I don't live in the UK..
For the 2018 World Cup my department repurposed several meeting room TVs to stream matches and folks could gather in those rooms to work while watching the games.
Work still got done on time.
At the same time, a friend who worked down the street forwarded me an all-team memo from his boss that warned employee sick day requests would be "extra scrutinized" during the World Cup. So yeah.. Leadership.
All leave applications were cancelled :)
They had to pay a pretty hefty license for the whole headcount of the office, and they whole thing started because one team leader wanted to watch EPL. It was a pretty great place to work tbh.
After the first day, the rest of the company complained enough about the speed of the internet that we had to block it on the firewall.
That’s why you stream it to only one conference room (or a small number). By making it explicitly approved for those rooms, you can limit the people who are doing it more clandestinely. Then you only take the bandwidth hit for a smaller number of streams.
Even if you don’t want to encourage it, the better managers would accept that it’s going to happen and then try to minimize the impact.
The CBS online stream even has a “boss mode” with a fake spreadsheet.
In high trust environment nobody cares what you are doing -- you are trusted to manage your time to produce results best you can. You are given a challenge and you figure your way to deliver results. We are all adults and we understand different people work differently but most people are unable to keep focus uninterrupted for 8h straight, day after day.
In a low trust environment management thinks they can improve productivity by banning activities that have nothing to do with work.
The reality is that banning everything else than work is not causing people to do more work. It just causes them to work longer but slower. Or be more inventive about avoiding work. Or just staring at the screen with your mind blank (I have been there). Also not care to manage your time better, look out for risks, improvements, etc. And then if they are any good quit after 2 years so they don't get bored to death.
Do you really want to pay your developer by the hour? This is just as stupid as paying by LoC.
You would never expect this level of micromanagement for sales because it's clear when salespeople are or are not performing. Who cares if a salesperson is only working 10 hours a day if they're bringing in more revenue than any of their peers? Everyone in leadership can see that.
However when an engineer is a top performer that's not necessarily clear. What people see are the bugs that get created, deadlines met vs not met, how quickly inquiries are responded to, etc...
I thought a lot about entire topic. I think excuse comes from our internal necessity to think as being better than others. I mean, if I was promoted to manager it must necessarily mean I am better than others?
And so a lot of managers persist telling that excuse to themselves (even if not consciously) that they are better and so can be trusted to do things but other people that are "under" them aren't.
Some other thoughts:
* Trusting somebody necessarily means becoming vulnerable to them. Yes, if you trust an employee it is possible they are going to cause damage. The solution is not to stop trusting employees but rather fire employees who can't be trusted.
* Trust does not mean blind trust. You can still trust people to make good decisions but then expect them to be able to explain it and to verify these decisions. An example of low trust: require lengthy process to approve software license for developer tools. High trust: allow developers to get any piece of software they need, automatically. As them to write down rationale when they request the license. If you request software honestly and can explain what it is needed for you don't have to worry and you can get it immediately.
* I believe most people want to do good. But when they are not being trusted they rationalize doing bad work (and sometimes they are really prevented from doing good work altogether).
* I have worked for a lot of companies, most with very low trust environments by some with high trust. Observing new employees joining taught me that people change when they join the company to fit the culture. People who join high trust environment mostly try to be have responsibly (within their abilities). People who join low trust environment mostly become automatons who feel they can't change anything (because they are not trusted/expected to do so).
* If you are a senior leader of a non-trivial organization, you have no other way than to put trust in your employees because there is no way you can enforce/verify everything. In low trust environments leadership puts trust in their management. In high trust environments senior leaders put trust in all their employees and use managers to detect and remedy faults in the process.
On a whole I think it was probably neutral or even a positive for productivity. If my project manager wanted to talk through something he'd usually appear over my shoulder and just say "pool?". Similarly other people on the team when struggling with something would do the same and use the time to loosely discuss the issue (often in rubber duck fashion) or just take a few minutes to think about something else which was often enough to get things moving again.
At previous employers me and my team would sometimes do a few rounds in a team pve videogame at lunch, without anyone ever having an issue.
These things, if done in moderation, builds good team cohesion and spirit.
We used to have a table at Oracle, inherited from the SUN acquisition. Managers never used it, maybe because they were mostly women. We had some furious tournaments though, where I discovered that French people play it with balls made of cork - for a slower and more technical game.
There is little to no coherent speech that happens during those intense 5-8 minutes
Ofcourse the lunch break was ours to do with as we pleased. That wasn't the point.
Rather the point was that no one ever raised any issue with a group of the professional developers playing video games inside the office. And sometimes for longer times than just lunch.
That does speak to the type of people who were managers there. They realized that this was a close group of friends who were honing social and coordination skills that would feed back positively into the team's work.
I advice leaving the snarky tone at the door next time. It can usually only backfire on you.
https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=86181
https://www.dlineradio.co.uk/articles/building-an-am-transmi...
And if someone doesn't get that, just replace that with "Here in Germany" or "Here in the USA" and you instinctively understand the notion of nationalism this transpires.