I frequently have all of my work completed, and I am unfortunately not allowed to work from home. This means I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk scrolling social media, because there’s nothing that needs done. I feel like I’m wasting my time, even more than work already wasted the best hours of the day. How do you fill that downtime with something that is personally valuable, but not disruptive or noticeable enough that you’d get in trouble?
So if you never do anything but look busy, you won’t get fired?
No. That is not my point. I said that the most important thing is making the boss think you are productive/busy, regardless of that actually being the case. A boss can’t and/or does not use objective data to assess productivity. At least I have never seen that anywhere.
That does not mean that you do nothing. It just means that you can appear far more productive/busy/important/… when that is far from the truth.
I don’t know what to tell you. In my experience, in my line of work, if you show what you can do, you become valuable. If you slack off, you don’t. Showing what you can do will get you ahead. That’s my point based on empirical evidence I’ve seen and done first hand, and that’s the original point you were challenging. I’ve answered it now, so there. 👍
Of course you have answered my question, no worries. I find it odd that our experiences are so different. Like I know nobody who stayed at a company and got anywhere, everyone always has to go somewhere else to get higher pay etc. And at the same time, companies complain that if they train someone, they just go to a different company. Like are they best dumb? Really odd reality we are living in.