Have you ever coasted and gotten away with it?

[foreverhidden]

I'm curious to know if coasters are as obvious as we think, or if anyone out there has been a closet coaster and actually gotten away with it.

Ie have you coasted but still managed to gain good performance reviews and not been pulled up on it. If so, how long for.

If you've been caught, how long did you coast for? What was the process once you were caught.

I've seen so many people in my company who I knew coasted, get caught up with eventually. Wondering if there are some getting away with it all the same.

I could get away with doing very little in my job if I was that way inclined but I'm not and am a hard worker. Two colleagues I would say do very very little. One will get away with doing one home visit to a client today, often booked for 1pm and taking an hour and then will disappear home afterwards with no sign of any work being done at home. There is another who has been allowed to do nothing for years. The place ( charity ) is very poorly managed.

“Gotten”

Very annoying indeed, agreed. (Unless the OP is American. )

Gotten is an old english expression taken to america.

I worked once with someone who in a massive reorganisation had somehow manage to not be matched into a job but also not made redundant. He spent years helping out on projects he fancied and everyone thought he was great because he went 'above and beyond' until it was finally noticed he had no core role. No idea what happened to him.

OP, not sure what industry you're in but I used to work with an incredibly successful coaster.

A promotion came up as the head of a department's deputy. The coaster was happy, chilled, relaxed because he used to sit at work planning his holidays and never working.

Another guy, let's call him 'The striver' worked much harder, but was very stressful to be around as he never stopped.

Both guys were on around 60k.

Long story short, the coaster got the promotion due to his relaxed attitude. Job paid about 80k. When the head of department left the coaster then left for another role - £95k, soon got commended on his attitude at new workplace and went up to £120k. The coaster has now just taken a new role, at a new company, for £200k. I've never known him do a day's work but everyone likes him, he's very relaxed.

What happened to The striver? He burnt out in the first job two years later. Left for a lower role as he couldn't cope. He's now on £50k, so the coaster is earning four times his salary in a few short years.

I'm not really sure what my point is - but watching both of their careers I do find it fascinating. The striver was clearly the better worker.

And it makes me wonder how valuable working hard really is - Vs looking out for yourself & self care etc.

I’d say I’m at about 22 years….

Depends on the job. Mine is full on most days but I do get lunch and 2 breaks, work 9 hours a day and usually take around 130 calls
I can't be more efficient as I physically can't take any more calls

I don't work that hard but that's because I am doing a job that is a grade below what I am capable of. I don't need the money and don't want the stress of more responsibility. I am really experienced and so it is quick for me to get stuff done.

I do my work in about 75% of the time it takes my colleagues (there are 4 of us, we all do the same job, the work is spilt equally)

I’m just quicker and more efficient than them. My boss has no idea, my appraisals are always full of comments about just how much I manage to achieve. Love it 😃

Doing the bare minimum in my company would be replying to correspondence, attending calls and meeting task deadlines.

However, at manager level, if you are not running projects to improve your region, developing your team, understanding and reporting on metrics to a level where it has an impact and not contributing effectively in meetings, you are not performing.

But surely either those things are part of your job description or they aren't?

I'm a teacher. The bare minimum of what a full-time secondary school teacher needs to do is certainly not manageable within actual school hours. But contracts expect us to 'Do whatever additional hours are necessary to do the job'. In my 30 years' teaching, I've never felt I was coasting, in the sense of choosing not to work hard. But I have absolutely always felt that I wasn't getting everything done that I'm in theory supposed to do, because I'm not willing to do more than the roughly 50-53 hours I do.

I've been the chump who "goes above and beyond", gives my all, exhausts myself to work way above what is actually in my contract. No one thanks you for it and you remain exactly as dispensable to the company as the people who do just enough. It's not worth it.

This.

I worked my arse off in my previous job and was thoroughly shat on. It only meant higher expectations were put on me than anyone else and I was never financially compensated for any of it.

I was paid the same as the chap at the same level as me but who needed supervision to do tasks set to the level below him.

I don’t work there anymore - and probably “coast” at my new place - but I still get everything don’t - I just don’t break myself for them.

