Employee Is Torn About Confessing to Her Boss That She’s ‘Automated 90%’ of Her Job
A woman revealed on Mumsnet that she only works four to six hours per week at work while most of her tasks are automated
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Woman working in an office (stock image)A woman has confessed she’s torn on whether or not to tell her boss that she has automated most of her job tasks.
On Sunday, Feb. 9, she explained the situation on the U.K.-based forum Mumsnet writing under the username IroningBoardAgainstTheWall. The woman revealed she took over her role from a man named Phil who would spend over 50 hours a week “not achieving very much” because he didn’t have a good grasp of databases.
She was told when taking the role that Phil was always “very busy” and they kept him on a retainer for if she ever needed any help.
“Within a month I'd automated the daily, weekly and monthly reports, added more useful ones and sent them out,” the woman wrote on Mumsnet. “During my first academic year, I'd introduced new systems to automate tasks for others, developed new ways of capturing and reporting data, linked systems to the main MIS to automate account creation and syncing, etc.”
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“So basically I have very little to do anymore,” she continued. “I do ask for stuff to do, but there's nothing much really. I look for stuff to do but again, there's not much. Occasionally I'll get feature requests or specific reports.”
The woman confessed that she works just 4 to 6 hours each week, including doing tasks that aren’t part of her job description such as fixing printers and laptops.
Having not revealed how little her role is needed to the company, she asked Mumsnet users: “Should I confess?”
Hundreds of people replied to the post with the majority of commenters advising the woman to stay quiet and attempt to upskill or focus on a side hustle in quiet periods of work.
“You smashed it!! Congratulations!” one person commented. “I think you should request a work-from-home and start a side hustle and make a retirement fund. Also, say that you need an assistant and hire me to chill out too, please. Seriously, you should do some courses and follow your life’s dreams.”
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Woman at work (stock image)“Definitely don’t confess OP [original poster]!” another chimed in. “It’s the dream. But to make it work more for you, I would definitely request to WFH [work-from-home] for a few days. Do your six hours work whilst in the office and then do what you like at home. Washing, housework, work out. You’d be mad to confess or leave.”
A third said, “You are still needed to manage the system, deal with bespoke requests and be generally helpful on the IT side, so you are very much doing a full-time job, even if you are effectively on-call most of the time.”
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However, others warned that it could be risky to hide her lack of work from her boss and advised her to get a new job if she wasn’t required for other tasks at the company.
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“In my career, there hasn’t been anything more demoralizing than the brief periods of time that I’ve not been busy,” a commenter wrote. “That hasn’t happened in years, and now I’ve got work coming out of my ears, but I prefer it that way. So I’d have to ask for other work.”
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