I have a similar problem as you but I found out something about this...
If you choose your employee to chat about business with the costumers, they'll just do it until you have Sims avaible to talk on the lot. If your employees don't find anyone so they just cancel the task and starts reading, dancing, chitchat...
The same thing happens with cleaning task if they have nothing more to clean and attend costumers if everyone already bought something.
I don't konw if that is by design but it's annoying and could be considered as a bug...
EA Staff (Retired)
@ceunon20 wrote:
I have a similar problem as you but I found out something about this...
If you choose your employee to chat about business with the costumers, they'll just do it until you have Sims avaible to talk on the lot. If your employees don't find anyone so they just cancel the task and starts reading, dancing, chitchat...
The same thing happens with cleaning task if they have nothing more to clean and attend costumers if everyone already bought something.
I don't konw if that is by design but it's annoying and could be considered as a bug...
I don't think that the excessive dancing on Retail lots is by design, that's something we've reproduced as well. But it sounds like the other issue you're describing is that using Assign Work Task does not assign the work task for the entirety of the shift. And that is indeed by design. Employees may slack off or perform other Work Tasks that they aren't currently assigned to. Here are some verification points we used to test this feature, that should give you some idea of the intended design:
During work hours, employees will try to perform any available retail tasks.
Depending on their Work Ethic, NPC employees may occasionally run slacking behavior.
A slacking employee stops running any commands the store owner may have told them to do.
A Store Owner Sim may simply issue a new order on a slacking Sim, who will return to work.
