Ok, so I get the “good intentions” of the procedures - sanitary, patient health and wellbeing, etc - sounds good on paper. It yeah, you’re right that it’s demoralizing and easily causes burnout. I’ve had jobs where management absolutely didn’t trust their employees to do the right thing. They even went so far as to herd us into a janitors closet and then walk us to our desks (floating desk arrangements at a call center) like we were children.

The managers were told to walk up and down the rows and look for people not doing their job and fire them. We were told if we weren’t on active calls, we were to sit in our chairs with our hands over the keyboard in ready position for the next call. No talking; no reading books; no nothing. I’m sure somewhere on paper it sounded like a good idea. But it was the absolute most toxic environment I’ve personally been in.

Anyway, y’all should unionize.

just hire more nurses

Look, I get your point, but it’s not like nurses grow on trees. (Especially good nurses.)

Things need fixing, but they need fixing far earlier than that.

I used to work at a place that required daily progress reports on tasks (this was before agile took off so ‘daily standup’ wasn’t a thing.). So I wrote a script to schedule my git commits throughout the week (so that I had at least one a day), and every afternoon it would pull my git history, generate a summary, and email it to my manager.

He knew it was automated and hated me for it but I had the most consistent and detailed reports. On the upside, it really trained me to make good commit messages. On the downside It really instilled me with a strong “burn the building down” kind of vibe that persists to this day.

I moved from one project in my scaled agile using organisation to another and a week later got a phonecall “why are you billing half an hour a day to admin”

“Um” says I “working out where to put how much time against each of the five rows we’re tracking our work under takes at least that long”

Then management shot themselves in the foot

Step 1. Instruct people that all their time must be allocated to a project task, no more admin time, no more corporate role time.

Step 2. Assign a “tiny” piece of work to a team of 10, so the tiny work costs (10 x number of days to deliver) pdays, but was costed at a reasonable level of 20 pdays.

Step 3. Don’t assign any other work to the team

Step 4. Dissolve the team and scatter the staff 2 weeks later

So by the time the team was dissolved, the work was done but for QA, which was delayed and idle because of a bug found in unit test. At that point it had cost 10 people * 10 full days — a hundred pdays.

Management has been calling former team members asking for them to assign their time to a previous project to get the cost of the work down to its planned amount

I don’t think it’s fraud since it’s billing this part of the organisation for work done for that part of the same, but it really makes a mockery of the idea of tracking time per project being meaningful. Anyway, I’m glad they asked me to lie on MS project in writing

Had a coworker do it in 2 hours increment, customer asked to have him removed from the project because even emails led to being billed for 2 hours.