About breakfast at work

[WishingILivedOnAnIsland]

Every day without fail one of our senior administrators comes in on time, gets herself settled, then spends 10 minutes in the kitchen constructing a complicated bowlful of breakfast. She takes the bowl to her desk and slowly eats in the open plan office until around 9:30am. She then signals the start of her work day by returning her bowl to the kitchen. Anyone who approaches her regarding work prior to The Bowl’s Return is met with a withering look and an ‘excuse me I am eating my breakfast’ as though they’ve walked into her own kitchen out of hours and demanded a favour.

I’m her manager and I’m starting to get complaints. Both about her commandeering an additional 30 odd minutes break, and also about the tart rebuke she gives anyone who dares interrupt her morning ritual.

Here’s the thing- I don’t really care that she does this as in every other way she is a sensational employee. She is a proud set-in-her-ways kind of person and wont respond well to negative feedback. It would be a disaster if she quit and we had to replace her with a mediocre employee whose only advantage is that they eat their breakfast at home.

So AIBU to let this breakfast nonsense play on? My colleagues seem to think so and are salty with me for my inaction thus far.

Why?

Because I've been the subject of a terribly petty complaint along similar lines and it didn't end happily for the person complaining

Jacques sounds like whoever manages in your workplace is a bit shit then.
It should be perfectly acceptable for other employees to complain that this woman won’t respond to work- related issues during ... work time! That’s the bottom line. She’s not doing the job she’s paid to do and it’s impacting on other people in the office trying to do the job.
It would be a truly shit workplace that can’t deal with that without ‘blaming’ the rest of the workforce

No, I’m the Director of two businesses....I don’t need to work full-time hence I can MN to my heart’s content or take a 4 hour breakfast if I so choose grin

FFS @JacquesHammer ..... get on with your work. Like wot I am

Ok so I’ve read pretty much all of this and I’ve no problem with eating at desk, but you need to be available.

30 mins/day

2.5 hrs/week

Over 48 working weeks that’s 15x8hr days (if I’ve done my maths right)

So that’s three weeks of pay for eating breakfast.

Jacques sounds like whoever manages in your workplace is a bit shit then

Well it's me now, this was a number of years ago.

He was great - he took the complaint, brought it to me and asked how I wanted to deal with it. I accepted he had to bring it to me, and we had to deal with it properly.

We dealt with it perfectly by the book - it just meant that the person who demanded my absolute precise time-keeping at the beginning of the day lost out at the end of the day because I worked exactly to the clock at both ends of the day rather than helping her out at the end.

I don't care if the staff reporting to me do their work standing on their head or want to eat breakfast at their desk. Once their work is done to a high standard and handed to me on time they can do it however they like

A million times this.

Maybe have a quiet word with her about her attitude if she’s asked to do something first thing. But if she’d s great employee, no you don’t want to lose her.

But the ‘you must be at your desk, breakfast eaten by nine’ jobsworths on this thread would drive me insane. I bet they spend half the day on the internet.

And this is how this type of person becomes 'untouchable' at work in the first place...because managers are too scared of tackling blatantly unreasonable behaviour, while being prepared to then also tackle any sulky/childish/tit-for-tat behaviour or dip in performance that may materialise afterwards, because Ethel thinks she's so amazing it's an outrage that anyone should dare pull her up for anything so sod them if she's going to answer Doris's phone any more when Doris is at the photocopier.

Genuinely excellent employees behave like professional adults and don't push the boundaries like this woman is because they understand why it's poor behaviour in the workplace without having to have it spelled out to them, and they don't hold the implicit threat of withholding their labour if they're given any kind of negative feedback over their manager's or colleagues' heads.

So that’s three weeks of pay for eating breakfast.

And some people complete tasks in half the time to a much higher standard than others. Their value to the business is high.

get on with your work. Like wot I am

Is now the time to say I've watched rugby this morning and am about to go out and meet my daughter and have afternoon tea

Exactly TheTitOfTheIceberg excellent employees don't have their managers over a barrel and excellent managers don't allow employees to put them in that position.

You need to say something to this employee, she's taking the piss regardless of how great she is at her job.

I don’t think the employee has the OP over a barrel. The OP recognised the employees worth to the business and isn’t overly concerned with what she does between 9.00 and 9.30.

Presumably if the employees work standards slipped it would be a different story.

And some people complete tasks in half the time to a much higher standard than others.

Something this woman is preventing other people from doing with her "how dare you expect me to deal with your work query while I'm eating breakfast" attitude. Wonder how much quicker some of her colleagues would have got through their work if they'd been able to get an answer to their question at 9.00am instead of having to wait until 9.30am? Because it's not always just that half hour's extra wait, is it? It's the person who needed the answer for their 9.30am meeting so an action has to get carried forward to the next one; the person who only had that first half hour to get the answer and then catch someone on the phone before they went off into a training course so that task won't be complete until tomorrow at the earliest...there is a lot more productive time being lost to the company than just that 2.5 hours per week.