Really interesting. What you're describing is the likability factor. Indeed, I've known people who work themselves into the ground, however they are come across as desperate people pleasers, annoying, frazzled and probably just don't have that something about them.

I'd say people who coast and are likeable get away with it more. Although I knew one coaster who drove me mad, got promoted to above me 3 years before I did and boasted how much more money she got at her level. I knew she did no work because if a doc was sent around same day for a meeting, she would have time to go in there, read it, make comments and turn up to the meeting prepared. Vs me at the time who worked so hard and turned up to the meeting sometimes having not had a minute to check my emails, let alone that. She was vocal in meetings, experienced and level headed but really no one liked her and everyone knew she was coasting in the end so that was the end of that. I wonder if she had been likeable if she would have been pushed out.

I don't know anyone paid £11.80 an hour, that's just awful of them. Especially when CEO takes home that much. A 17 year old in our street babysits our sleeping daughter for £10 an hour and she just watches Netflix. Definitely coast and also find a new contract.

Since most of my employers have had blood, sweat, tears and hundreds of hours out of me over the years, even coasting would normally be the equivalent of 1.5 WTE in my world... I'm getting less inclined to do it as possible partial retirement is almost within grasp though.

Hundreds of extra hours.

Also I've learned over the years it isn't what you actually do that matters as too many senior managers are vain, gullible, credulous and lazy.

It's what you TELL people you do. Very few senior managers seem capable of checking.

I’m sorry but that was you not prioritising your work properly vs her doing the right thing - coming prepared to meetings.

Nothing to do with ‘coasting’ imo.

They have annual pay increases and annual bonus payouts, this is performance based. I've never had a bad performance review or bad remuneration. I think my last manager had a feeling I wasn't working as hard as others, because they once wrote in my review 'you didn't find projects to keep you busy' but she never acted on it, and she was in line for a promotion and had me as a succession plan so lifted me up for her own gain. When her promotion fell through and I had no where to go, she wrote that.

To answer your question, the annual raise can be anywhere between 0-7% I believe. So maybe. With bonus, quite likely.

I work in Pharma and it's quite normal to do this and have stack ranking performance reviews. They say Pharma is the new Tech and 10 years ago, many will remember that Tech was the new banking.

Agree. Although, most people in my company get caught out due to stakeholder feedback. If a few people say something untoward, then you're in for it. The higher you go, the more you earn, the more people resent you and the knives come out.

Fwiw, years ago, I was working in a technical position.
Part of the job was putting together documents for each product. They were all very similar to each other.

I sorted out a way of making the process of writing those documents quicker. Like people were taking 2 days to write one. I was doing 2~3 in a day.
I was told I wasn’t doing my job well!! I was only using copy and paste when other people were painstakingly typing the whole doc again and again.

Ive seen many times something like that happening.
One person comes and works in a more efficient way. The person doesn’t look stressed. They’ve prioritised well instead of being distracted by stuff that aren’t actually in their remit/necessary. But it can look like they are ‘coasting’ ….

I've always coasted.

I do the absolute minimum amount of work I can do without actually being sacked. My colleagues who do more get paid the same.

@DullFanFiction if I'm in meetings all day, then how would I have time to check my email, open a doc, read it, comment on it?

In fact it didn't happen often but when it did, only 1-2 people had time to go in and accomplish that task. It was always her. She seemed to be sat without work, fielding emails, keeping the lights on and she knew that meeting had our VP in it, so part of her bare minimum was to turn up to that meeting and be vocal.

She got fired and I've since been promoted so it is not her being good at prioritising vs me not. In those days I was operating without a full team and overworked.

@foreverhidden then that’s a different picture than the one you first gave.

Because in that case, that person wasn’t coasting, she was underperforming.

In a lot of jobs the reward for getting your work done quickly and efficiently is more work, not more money. So why would you?

I've coasted before, but so has my employer - they offered no training or progression, so I just worked to rule after a while.

My current employer is much the same, but I have a very high workload, so whilst I am good value for money in terms of output I haven't been developed or invested in enough by my employer to do anything great, and I wouldn't have time to focus on it either. I'm just churning out work and getting things done, which might well be considered coasting, but until they relieve my workload and train/invest in me that is what they will get. It's not always the employee who decides if they should coast.