Hi All, I have just had a very "interesting" discussion with my manager today and hoping if someone who understands the New-Zealand-way-of-doing-business can help me out here.
long story short:
my manager has asked me to put a time on very single work that I do, for instance: if i'm getting a quotation from a company, it takes me " 2 minutes" to write an email, then it takes another "5 minutes" for me to read the reply, thus my total input on this issue is "7 minutes". Example 2: if i'm to talk to a customer, it should take me 10mintes (give or take) to do the talk, then my total input on this work is "10 minutes". Same goes to so many others works that i do, the waiting time is exclusive from the consideration (let's say it takes 2 days for the quotation to come back to me, then I can't say I have been doing this work for 2 days which is fair enough).
why do I need to put a time on details like this? because the manager says that my working hrs on the employment contract is 40hr a week, this is how they keep track if i'm having enough workload to do, and I can only suggest the company to hire another one like me to help in the company once after adding those "minutes" together the total time that I worked exceed 40hrs a week, only in this case the company will hire another employee. (which basically means I need to keep working (non-stop) for every single "second" for 40hrs a week).
When I confronted my manager saying what company in the world would ask their employees to do things like " 2 minutes to write an email, 5 minutes to read the reply, if i'm writing 100 emails a week and doing nothing else, then i'm working 700 minutes this week", my manager replied that this is a very common business procedures in New Zealand.
so my question is that: do you know any company in New Zealand that is asking their employees to do things like this so that the company can measure the employee's work and value based on it? because to me this is just ridiculous.