‘I show idle more often, I’m a worse worker apparently.’ Work-From-Home Employee Criticized For “Being Idle” So She Creates A Code That Shows She’s Working Even When She’s Not

Millions of people found themselves working from home during covid, and a good number of those people realized they really loved it, too.

Some didn’t, but as businesses and offices began to demand people return to the office, those who recognized the benefits of not commuting started to ask why.

OP is one of those people who couldn’t stand the thought of going back to the office, and since no one in her team works in the same office (or lives in the same city) she figured she was safe when management was deciding who could stay WFH.

As part of the plan to return to office post covid, my company has done a lot of re-designating of who can permanently work from home, who can hybrid, etc. I really wanted to work from home full time.

I hate the office with a burning passion – it’s distracting, it’s a long commute, there’s no benefit to being there, so on and so forth. I’d just rather be at home.

I work on a team of 8 people and each of us is in a different office somewhere in the country. I’ve literally never been to an in person meeting or needed to do in person work in 3 years at this company.

So, when everyone on her team but her was allowed to continue working from home, she asked why – and was told it was because her chat went into idle too often.

Well when we thought May was going to be go back to office time they started giving out the new designations. I got designated as in office full time. It made no sense to me.

Every single other person on my team got designated to work from home. So I brought it up with my boss and asked to work from home. When I started at this company and lived elsewhere I got to work from home for 4 months before I moved and the past 14 months during covid have been at home, so 18/36 months at the company have been WFH.

What I was told is that I go idle too often in chat to trust to work from home.

This is because, according to her, it only takes her about 3-5 hours of actual work to complete 8 hours worth of tasks. So, she could sit at her computer playing games or surfing social media for the whole 8 hours to show not idle, or she could do other stuff while still getting meeting her goals.

And she does meet her goals, at the top of her team or near, and technically performs better from home.

Basically we have a company wide IM system that shows you as available, idle, or in a meeting. If you don’t touch your keyboard for 5 minutes you show as idle. So they’ve decided to use this as a measure for who is working and who isn’t.

The thing is, like many people in many types of jobs, I don’t have anything to do for a full 8 hours every single day. The amount of work I have to do on a typical day takes 3-5 hours of actual attention. There simply isn’t something to do ALL the time.

My performance numbers actually went up working from home, by all objective KPI numbers I’m a better worker at home. In fact, in the KPIs that I don’t flat out lead the team in, I come in second.

There isn’t work to do that I’m neglecting or procrastinating, when something comes up I simply do it until it’s done or until I can’t do anymore due to waiting on someone else then stop.

And I’ve done that method long enough that my work queue stays empty because I worked to get my queue down to the point where when something comes up I can immediately address it and be done with it.

But because I have other ways to spend my time in down time instead of messing around online at my cube pretending to be working meaning I show idle more often, I’m a worse worker apparently. I was told if it weren’t for that they would let me work at home.

In response, she wrote a program that keeps her keyboard “live” even when she’s away.

So I wrote a 6 line powershell script that virtually inputs the period key every 4 minutes that starts running every day at 8am and stops at 5pm.

So now I literally never go idle. I do the same amount of work and still read books, watch tv, and play video games on the side. But I have a shiny green check next to my name all day.

Now, she gets to work from home (and she’s sharing the code with y’all!).

Because of covid complications they eventually said no going back until after labor day. I just had a meeting with my boss and he said over this time they’ve noticed I go idle a lot less than I used to so they’re changing my designation to work from home, all because of a little icon in some software.

This concludes my TED talk on why low to middle level managers are the dumbest, most useless do-nothing positions in all of corporate America.

A lot of people are understandably asking for the script:

$dummyshell = New-Object -com “Wscript.shell”
$dummyshell.sendkeys(“.”)

That’s the backbone of the whole thing.

There’s different ways to implement it with for loops or scheduled tasks or whatever, that parts up to you, but that’s all the powershell needs at it’s core to accomplish this.

A lot of people have pointed out that sending Insert or F13 instead of period would be better so change that up if you want.

Is this wrong? Does it matter? I’m sure Reddit has opinions!

The top comment points out how strange it is that they measure success by touching your keyboard and not by actual metrics.

People much prefer managers who focus on the quality of output.

Turns out folks have already figured out other ways around stuff like this.

Here’s another great idea…

And yeah, some people have written whole programs for that.

Y’all…I say work smarter not harder.

If you’re doing what they pay you for, and doing it well, is there really a reason to feel guilty?