickly, and the company would be paying a fortune in damages.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
There are two basic ways you can measure employee performance:
* Input effort - stuff like time on the clock
* Output quality - customer satisfaction
Measures of input effort are usually much easier than output quality, mostly because management has to be able to evaluate output results - i.e. they have to be able to understand the jobs of their subordinates.
Any time you see management that primarily uses input effort measurement (especially if their spinal reflex response is to increase input effort measurement), you may conclude that they are turkeys, and you should get out from under them as soon as practical.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Sometimes it is easier to push a fool down a hill than to keep trying to hold them up. Do this. Call for a meeting to clarify the following:
1. Do you want the amount of time spent in the bath room broken down into actual bowl movement versus washing hands, etc.
2. Do you want to know how much time my left hand is occupied while my right hand is wiping, or both?
3. Where and how do we report personal clothing malfunctions, such as my zipper isn't working, or my friends zipper isn't working and I got my finger caught in the CEO's pants.
4. Are you going to limit the number of sheets of T.P.? Or the number of shakes? Do I need to record the velocity at which I shake my junk?
5. Do I get extra time for that itching problem that you gave me boss?
It doesn't matter whether you're lowly cheap outsourced labor, or unionized working for a major telecom, they will track you down to the second. I speak from experience, having been the second at a point in my life. If you want to be treated better than just another resource to be micromanaged, start looking for work elsewhere.
tl:dr call centers suck, find a real job ASAP
As a consultant who designs and builds those Cisco call center products, let me offer a more innocent viewpoint: The Not Ready reason codes for bathroom breaks may have been created just to give the Workforce Management (i.e. scheduling and forecasting) software a way to exempt bathroom, or other non-predictable yet acceptable non-ACD time, from the compliance and forecasting logic.
In this example agents may have been using the Break reason code when going to the bathroom; however, the WFO software views a Break as a predictable and scheduled occurrence. When the agent uses a scheduled reason unexpectedly it typically counts against them. It's possible that management was simply giving the agents a way of going to the bathroom without it counting against them. Additionally, depending on what WFO product they are using (Cisco only OEMs or interfaces with third-party products for this), the engineer may have needed a separate reason code to prevent the software from adjusting it's forecasting logic. In other words, if three employees go to the bathroom between 10:00-10:30 on the first Wednesday of this month, that is not a reliable indicator that additional headcount are needed next month at the same time.
As many have pointed out in their responses, tracking bathroom time is not an uncommon practice. There may be technical reasons why it was done but the tool is neither good or bad. Ultimately it comes down to the tone of how the change was communicated and whether employees and management in that call center have a cooperative or antagonistic relationship.
Disclaimer: These statements/opinions are my own and do not represent Cisco Systems or my employer.
After a few weeks of 8 hour bathroom breaks they'll give up on this plan.
I worked at convergys once upon a time. My team lead pulled me in one day and told me i was in the bathroom too much last month. I told her straight up that my bathroom time was none of her fucking business and even having this conversation might be in the legal grey area.
stay away from companies that require you to schedual your shits.
The call center I work for, they have a generic time code for when you are not on the phone taking calls. 'Personal' encompasses everything you might leave your desk or stop taking calls for a few minutes (bathroom break, make a personal call, etc). Its not meant to take more than a few minutes. Its different from a break or training or meeting with supervisors. They are all coded different. None of the supervisors really say anything about it as long as it isnt abused. Two or three 5 minute personals a week doesnt set off any alarms, a 15 minute personal every day, that will show up on some manager's radar. When I first started working here (in 2006) the whole concept of monitoring every single minute of your work day did seem a bit totalitarian to me, but as with most everything else in life, you get used to it.
I know, I worked there. I quit. Not because of that, but because they were going to let some guy die rather than let me make an unauthorized call.
...for ironic use of solidarity, logg, and retention.
Their they're doing there hair.
> When Does Time Tracking at Work Go Too Far?
As soon as it starts. I thought I was being employed to do a job of work, not to watch a clock ?
If you want me to watch a clock then I'll do just that. Diligently. To the exclusion of all other tasks.
Just saying.
I used to work full-time in an elected position representing employee interests, so I do have a bit of expertise on the subject.
That said, I can not comment on "legal", because that is a matter of your local laws, and I only know my local laws well enough to say that.
Aside from legal, however, this is completely inacceptable. The employer does have an interest to track whether or not you are working, but when you are not working, you are spending private time, and what you do in your private time is your business.
If you are in a position to negotiate, ask what the real interest of the employer is. Almost certainly, he doesn't really care if you take a piss or bone his secretary. What he wants to know is that you are not working and probably what kind of break you are taking in the sense of an answer to the question how soon you will be back. A solution here would be to make two options of breaks, one regular and one short break, where the short break option does the employer that you'll be back shortly (duh).
