Employees Slacking Off When Bosses Are Away: How Can I Improve Office Discipline?

I am working as an HR executive in a core company. I am the only one in HR to handle. The issue is that employees are wasting their time on personal calls, unnecessary discussions, and other tasks when directors are not available in the office. Mostly, directors will go to visit the plant and head office. Please suggest ways to change the environment and help me solve this issue.

Regards,
Devi

Dear Devi, You have raised a productivity concern. Please help us understand the degree of work pressure at your organization and what kind of unwinding processes are followed within the teams?

How Do Self-Managed Teams Function in Your Organization?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thank you.

Please find the reason why employees have time to talk on the phone about their personal issues. If they do not have any work, why don't you conduct employee engagement activities?

Work Pressure and Employee Engagement

Why doesn't your production manager put work pressure to avoid these kinds of issues?

Regards,

I appreciate your concern towards the improvement of individual productivity in general and that of the organization in particular. From the post that you have given, can I infer that the management style of "command and control" is followed in your company? You have written that "unnecessary discussions and other works when directors are not available in the office." Are you suggesting that the good old proverb, "when the cat is away, the mice will play," is applicable to you?

At this stage, what you need to follow is to conduct a workload analysis of every department. Within every department, do this analysis for every individual as well. Study the productivity of every department. Take your Director into confidence and talk to him. Let your Director advise every individual to come up with the idea of job enlargement. To identify the scope of job enlargement, let each staff member fill out time logs or timesheets. Analysis of the time logs will reveal insights.

Lastly, if the staff are spending time on some unproductive activities, then it speaks to their motivation level as well. Why did they not come forward on their own and ask for additional work?

In the good old days, there was "Theory X and Theory Y" of management. I feel that in your company "Theory X" has precedence over "Theory Y." Hence this problem.

Thanks,

Dinesh V Divekar