American Workers: Lazy or Creative?

Nofsck Ingcloo writes "CNET News.com is carrying an article by Ed Frauenheim in which he interviews Bill Coleman of salary.com. Coleman and company have conducted a web based survey regarding how workers spend their "non-productive" time at work. Here are some snippets from the CNET article. " Click to read more. "The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch and scheduled break time."

"The extra unproductive time adds up to $759 billion annually in salaries for which companies get no apparent benefit."

"Work is invading our personal time and therefore it makes sense that personal activities are invading work time."

"Not all nonproductive time that an employee spends is a complete waste. Some of it is creative or constructive waste."

"[P]of the reason that this [survey] got such a good response was that it's an issue that people think about on some sort of regular basis."

"[O]ne of the reasons people gave for wasting time is they feel that they're not being paid appropriately for the work they're doing. And so it is sort of quid pro quo, in that an individual employee's ability to increase his or her pay is limited, but their ability to decrease the number of hours they actually work is not as limited."

Coleman is definitely on to something. I see this phenomenon, and this reasoning, all around me. How much of the reasoning is rational, and how much is rationalization?"

Comments

yes, lazy

[jshaped]

I can only speak for myself,
Yes, I am lazy.

Re:yes, lazy

[SlamMan]

Actually, both were created about the same time. Labor Day's been in September since the 1880s, after Grover Cleveland declared the Knights of Labor's annual (since 1882) parade a national holiday in 1887, in order to take away attention and support from '86's Haymarket Riots.

Re:Web based survey

[Wavicle]

The data is a lot less useful than I think you may be giving it credit for. I go over this occasionally with social scientist PhDs who have at most one or two semesters of formal statistics training. They also think that it is fair to generalize from mailed questionaires. If you do not know the degree of the bias, you really have no idea of the skew of your results.

Case in point, the study says that an average of 2.09 hours is spent "wasting time." Now you know that time wasters were more likely to answer the questionaire, so the bias is out in the open. Now... How far is 2.09 hours from the true mean? Just pick a confidence interval of say 90%. Do you have enough information to figure that out? Unfortunately you don't. There is information in the study, but you don't know enough about the bias to separate signal from noise.

And also keep in mind that no matter how many lengths one goes to to make a survey sample representative, it is never going to be perfectly so. There is always some error, and there is always some insight to be gained, "scientific" or not.

This is all taken into account in proper statistics - which require a random sample. If the sample is random, you will know how likely it is to be a "good" fit. But I'm curious, what exactly is non "scientific" insight?

Re:Vacation...

[aaarrrgggh]

Most companies in the US have 8 or 10 "govenment holidays" paid. "Standard" vacation time is 10 days, but you usually get another week after 5 years working with the same company. In addition, most companies give 5 sick days per year. This gives a standard benefit of 23 days.

For my company, they combine sick and vacation days and just count it PTO. This works out pretty well if you don't get sick or have kids.

Compared to Sweden, which I think has a standard benefit closer to 45-50 days... I would say that Americans have a very limited vacation benefit.

Re:Vacation...

[bladesjester]

Most companies work through national holidays with the exception of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and sometimes New Years.

Really the only people that get the other days off are banks, government offices, and a few buisnesses that actually decide to close for the day.

After that, most people get 2 weeks or so of vacation if you're salaried.

Re:Vacation...

[digithed]

I live and work in Sweden (although I'm from UK) and the standard benefit is 25 days vacation plus around 13 days of public holidays. This is pretty similar to UK which also generally has 25 days vacation plus around 11 days of public holidays.

In both Sweden and UK some companies also operate flex time so it's possible to build up more free time (the company I work for also allows you to choose between cash or free time when you have worked paid overtime).

However, the biggest difference in Sweden is that it is a workers right to be allowed to take 4 weeks vacation in a row in the summer (assuming of course they have enough holiday entitlement left), and it's not that uncommon for people to take 6 weeks in the summer if they have built up enough free days. A lot of Swedes work like mad in the winter when it's dark so they can enjoy the nice weather in the summer.

In UK, it is uncommon to take any more than 2 weeks vacation at one time. The last company I worked for in UK allowed you to take 3 weeks but you had to ask permission and your manager had to agree.

Re:Web based survey

[servognome]

they hunt down people who did NOT respond to questionnaires, going to them in person with a bunch of flowers, explaining why they need to research skew. On average, it takes 2 calls and 1 visit to get to the pesky non-respondents.

Hunt them down with flowers? With a baseball bat they can get responses from those pests with just 1 visit, no calls needed. And in the future you can be sure they will respond the first time :)