The Reality of Management

First: Employees will not and cannot stay buried in work every minute of their day (at least not every day of the year). They will take breaks and the type of break depends on individual preferences. Just because a person chats with someone for 10 minutes or one hour, one cannot conclude that he is not a good worker. The chat may, in fact, be relevant to official activities. Worst case, the chat may give the employee a break from routine and that may re-energize the person. There are paranoid workaholics but not all employees belong to this category. Trying to make a person who is moderately interested in work a complete workaholic through force or fear will not work and could, more importantly, be disastrous. The quality of work is best only when a person is inherently passionate and sincere about it. The speed of work is great only when passion and sincerity is combined with personal and technical skills and support from the rest of the organization. Employees without work ethics and a conscience are hard to change but changing them over a long period of time is possible only with patience and perseverance

Second: We live in a world where we cannot anyway control each and every activity of an employee and even attempting to do so will only backfire. If the concerned employee is consistently involved in an inappropriate activity that has a negative impact on his work or is unethical and does not heed to warnings, it may only then be natural to ask him to leave

Third: The best way to get work done is to come up with exciting and useful ideas, provide the implementer with the appropriate environment, tools & training, inspire him and trust him. Fixing reasonable schedules is another dimension. Additionally, if one wants to slide toward a more “controlled” approach, one can obviously follow up and monitor the daily or weekly progress (or at some other appropriate intervals) depending on the situation and type of work. If this process throws up any loop-holes or other suspicions, appropriate action has to be taken to bring the person/project on track. The action could be related to the idea, environment, tool, training, inspiration or even just trust

Fourth: There are times when the team may be admittedly slow and not run like Ostriches or be ready to squeeze out every drop of its blood, but we must accept it to be a reflection of reality (especially in the case of teams as opposed to individual star performers) and be happy (at least till the time you find a way to inspire the team to run faster) if the team is found to be traveling at a reasonably good pace