The switch to work-from-home has, for many people and employers, has been a smooth and welcome one. It saves money, it saves time, and people don’t have to get dressed or make the stressful drive into the office.

It hasn’t been without trouble, though, like how to ensure employees are working for the time when they’re clocked in.

OP is a smart cookie who is able to meet her metrics in about half the work day. She gets good marks on reviews, though, so for a long time no one complained.

My current job is a simple one and nice as it is WFH, receive work to file digitally, upload said documents, repeat.

Anyways, every day I achieve above average uploads, like I said, it’s super easy for me.

I don’t do too much over the top and generally can complete my whole workload, accurately, within a max of 4 hours every day.

This leaves a lot of time to myself. I always stay by my computer however in case my boss or a coworker needs help with other things.

The other people on her team seemed to take longer to do the same amount of work, but of course, everyone got paid the same.

The expected productivity according to my boss is laughably easy achievable by myself, however, others on my team seem to only be able to complete what is expected. (Keeping things vague bec my company is large and I’d prefer to vent safely)

Then one day, OP was approached about all of the time she didn’t seem to be logged in and working.

Just this past week however, I have been reprimanded for “productivity” issues. Basically being told I need to be doing something at all times and that the time gaps in no work is unacceptable. This comes after having worked in this fashion for the last 10 months by the way.

So, my boss demands that when I am clocked in, my upload records must always show that I have recently done something, and that there cannot be a gap in uploads longer than 10 minutes unless I’m clocked out.

Basically demanding I do more work for the same amount of pay.

So, OP did the smarter not harder thing and set up a timer to remind her to push some buttons every so often so it looked like the work took her 8 hours instead of 4.

Well, my solution is to set a timer that goes off on my phone every 3 and a half minutes telling me to complete one upload.

So now I do the exact same amount of work over the course of 8 hours instead of 4.

Don’t want to pay me more for doing 3x as much work as others? I’m not putting the effort in then. It’s silly to think I would.

If you want more work you need to pay for it, right?

Some people had advice on how she could even do it better.

Apparently there are more than a few options.

You have to be careful with that too, though.

Others warn OP to be careful.

But mostly they figured management is just asking for it.

This kind of thing makes me mad, too.

You basically get punished for being good at your job.