Then again, he just might be a Big Brother control freak, in which case you need to get enough support from co-workers to put pressure on him and tell him that you and lots of others are not willing to accept that invasion of your private time and that either the bathroom breaks are paid time, or you will continue to book them as regular breaks and he can take you to court if he thinks he stands a chance of winning. Do consult a lawyer before telling him that last piece, though. In my country, you would almost certainly win, but your laws may vary.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
My time is tracked in one application which takes the inputs from the badgereader, when corrections are needed (forgot to badge and such) It's in another aplpication, then the hours are transferred to third application (SAP), and i enter the times spent in a 4th application sitting on top of the third which provides management with metrics. Of course the apps don't push their data in realtime, they work in scheduled batches, which means a variable delay of 1 to 3 bussiness days before I can print it out, have it signed (typically takes 24 hrs, but there's been an occasion where it took 2 weeks)
When the printed timesheet is finally signed, I scan the sheet and send it by mail to my consulting firm, then I have to enter my times in my consulting firm's application.
And as cherry on top of the cake, I once had to redo the whole thing because I had billed 2 minutes TOO FEW. Yes they made me spend at least 10 minutes to correct the timesheet so they could pay me the 2minutes extra ... And the manager signing it had to redo his checking from scratch too ...
At a USA aerospace company that has government contracts you have to keep track of your time in six minute increments. I understand why, but damn is it annoying.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
If my current employer did this, I'd be unemployable. Fortunately a lot of my work can be done by email on a smart phone or consists of staring at the wall thinking through code, which can be done just as easily ( or better) in the bathroom.
When does it go too far?? When they actually look in the toilet after you take a dump lol.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I have figured out what your problem is: "I work in a call center"
In Reason We Trust
This isn't Right To Work issue. It is confused with Right to Work, but it isn't the same
What you are describing is At Will Employment.
At-Will doesn't have anything to do with Right To Work. Most States recognize a Contract Exception that allows the Union and Business to negotiate to have At-Will rules not apply in a Union Shop,
Legality depends on where it's located (which country are you in? Let's assume it's in the US). Whether it's legal depends on what was signed when you started, which state you're located in, etc. The "bathroom" button is called a Reason Code and many call centers use them so that managers get a good feel for productivity and whether staff augmentation is warranted. It's likely legal, I'm assuming that a call center company probably has legal council that advises them. That said, just because something's legal doesn't mean it's a good idea. High attritition is usually proceeded by poor management policies. It may be time for a better gig if this kind of thing bothers you.
I finally escaped from the phone support world after a year and nine months, partly because the client is in the habit of canceling contracts after a couple of years, and partly because of finding another job. One of the main problems was uninterest and ignorance of the best way to track needed breaks. All the way from management down to shift leads there was no attempt to deal with the question. So the phone slaves would just come up with their own way to deal. Some would just run off and hope no calls came in. Others would sign off the phone and hope the numbers didn't rank them too far down. Not that the numbers were that important. There was no serious advantage to getting good numbers than you might get a better chance at the shift you wanted. Phone support is a necessary evil, and now I have much better sympathy for those guys than I did before. I'm sure a union presence would have one of two effects - one, possibly reduce the number of indignities, and introduce clear work rules, and two, send the support function off to India or China (funny, that is already happening without unions). Are you working in phone support? Get your certs and get a real job, or if you can't do that, get down to Mickey D or BK. They don't pay that much less, and have more flexible schedules, and the management is only incrementally worse.
Is the mass inequality of the U.S. distribution of wealth due to the lack of unions or their incompetence?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I worked in a non-union shop. While most of us respected the 5 minutes per hour of cigarette break, and the 15 minuts per 4 hours of bathroom breaks, some of us who did not like the job, or had some personal business that needed extra time, abused the system. If extra time was needed, the honest ones stayed longer to make up the time, or came in eariier.
Then I worked in a time card oriented shop. People would punch in at 7:45am, and go to the cafeteria for breakfast, expecting to be paid for that time.
Others would abuse the 15 minutes break mid-shift. We added a tolerance of 5 minutes to return before time was docked. If you can go for a smoke every hour, and you have 15 minutes in the AM, Lunch time (unpaid) and 15 minutes paid break in the afternoon, it was fair.
There was for everyone, a five minutes pee and wash time at end of shift.
So yes, it is ok to measure your breaks. The employer may look at a week at a time to see if there is a pattern of abuse.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I had this working on a help desk, they used a similar system to the one you're mentioning. they tracked bathroom breaks, lunch breaks, and different types of work, such as none call related work, all through the phone system. I'm still at the same company but moved up and out of the help desk, anything call center related will eventually have something like this. I recommend using it as a foot in the door job and move up and out of it as soon as you can. Too much stress involved with the micro management, for both the employees and the managers.
One simple answer is that it goes too far if
you have a medical condition that causes you
to go often enough that someone demands an
answer.
Pregnancy, prostrate, infection, can all interact
as can drinking water as so many Weight-watchers
do.
Just begin wearing long skirts and put a
piddle pot in your office. Fill it with anything
that looks yellow enough. If the boss complains
comment that you are unwilling to wear depends
like he/she does.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.