If the OP saw that as a problem to the team surely she’d have mentioned it?

Jacqueshammer in other words a totally different scenario! The woman the OP describes is not responding to work issues or interacting with her colleagues while she’s in the office being paid to work. If you were doing that then it makes you a knob too - but I suspect from what you say that it was a totally different situation where another employee was simply nitpicking

I'm disappointed at the volume of posts advocating a strict, rigid, rules driven management style. That may have been the preferred model 20 years ago but, in my experience, the best performing teams are those where they are trusted.

Management style massively depends on the environment - it has to. What works in an office won't work in a factory, and what works in a factory won't work in a shop. Some environments are conducive to allowing people to pop to appointments, to eat at their desks, to take personal calls - others don't quite work like that.

When you work in a shop in direct view of the public and where you have to be available to the customer at all times unless on a break, you can't sit there and eat a bacon sandwich or text the nanny or re-arrange the babysitter without leaving the shop floor (and therefore ensuring you have sufficient cover). That's the environment I work in (and the only one in which I've got any management experience) so that's the viewpoint I'm responding from. I've had to pull up colleagues for wandering off mid-shift to make coffee without checking because it leaves the shop uncovered and as the manager it's my responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen.

What works for one environment doesn't necessarily work for others. I think people are just speaking from the experience of the environment they work in. Doesn't mean they're wrong just because they manage differently to you.

To clarify- as a manager I have no time for nit picking whiners. But if a someone in the team was in work but deliberately blocking others from interacting on work issues with them for half an hour every morning, I’d recognise them for the total knob they’re being. She clearly thinks she’s untouchable.

I'm disappointed at the volume of posts advocating a strict, rigid, rules driven management style. That may have been the preferred model 20 years ago but, in my experience, the best performing teams are those where they are trusted.

I’m not at all surprised it always happens on these threads.

It’s disappointing yes.

And for the record, obviously there are workplaces where strict rules are necessary. This doesn’t sound like one of them.

Imagine if she worked ina shop. Would she tell customers to wait while she ate her breakfast before serving them. What if she was a surgeon. Would she make her patient wait while she munches on her cornflakes. She is taking advantage of you OP

I don’t think the employee has the OP over a barrel.

She does if the OP doesn't feel like she can address this issue because, as she said herself, this so-called excellent employee won't respond well to what she perceives as negative feedback and therefore the OP is afraid of any repercussions.

When the only repercussion if she is a genuinely excellent member of the team should be to say "sorry, I hadn't really thought about the impact, point taken" and an extra 30 minutes of her time devoted to the work she's being paid to do.

You need to tell her - it doesn't have to be heavy handed - just say something like, 'I have no problem with you eating breakfast in the morning but since it is in working hours you really should deal with any requests/questions if they arise and not expect people to wait until you've finished eating. I hope you see that as fair'. If she says 'no' then you have to get a bit more gritty.

It would be a disaster if she quit and we had to replace her with a mediocre employee

Why on earth would you replace her with a mediocre employee? Are your interviewing skills so bad that you're incapable of recruiting a suitable replacement?

Imagine she worked on an oil rig? Imagine she worked in a hospital?

She doesn’t work in a shop. If she did, different behaviour would be required.

Her value to the OP is how well she does her job.

I'm in the overall performance and actual work output that is the most important thing camp, not that you are sat at your desk clocking up hours.
I have worked with the latter and they seem to think as long as they are sat at their desk for 40 hours a week they're doing a good job, it doesn't matter that they're doing fuck all for 15 hours of it.
Ime they are usually jealous , if she's an outstanding employee then they probably are, they also don't see the irony of the amount of time they spend bitching about what other people aren't doing and how their time might be better utilised actually working.
Along as she is otherwise doing well in her job I don't see the problem, but for the sake of staff morale perhaps take your dilemna to her and ask her how you can resolve it.

Her value to the OP is how well she does her job.

Which has to be balanced against the 30+ minutes (having re-read, the OP actually says '30 odd' so it appears to be longer than half an hour - are we closer to 3 hours a week being lost now?) when other colleagues can't approach her and may not be able to get on with urgent work of their own. She may be the apple of the OP's eye but she is affecting team morale - what happens if OP's #2 most efficient worker gets so pissed off with the perceived unfairness and OP's inability to manage effectively that they leave instead? - and I doubt she has the same reputation with other managers if their team members are held up with their work because Fanny Ann hasn't finished her Alpen.

Her value to the OP is how well she does her job.

See I think employees bring other values to the workplace too. Being an outstanding employee isn't just about doing your job - I think there's more do it than that.