Slashdot Mirror
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?"
"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?"
Web based surveys are not scientific (not a random sample), therefore are completely worthless. Who is more likely to fill out a web based survey, those who use time at work looking at the web, or those who don't? There's the problem, and any conclusions drawn from this data about the general American population have no basis.
We're bored.
America lost its internet economy when we realized we'd made it too easy to operate and it could be shipped anywhere people could put text into editboxes.
Now we're giving massages and filling out divorce forms for a living.
This isn't the New World Order we paid for.
Indulged, entitled.
Deleted
A part of the problem is the amount of time most Americans spend at work, and how little vacation time people get in this country. Two weeks of vacation a year isn't much, and people burn out as a result.
Meaning that, rather than doing boring repetitive tasks manually, a good engineer usually finds shortcuts and ways to automate tasks without compromising the quality of results.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
I generally find that time spent bonding with co-workers comes back in intangible ways. It opens lines of communication so that people feel comfortable when real issues arise. It makes people feel more comfortable reporting blockages in their workflow.
Likewise, studies have shown that workers produce the most when they spend a full 20% of their time off-task. That means roughly two hours of their day should be spent doing something else as recovery time to produce the most overall. People burn out if they focus too much, and 2 hours sounds about right based on the studies I've seen.
Employers should grab the above and run. Never give an employee one thing to do... always have several things they can rotate between when they're tired. Give them little projects with other people that can open lines of communication, rather than just one daily grind task.
The ______ Agenda
I used to have a job where I was severely underpaid. I was making under $40k to be the sysadmin and only programmer for a small e-commerce company. Rather than dicking around, I just took a later train in the morning so I ended up working 7.5 hours rather than 8, because I couldn't justify working for such a pittance at the time, but there was nothing else available. After a while I had a lot of built up a resentment because it became clear I wasn't ever going to get a raise. For many people, feeling undervalued is a great demotivator.
rooooar
Another factor is that more and more people are working in jobs where it is difficult if not impossible to quantitatively assess their hourly productivity. For example, if you work on an assembly line screwing parts togethe, it's pretty obvious if you are slacking off during a given hour, and what's worse, you'll slow the whole line down. But if your task is to write a chunk of code, or draft a certain number of letters, it becomes almost impossible to figure out whether you are working fast and loafing, or working slowly but steady. From the employer's standpoint, they don't usually care as long as the total work gets done in about the same amount of time.
It also gets harder to second-guess the employee when certain tasks take longer, because some tasks are more difficult than others and will inevitably take more time. Unless the manager is willing to personally do the task and figure out exactly how hard it was, they can only rely on what the employee tells them.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
On another level, Slashdot is an example of how people rationalize when they are wasting time at work - "it's work related!"
Readers of Slashdot freely admit that they are reading and commenting while at work. They rationalize it by saying that they are getting news and info directly related to their work. And sometimes, sometimes, that might actually happen. That could be, what? Twenty percent of the time? Less?
The rest of the time they are debating the finer points of Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Dr.Who, evolution vs. intelligent design, politics, NASA, Hubble, flying men to Mars, flying cars, and what old people in Korea are doing, etc.
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
These are two totally unrelated qualities. Yo can be very gifted and work 2 hours a week and produce a lot, make millions, etc. If you are not gifted you can work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and produce nothing.
If you manage to accomplish in an hour as much as other people in a year why not be lazy?
Yo can see that in all fields which require special talent like mathematics, theoretical physics, literature, art, etc.
For example, Adolf Hitler dreamed to become an artist, worked very hard, was not lazy but had no talent and only managed to become a dictator. (He did design the Nazi flag, however)
There are Nobel Laureates in literature which only wrote a few books. On the other hand there are hard working mediocre writers which wrote hundreds of books and nobody knows them.
The workday in the US should be reduced to 6 hours. That's 30 hours per week. Any more is unproductive.
The Europeans are kicking our asses on even the most basic technology, and they don't work nearly as much as we do.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
But I find it very often you need to be lazy in order to be creative. Sometimes I think very hard on a problem and cannot think of a solution, but when I go to lunch or start doing something non-work related the solution appears to me out of thin air.
Fact is if you have to work all the time you cannot be creative. You need to pu tyour brain in different modes.
Good advice. I consider myself to be a lazy individual, and I'm constantly amazed by people who can work two or more times as hard as me and not achieve anything more.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I use my wasted time at work constructively. I have found throughout my job history that if you want your ideas to be heard and implemented, you have to implement them for them to be heard.
Yes, but the big question is: is it worth it?
Is it worth giving your blood to the company, working on a idea they themselves don't encourage you to do and are not paying you to do it? What are you going to get in the end, a big "thanks"?
That's something i've been thinking a lot lately.
In business classes they call this sort of thing employee empowerment. People get a lot more satisfaction and do better work in a job they feel they own. If the highly skilled and creative people hired to do the work make the decisions then the project is their project and their work tends to reflect that. The opposite is true too.
