I get paid a lot of money for doing very little

[Thrilley]

I'm not proud at all, I'm a bit bored, but also recognise I have it pretty good.

I lead a small operations team, 3 people including me. I took the job mostly because it paid the same as my old job, but for only 3 days pw, whereas before I was FT.

Partly, I have little to do becuase my no2 is very good and very keen to take on new work. I'm enjoying developing her and there's no doubt she's doing some work that should be mine. She seems happy with this/glad of the training though. Regardless, I think our team of 2.6 people is probably 1 too many, the others aren't over worked either.

However, no one outside the team seems to have noticed, no one seems to care about cost, everyone is very happy with the service we deliver and none of us is likely to easily find similar work for similar money

So, I keep quiet....? It doesn't seem quite ethical, but neither does volunteering one of our jobs!

It's probably an exaggeration on my part but there were a fair few days I did it over summer, which is quieter. I think most people take the odd few hours off here and there over summer. It's perfectly acceptable to finish at 5pm for school run so why not in summer?

Starting at 11am is maybe a summer luxury but if I don't have meetings and the work can be done in the 6 hours I am online then why not.

Monday is already busier diary wise and things get hectic from here, so I won't be doing it anymore. Peaks and troughs during seasons!

I was in a role like this but made the mistake of seeing how stretched colleagues in parallel teams were so stepped in and did work for them. As a result, I blurred boundaries and became too operational. I then doubled down on this error by ending up with responsibility for some of these areas which meant I didn't have the time or headspace to think about the strategic issues which were part of my role. By this stage, boundaries were blurred and it would have been too damaging to relationships to step back effectively. Instead, I ended up resigning.
In another role like this, I'd enjoy the down time!

Sometimes the value of an employee is not in how much they do but in how well they do it. Like pilots, the majority of their 'value' is in preventing things from going wrong, like the experience to know when to abandon an attempted landing, and in coping appropriately when things do go wrong.

Someone who only really needs to work half of their hours but who can spot a potential problem early enough to head it off is far more valuable than someone with less experience who is constantly needing to do extra hours to solve the thing that they didn't recognise early enough was a problem.

People are generally paid in line with the size of their decisions in respect of the organisational impact.

But it is stealing from a charity. 'Value' that should be being contributed to a charitable purpose is being squandered by someone taking a salary without returning commensurate hours of work in return.

Whether the charity curates art or cures cancer - and whether the worker does IT or medical research is neither here nor there.

I think you know perfectly well that when people hear/read/say ‘stealing from a charity’, the mental picture isn’t (for example) a lazy HR person for the Institute of Actuaries (which, like most membership organisations is funded by member subscriptions).

And while you might think there is no difference between that and an aid worker legging it with money donated by the public to care for orphans, I don’t think the majority would agree.