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When the cat is away the mice are at play
01 December 2011
By Blanka Sengerová
When the cat is away, the mouse are at play, so the saying goes.
The thing is, when the mice need to be productive themselves (who is going to eat the cheese and bits of food instead of them?!) they're just shooting themselves in the foot because they'll just have to catch up on their job anyway.
Mice and cats aside, we were talking about this in two different contexts in the lab. Firstly, the public sector strike. OK, researchers may have been eligible to be on strike (and we did get an email asking us to fill in a 'pay reduction' form to have 1/345 of annual salary taken off if we were on strike) but what would have been the point? No one would have noticed (it's not like the intellectual level of the country goes down when researchers are on strike!) and you would have just had to catch up on the work you missed the next day. You would be mostly inconveniencing yourself.
The second point, and the one that mostly relates to the cats and mice in the introduction, is about the labs that suddenly become deserted when the boss is at a conference/holiday/away. I have to say that this has never been the case in any labs I have worked in (phew!) but I know of labs where this sort of thing does occur, to a greater or lesser extent. In my view, the PhD students and postdocs are shooting themselves in the foot - whilst they may enjoy a slightly easier week when the boss is away they're going to have to be catching up on a lot of work beyond that. But I also think that it is a bad reflection on the PI - if his/her group see him this way, then surely it can't reflect well on them as a manager.
Have you experienced PIs who have had such an effect on their groups? How do you deal with it when you are in such a group? How do you encourage others in the group to change their attitudes towards their own work and do you need to?
Sandrine Berges02 December 2011 at 03:39 PM
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Obviously I've never encountered any thing like this as I don't work in a lab, but it seems that if people avoid work when noone is watching it's possibly as much because they need a break from working in an uncomfortable environment as because they're not committed to their research. Although I can see that a bad boss could sap your commitment even to work you believed in.
Simon Smith03 December 2011 at 08:29 PM
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Is it just possible that the absent 'mice' are not playing truant but actually catching up on other work that can best be done away from the lab (like writing and reading)? Maybe they feel pressured to be seen when the leader's around, and get behind with other tasks? Or is your kind of work entirely centred on the lab?
When I'm deciding whether to work from home or go into the office, the issue of whether my boss is going to be in that day is a minor consideration, but mainly for practical purposes - there might be something I want to ask her, for example. Much more important is what kind of work I'm planning to do. And what the weather's like outside.
Blanka Sengerová08 December 2011 at 11:17 AM
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>>Is it just possible that the absent 'mice' are not playing truant but actually catching up on other work that can best be done away from the lab (like writing and reading)?
Possibly, but I would argue that if you are happy with your boss' attitude (and they're happy with yours and know that you will actually be working from home) you would have no problem catching up with this sort of work even when he/she is around in the office. I would say that generally if there is trust between boss/group members, then this 'mass exodus' on boss's holidays does not tend to occur and people work from home when they need to.
And actually both boss and employees (from experience) sometimes find it more productive to work at home as there is no temptation to chat or go for those tea-breaks...
>>Or is your kind of work entirely centred on the lab?
I would say probably 60-70% of my work involves lab work, and the rest is analysis and sometimes writing up papers/producing presentations and similar. The analysis sometimes needs to be done at work because of the specialised software which I don't have on my home computer, but I have at times spent the day at home writing papers and talks because I knew I would be more productive.
>>because they need a break from working in an uncomfortable environment as because they're not committed to their research
The problem with this is that it would be much harder to get away with in other job lines. Because research is inherently flexible and self-motivated, people who lack self-motivation and need more hand-on management can have difficulty with this?
Tennie Videler12 December 2011 at 01:31 PM
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My experience has been that PIs tend to be away an awful lot, so that becomes the norm- if you weren't self-motivated nothing would get done and I don't think there are many researchers out there who need that sort of hands on manegement!
Blanka Sengerová14 December 2011 at 12:08 PM
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>>if you weren't self-motivated nothing would get done and I don't think there are many researchers out there who need that sort of hands on manegement!
I think Tennie has hit the nail on the head with this. But I would argue that whilst researchers (postdocs etc.) need to be able to do without hands-on management, some PhD students need more support than others and a good PI will be able to spot that (maybe with the postdocs' and more senior students' help) and prevent such a student from becoming so demotivated that they start slacking and slipping behind with their PhD work.