A Study On Time Wasted At Work

Animesh Pathak writes "C|Net News has an article about a survey of people's goofing off habits at work. From the article: 'It's interesting to note that the Internet was cited as the leading time-wasting activity. It goes to show how integrated it has become to the daily functions of our personal and professional lives,...Today, there are so many useful tools and Web sites on the Internet that have enabled people to become more efficient with accomplishing multiple tasks in a shorter amount of time.'"

Comments

Standby Periods

[fembots]

The article did mention that not all waste is pure waste, as they could spark new ideas, and it's also likely to introduce ice-breaking topics so that everybody can sit together and chat about something in common.

Nowadays companies expect employees to be available from 7.30am to 6.30pm, but these employees aren't actually required all the time, the boss just wants you to be there so that when he needs you, he can find you.

The article mentions insurance industry is the worst, but what do they expect insurance call centre staff to do when nobody calls in?

Maybe start cold-calling: "Good morning Mr Anderson, this is Smith from Surely Insurance, we're wondering if you have a car accident today?"

So I normally treat non-productive time as time-out or standby periods for employees, they're getting paid to provide continuous service availability throughout the day.

Re:Standby Periods

[Nos.]

They even say that roughly 1/3 or respondants say they "waste" this time because they have don't have enough work.

Near the bottom of the salary.com article is this little blurb:
Populations surveyed included AOL users, Salary.com Salary Wizard users and corporate human resource professionals

So, a good portion of the surveyed group are visitors to salary.com. I would guess that a majority of people visiting salary.com are at least somewhat unhappy with their job. I don't think I would consider they're numbers worth anything. Its like asking people coming out of a theatre if they're willing to pay current admission prices to see a movie.

Re:the internet and solitaire.

[_RidG_]

That's absolutely ridiculous, provided that it was indeed the case that her work only took up 45 minutes of the day. Could you reasonably expect a sane person to sit at his / her desk five days a week, 8 hours every day, and do absolutely nothing for 7 hours and 15 minutes at a time?

I don't quite understand this logic. You are paying her to do her job, i.e. answer phones and do accounting. As long as that condition is satisfied, let her be. Your employees are people too, though by the hostile tone displayed throughout your post, it seems that there is certainly some bad blood there.

Re:the internet and solitaire.

[NeoSkandranon]

If the real reason you kept her around all day (as opposed to having her come in, do the work, and clock out) is so she could answer phones, why's it her fault that she didn't have other tasks to do after the 45 minutes of accounting work?

The way you make it sound is that she literally had no other tasks to perform (if this isn't hte case *please* correct me as it changes your story completely) --so what would you have had her do? start shampooing the carpet or something like that?