Why is new boss being such a knob?

Exactly
op is the second most senior in the team, so will likely have many reports. She needs to be advocating for them if they arE unhappy

I had a boss once who tried to get me to buy her lottery ticket in my lunch hour. I bought the ticket but came in late by the exact amount of time the diversion to the shop had taken. An extra 15 minutes. When queried I told her I was happy to do her shopping, but only on company time,

You have to protect time you are not paid for.

I’d tackle this a a group if I were you. I’d gather the opinions of your colleagues and use this as evidence that your complaint isn’t personal but impacting the entire team.

One can't help wondering how much time the new manager is spending on doing his actual work, compared with the time spent continuously monitoring every move of all the team members.

@Buggeroffboss - mess with his brain. Secretly ask all the team to book their coffee breaks and lunch hours 1 minute apart from each other for a week, but all change the timings slightly every day. Monitoring all that lot for 40 people to the last second will absolutely do his nut.😂

I am a manager
this is fine with senior people
but to have this level of flexibility and trust for all 40 people in a team of varying experience and skill sets would be… difficult and unusual

Project based work doesn’t need a ‘working week’ in the sense that everyone needs to do a strict 40 hours etc.

The deliverable is something like ‘produce analysis of this quarter’s new client acquisition - written document and slide deck needed by Friday’

Manager has assessed its a week’s worth of work for employee A.

As long as employee A produces the work expected by the deadline, and participates in any meetings or core staffing hours as well then it shouldn’t matter to the manger if A decides to start work at 6am - break for an hour at 8.30 to do the school run. Take four tea breaks and go to the gym at 5pm. Do two hours of work in the evening after dinner.

Then the next day she works 8-4 with a 30 minute lunch at 1pm.

Come Friday she presents the document and slide deck in the meeting.

As I said before with project based work the main danger is an employee doing too many hours to get something done and not letting line managers know their deadline and goal is not deliverable within normal working hours load.

Similar to others, I am contracted to work 40 hours a week. When and where I do those hours are entirely up to me as long as they fit with my projects. If I’m working with our US team,
then it’s common for me not to be online until 1pm as I’ll often have calls going into my evening.

Not quite sure why it’s so hard to understand not everyone has set contracted hours which dictate lunch break times and length.

Anyhow, we have a new manager who had previously worked for a very rigid company. He soon picked up that our team isn’t like that and he had to get used to people working random hours and joining calls where pets would often put in an appearance. All perfectly acceptable as the CEO often has his dogs on camera with him. He’s mellowed quite a lot in the few months he’s been with the company.

but if they're drinking their tea on screen then its not a tea break. putting water in a cup is not a break ffs.

I can’t get past him saying you’re not allowed to make a cup of tea unless you’ve scheduled in a tea break?! Is there an acceptable length of time for this tea break? Have you been told how many you’re allowed to have?
There’s so much here that you need to take to HR about this man. The tea break stuff, so effectively telling people they can’t make a drink unless it’s been agreed, surely can’t be allowed as it’s completely unreasonable. Unless you’re in a job where being at your desk at set times is critical such as an emergency services call handler, this is just bonkers and he needs to be pulled up on it.

New boss is under the delusion that he has to assert his authority to be feared and respected as the boss, by being a dick. He's come into an established team and thinks he won't get taken seriously as the boss unless he bosses it to the max from day one.

so the important factor now is the wording of the contract. Which boss is adhering. Former or current

That allows for a lot of trust. Fine in a small team but a 40 odd team? Tricky. Do you have to log your hours to ensure you are actually doing a full working week? Or does the contract say “as long as you get your assigned work done”?

apologies - you’d answered a PP about him being an external hire. Is he on probation?

Oh I do hope everyone puts their drink of water in a mug. New boss will waste so much time reporting everyone and be made to look like a total pillock for reporting people drinking water.

Curious that your boss can tell you what to do in your lunch break. It's YOUR lunch break.

I’m not the OP, but for us, we have a written policy that states we can flex our hours day to day, provided there’s no negative impact on colleagues or clients.
I’m internal facing, so basically as long as I don’t have a meeting, and there’s not some work that will miss a deadline, I can flex my hours as I like.
When the policy was introduced, the head of HR specifically used the example of her going to the gym in her lunch break, which would take it to over an hour, as an example of something completely allowed under the policy.

Sounds like OP has similar flexibility. And her new boss hasn’t experienced that kind of culture before, and doesn’t like it. He sounds bad at managing based on output, and needs to manage based on presenteeism.

This is absolutely crazy! He sounds like a nightmare. Hopefully he doesn't last long OP.

It sounds like the previous manager led with a ‘results based’ model and not an hourly model.

So the core hours are staffed, then working is flexible around meeting deadlines and goals.

You manage employees in this scenario by their output and deliverables, not a time sheet.

You have to be alert to working hours to a certain extent but that’s usually to protect an employee from working too many hours rather than too few.

Humm, hes not going to stick around for long.
He's obviously from a business where working 9-5 with a set 30 minute lunch break is the norm. His expectation of 2 days in the office when you only have 10 desks shows he has no clue!
Hopefully everyone on the team pushes back, or raises the issues to HR and he'll come into the 21st century.

If he'd said that to me I'd laugh and say right...then make a formal complaint to HR that he's endangered my health in this hot weather by denying me drinks

Is your team as great as you think. What is all the 'thinking time' in your work and 'hidden' contributions.
Sometimes a culture develops that isn't as productive as you think if you are part of it. He might have a remit to change the culture.

OP, this is of no practical use but he reminds me very much of Mackenzie Crook's character from Small Prophets. Conjuring up his image might at least make you smile, if you've seen it.

This sounds awful. How does he get any work done whilst monitoring you all? Perhaps if you all complained about different elements of this, a pattern would emerge and maybe some common sense would prevail.

That doesn't sound legal to me, based on ICO guidance

Data protection law does not prevent you from monitoring workers, but you must do so in a way which is compliant with data protection requirements. Article 8 of the Human Rights Act 1998 concerns the right to respect for a private and family life. This is increasingly important due to the rise of homeworking. Workers’ expectation of privacy are likely to be significantly greater at home than in the workplace and the risks of capturing information about your workers’ family and private lives (if you monitor them when they are working from home) are higher.

If you carry out monitoring in a way which is unfair, this will impact on their rights and freedoms under data protection law. It will also negatively affect the trust between you and your workers, as well as potentially affecting their mental wellbeing. Just because a form of monitoring is available, does not mean it is the best way to achieve your aims. You must be clear about your purpose and select the least intrusive means to achieve it.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/employment/monitoring-workers/data-protection-and-monitoring-workers/#dp2