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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.
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.
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)
How do you know the question asker isn't in Canada? They seem to assume that all /. readers are also mind readers who can answer "Is this legal?" without being told which jurisdictions are relevant.
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.
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!?
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'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.
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.
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%.
If they're going to treat you like a small child, act like one.
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 ----
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 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
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,