Ever feel watched at your job? Unsafe? Like an animal of prey, afraid of straying even a little bit from your work for a second? Feeling as if a monster may pounce on you from the shadows…?

Kidding about that last part, but I’m sure that feeling is very familiar to workers, especially in open offices. Well, Reddit user Viking-16 shared a story of this feeling of anxiety being ratcheted up to 11 when a group of consultants performed “time studies”, watching everyone to make sure they were working as fast as they could.

More info: Reddit

Being watched at work is the worst feeling there is, making you feel like your every move is being judged

Image credits: Southend-on-Sea City Council (not the actual photo)

The poster’s workplace was visited by consultants doing “time studies” who watched everyone work for a while, measuring their speed

Image credits: Viking-16

Image credits: Pete (not the actual photo)

After their evaluation, deadlines were majorly shortened, leading to what was 100% completion of tasks only amounting to 75%

The story is short, sweet and full of emotion. Viking-16 shares how their company hired “time consultants”, whose job it was to watch people with, seemingly, actual, literal stopwatches.

You can’t make this up.

This ended with people being forced to work much much faster, with what was 100% productivity becoming 75% now.

Unfortunately, we cannot use the same lexicon as OP, but they were very emphatic about their feelings on time consultants.

In the comments, OP revealed a bit more detail.

When commenters suggested they should have worked slowly in order to fool the consultants, they defended themselves by saying they had no idea someone would be watching them. They looked up and saw a person with a stopwatch looking at what they were doing.

A person who said they were studying to be an industrial engineer (one of those time consultants OP mentioned) chimed in as well.

Apparently they should have explained to the employees about what they are doing. The point of it is to measure how much time it takes to perform tasks, but without forgetting to account for delays for toilet breaks and fatigue.

Industrial engineers should make things easier for workers, not force them to work even faster than they are capable of.

OP also said that people who were struggling to reach 75% productivity could barely hit 50% now, making them feel stressed out and likely even more fatigued.

Image credits: Ben Schumin (not the actual photo)

If this is your first time hearing about industrial engineers and what they do, NC State University has a good breakdown of the job. Simply put – an industrial engineer’s job is to figure out how to do things better. Physical and social sciences are combined with principles of engineering to improve processes and systems.

Industrial engineering is regarded as the “people person’s engineering”. They strive to improve quality and productivity, while cutting wasted time, materials, money, and energy.

In OP’s case, it seems that instead of having processes optimized and the lives of workers being improved, they got majorly micromanaged.

According to process.st, there are loads of downsides to micromanaging your employees, with the word itself becoming almost like a curse by this point.

Micromanagement damages employee trust, annoys them, leads to major burnout, and increases employee turnover rate, among other things.

Over time, it makes people lose all trust they had in their workplace and themselves, making them less independent and unable to make decisions alone. After all, how would you feel if every single thing you did was scrutinized and criticized?

If you’re dealing with a micromanager, there’s some good advice for you on Indeed.

One thing you could do is attempt to build trust with your manager, because perhaps you’re doing something that may be inviting yourself to be scrutinized – being late all the time or missing deadlines.

Noticing that you’re being micromanaged, you may be able to get them off your back by informing them of things ahead of time, perhaps sharing your daily plans, thus putting them at ease and building trust.

You could also bring your feelings up, saying that you’d like for things to change, as being micromanaged is negatively affecting your work performance and feelings related to the job.

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The post nearly collected a whopping 19k upvotes, with about a thousand comments. Loads of people shared how they felt about the issue, saying that they would never put up with their bosses doing something like that. Have stories of your own? Share them in the comments.

The commenters were frustrated about the situation the poster was in, saying they’d just quit in their shoes

Image credits: UnknownNet Photography (not the actual photo)

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