"..she has to be productive for 8 hours" Depends on the field but very opimistic imo..

@iLuvLogix Ok, I removed the word - Productive, is it optimistic to expect 8 hours of work as she is putting the same amount on the timesheet? And we bill our stakeholders on the same basis.

So you want to tell this employee "Your icon is not green all day, make it green all day."? You will be amazed at how many solutions there are for making the chat icon green. If they are not available when you need them then address that problem. If they are missing deadlines then address that problem. If they are inattentive during meeting then address that problem. If they are not responding to important emails in a timely manner then address that problem. If you expect an icon to be green for 8 hours then that means you expect zero time for thinking and every second needs to have an action.

I see 2 different issues here: availability and productivity. If that employee is neither available neither productive, then you probably got a slacker...

hi @Jarvis Of the 40 hour work week, how many hours is she gone? ("Doctor" "market" etc.) Based on what you have said, my estimate is that she is playing hookey about 15-25 hours a week of the 40 hours. Can you give us an hour estimate per week?

Just as you should have been doing before, ask meaningful questions about the lagging project. Find out what the specific issues are, and the employee's current strategy thinking for how to resolve them. Have a joint call with the supplier, both so that you can weigh in on how serious the issue is to your organization, see if the supplier has what they need from your side in order to produce a resolution, and judge if the supplier seems reliable enough to depend on. If it seems this project is stuck in a waiting mode, discuss bandwidth for another project to do in the waiting time.

@LaurentS. You should expand the comment into an answer.

Sounds like your a micro manager who has no real way to tell productivity.

The new info has invalidated a great many answers. I don't know why it was omitted to begin with.

I think you still need to be more specific about what exactly the problem is. Is it that she's not always working during a particular block of time, say 8-5? If so, is that an actual job requirement, or would it be ok if she worked 4-midnight? Or is the problem that she's not getting the necessary work done, regardless of how many hours she works?

I don’t think you need to be careful or sensitive here, tell her your expectations. You might even want to tell her to start logging work hours, and if she prefers to work off-hours (which is a reasonable thing), then agree on a overlap time, it sounds like she manages the agreed team meetings just fine. And to help her with the tool selection process you can assign a second resource or help her directly, that will also allow for better understanding the challenges.

@Fattie I don't think she is working for more than 4-5 hours a day

Why do you not think she is not working more than 4-5 hours a day? Has her output or quality of work been halved?

At one employer, the status notification in the chat system was switched off for a while when it was found at least one manager had been using it to keep track of employees status, then matching that against the hours they had claimed to be working. It took some convincing to IT to switch it back on, who then made a general announcement essentially prohibiting managers from logging this information (data protection rules, privacy rules, other rules).

"is it not unprofessional to bill 8 hours a day when you are working only for 4-5 hours on average? " - the legal word for it is FRAUD. And in pretty much every jurisdiction falsifying work hours is cause for immediate termination.

Then the headline should just say "How to manage employe who is skipping work 15-20 hours a week".

@jmoreno I think so because she is away for rest of the time, I have mentioned in my first edit that she is working on a task with no end in sight.

Could she be working before/after hours, when you're not there to check her online status? Also is she obliged to work at certain hours? Or does she only have to work for 8h/day or 40h/week, but she can select her working hours (flex time)? Is the vendor replying in time? Apart from that even in the office people rarely work straight through their 8 hours, yet bill them. There's a chat here, some procrastination there. Just because someone's at work doesn't mean they're working all the time ;) Ofc if she misses deadlines or her task doesn't get completed, that's another story.

I’m voting to close this question because although the questions (s!) asked here are perfectly valid ("how to speak to an employee playing hooky") the EDIT HISTORY of the question has resulted in the entire QA being a dumpster fire. OP initially apparently included a side-rant about "icon-anger" which (not unreasonably) resulted in 7 rage-answers about icon-anger (which, apparently, had nothing to do with the (apparent) actual question). CLOSE this edited-to-hell question, ask new.

Where is the evidence that this employee is not working their full hours? The closest thing I found is this: “I think that I tarnished a very genuine question by mentioning IM status. Honestly, that's how I know that the person is not working for the whole billed hours and of course the productivity.” This comment is obviously suspicious given the edit history of this question.

@BrianDrake Exactly! There isn't any evidence. @Jarvis it's obnoxious and many contractors hate this suggestion, but what about asking her to install a time tracking/logger software on her PC? And does she need to do tasks like reading, or writing on paper?

I might add, this does NOT seem to be smartworking, but remote working. If so, and if it is CLEARLY stated in any written form, then the employee must agree to the contract terms.

If there is explicitly stated that he must prove to work for N hours a day, it's his fault to not do so. However, should this NOT be addressed, then @Jarvis has no binding leverage, apart from his judgement of the situation. If the employee is productive and IF there are no explicit constraints on remote working time, then why the hell bog him on that?

@TheVal that's the thing, if she is an employee in the traditional sense of the word, using work equipment who happens to be at home, then they are in control of her pc and could just put a logger on it. If she's a contractor then this whole question is pointless as long as she's compliant with her contract terms.

True! Moreover, every employee has a contract, and if by said contract it is mandatory to work from X to Y, then she must do so, or amend the contract. If it is smartworking (a different contract) the employee will have different constraints, and in that case it'll be true NO MATTER what the boss will say, because there is a binding document. The boss can't force to work extra (at least in my country).

The logger history is also a possibility, but it is not accurate. But again, unless you have the boss continuously checking on you at the workplace (which can happen for N reasons), it offers no real guarantee imho

Even loggers can have work arounds, but @Jarvis seems convinced she's away by her status, and at least this way she has a chance to indicate when she is working. What if she has no idea he is going by her status and just thinking it doesn't matter?

This is the conundrum of loggers. They don't necessarily represent reality, and especially the boss should know better, as it is a tool that she may use to manage her employees. Bad knowledge and bad assumptions are not tolerated in this case

It is so easy to imagine a case whether the boss does not fully understand a program, and misjudges her employees as a result. This not only creates a bad environment, but leaves a really bad impression of the boss