AIBU for thinking that this is ridiculous?

[Enni2S]

Last Friday, everyone in my team at work received an email regarding working from home. Apparently we are to upload a full itinerary of what we'll be working on, when and how long for into our calendar. Everything then has to be noted up so that work done can be checked by bosses.

Working from home is allowed on an ad hoc basis and most people work from home between once a week and once a fortnight. Everything that can be done in the office can be done from home. AIBU for feeling that this is ridiculous? Nobody asks me for a detailed breakdown of my day when I'm in the office. I dread asking to work from home as much as I dread calling in sick. To people who work from home, is this normal?

Personally think yanbu. Worked from home a lot in previous roles. In this one still do occasionally. I def seem to plough through more at home and sometimes if am on a roll will just keep going way past the time am s'posed to be finishing. Can manage my time just fine. Really don't need anyone managing it for me or checking what am up to because I am a grown-up!

I suppose in an office they can see that people are working. When you work from home it's on trust that you are actually working. Perhaps someone has been abusing the right to work from home and now they've had to introduce this to make sure that people are actually working?

I think it's very difficult for anyone to really answer here without knowing more about your job and billing practices. As a lawyer has already mentioned, they would routinely mark down units of time spent on each individual client file. I have some clients I work for on a similar basis and for those clients I need to be able to say we spent X time on this project and X time on that project, I can't do that without everyone in my team giving me the details of what they've done. 9/10 if someone hasn't recorded their time properly it's impossible to ever get a proper handle on how much to charge, they'll either grossly under or over estimate it in retrospect.

That said for the rest of my clients we all work pretty much on the basis that provided the deadline is met I don't really care whether someone is working at 9am or at 11pm - it's their choice in how they fit the work around their home life. It's certainly mine. ;) There are some really good time tracker apps available that should help you in recording different tasks etc, I don't think any employer wants to make this sort of thing into a major task, and if it's done right with the right tools and expectations it shouldn't be.

I once sacked someone for a previous employer who was absolutely taking the piss. She was a sales rep who probably cost us 6 months or more where she made claims to be doing work but was actually shooting the breeze and living her life. We investigated it when news finally reached head office of her abysmal performance. Unfortunately I think such is all too common an occurrence in roles which aren't office based.

I had a boss once who decided we should fill in a form every day to tell her what we were doing. It was split into 40 minute segments so I would block one out each day to say "filling in the time sheet again".

The thing is, people who are determined to do the least amount of work possible will still manage to do that.

In a previous job, we had to log every piece of work we did, anything we did that wasn’t part of a specific process such as phone calls to other departments. People who had always worked hard continued to work hard, people who had always skived continued to skive and found creative ways to account for their time.

You're either a "working from home" type or you're the do-more-at-home-than-you-do-at-work-to-prove-you're-working type! Presumably they're looking for the former so if that's not you then don't worry about it. It seems a PITA but occasional time and motion studies can be useful for both parties. If it's going to be on going just think of it as a timesheet, many offsite workers have to complete them.

I used to have to do that in my last job and hated it. Everyone working from home did. But the whole management style was micro managing and very demotivating. I was used to working over my hours, but for that job never worked over once.

What BellyBean said. I wouldn't und doing this at the end of the day, although seems a bit of a waste of the time they're paying for, bit I couldn't bear to have to plan each segment in advance. Things take as long as they take, sometimes things get moved around n order of importance, or matters arise. I would hate to have a rigid plan.

This would be a nightmare for me. I work on multiple projects at once (four at the moment) and I have to flit between them all constantly. Keeping track of what I was doing when would take as long as doing the damn job.

You have my sympathies, OP. I also work for a dinosaur company who views working from home with intense suspicion.

Just to add - this is completely different from filling in timesheets. It's easy in my circumstances to do a timesheet by averaging out my day: 2 hours on X project, 3 on Y project. Completely different from planning it in advance and then sticking to it.