Today I have the joy of listening to the roofers work above my desk and I am not so secretly waiting for a roofer to come crashing through and end up in my lap. The constant ripping and grinding noises are constant and nagging. To be honest, I’m not really getting all that much done today but at least I’m being paid. I’m really just perfecting the art of puttering and trying to make research projects look more substantial than they really are.
At my job, nothing stops the work. When it snows, we work. When part of the building is under construction, we work. When the server is down and there is no access to our computer files, we work. When the power is out, we work. When a roofer is tearing out and old roof and installing a new one (causing debris to fall into the office, I might add), we work. Nothing halts operations. I suspect that even if the President of our company died suddenly, he’d come back from the grave to haunt us if we even stopped working for a moment.
My intent here is not to make the owner of the company sound like a complete slave driver – he really isn’t. We have great employee benefits – our health care is totally covered by the company (and the insurance is Personal Choice which is costs more than what I make in a week). We are eligible for tuition reimbursement after 3 months. The company brings food in all of the time for employees. We have booze at our company events. I know I am luckier than most of my friends at this point in our careers.
But.
We never stop.
I’m not sure that our president has caught on that days like these, our productivity is shot. Any task that requires concentration is just not going to happen. And seeing that I work for a small contract manufacturer/pharmaceutical consulting company, everything we do requires concentration. I don’t think the president has noticed that we are all aimlessly wandering today.
I can’t help but wonder, what would happen had the executive staff opted to give us a week off while the roof was being replaced. Would employee moral gone up? Compared to what it is today, I’m fairly certain it would. I’m pretty certain that a bonus week off would do a lot more for productivity than try to eek out acceptable work during chaos.
Somehow, this doesn’t appear to be an acceptable option. And as someone who wants more flexible work time and work space, I find really disappointing. I want the executive staff of the company where I work to be concerned more with my productivity than the number of hours that I log in the office. I would much rather work 35 highly productive hours than get paid for 50 relatively productive hours. I want the hours I work to really count.
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