People get a lot less satisfaction if they have to ask permission for every move they make and their job consists of a to do list made by someone else. I work at a place where I need approval from several different bosses before I can do any sort of work and the details are all but laid out for me.
Where I work, when a project gets behind schedule for any of a hundred reasons, often the lag time in the approval process, the answer is always the same, more meetings and more bosses to answer to. More bosses more meetings [office space reference goes here] just slow things down and take away the last few shreds of satisfaction from the work. I'm guessing I'm not alone in this.
It doesn't really matter what the job is. Teaching kids with a to do list takes the creative part out of teaching. My mom is a teacher and that part of the work makes the job something people want to do. 25 years of going through the motions is an awful way to spend your time. This sort of thing turns schools and other places where creativity was important into assembly lines.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
I think Larry Wall was right in recognizing that simple metrics are often misleading.
/.? Isn't your employer getting what he's paying you for? If you're a programer, do you turn in quality code on time? If you're a supervisor, do your people understand what's expected of them and have the tools and materials they need to do the job? Do you turn in your reports on time and know what's going on with your projects? There are lots and lots of ways to measure job performance, and "works hard for eight hours a day" is often way down on the list of importance and relevance.
If you're a factory worker who's paid to assemble widgets and you goof off for a couple of hours, you probably ARE ripping off your employer. However, many of us, even hourly employees, aren't being paid to assemble as many widgets as possible. We're being paid to accomplish tasks, and one person might do a better job of it working hard six hours a day and goofing off for two than another person working hard for eight hours a day. If you're a sysadmin, is your network functional and secure? If so, does it really matter if you spend a couple of hours browsing
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
I don't know if you're working in public education, but I'm someone that works in public sector on the government side. I'll give you what is seen from that side of the fence.
Schools tend to account for over 50% of a municipality's budget. In most states, they aren't required to (and sometimes are strictly prohibited from) run their budget as just another government department. Most departments have to justify the need for money, and get approvals for expenditures. Schools get their money, and can move it around and spend it how they like, never requiring authorization from the government body that they're a part of.
That person you're talking about is likely the school system equivalent of a financial board; perhaps a business administrator or similar. They're making sure the budget monies that they get from municipal revenues are being spent in the right places. You don't want to get too detailed, though, because then you have to move money around all the time. You can't just have a massive "teaching" budget, since you need more accountability than that offers.
If you were to do it your way, you would have to allocate a pool of money to each school. Then each school would have to allocate it to different functions, and split the rest among departments, and then among teachers. That would actually reduce flexibility, because each pool of money would be quite small. You would get rid of a few administrators by making everyone be accountants.
As a teacher, your job is first to teach your students. Optimally, you shouldn't be worrying about money at all. You ask for something, and you either get it, or you get some reason why you aren't getting it. That all has to be worked out before budgets are decided. Realistically, you probably are working against a department budget, and have another small budget for your classroom for more specific things. Your department head would seem to be the person to talk to about budgets, or perhaps the school principal.
When the school systems decided their budget, they'll break down system-wide requirements, and lay down the budgets for individual schools. Those school budgets will be decided by talking to each principal and determining requirements. Then they'll go to the municipality and request that amount of money as their department budget. If it is granted, then they're done. Otherwise, they have to go and decide what school things get cut, etc.
Then pricipal of each school determines what they need by determining what the whole school requires, and then what each department within the school needs. If there is a budget cut that hits them, they need to decide what to cut.
That is why you can't just entrust the staff with the budget. There are too many things to consider, many of which are outside of a teacher's expertise. I think you'd find that if you let the teachers decide about the budget, you would have lots of classroom equipment, and buildings/grounds that are falling apart with infrastructures that don't work right. Management is just not what a teacher does, and it isn't likely to turn out well.
That would be a rather hard metric to evaluate! Not everybody works in a place where they can "write a program that makes it possible for your sales force to be 10% more effective". As the matter of fact, I could bet almost *nobody* has such a job.
What about people who work on strategic projects which might pay off tommorrow, in two years, in 10 years, or never? How do you measure by how much the work of the internal training department has contributed to the company's bottom-line?
Even if you came up with a perfect way to measure one person's contribution to the company's bottom line when working alone, how do you account for influence of other people on the team? Imagine a project which is a complete failure, bringing the company loss instead of profit. How do you now evaluate the people on the team? Have they all failed? After all, the company bottom-line has suffered, even if a part of the team has done a marvelous work. The same goes in another direction as well: if a project turns profit, it is often indistinguishable who contributed how much to it. Who do you reward, who do you fire?
Quite a few people have tried to come up with means of measuring a software developer's productivity. All failed the real-life check miserably (although some of them seem to refuse to go away and die the thousand deaths they deserve, but rather remain present in mid- or high-level management's minds; think counting lines of code, for example).
American workers are lazy. And creative. I think it takes one to drive the other. I for one will spend 2 hours creating a script to do something for me in an automated fashion that takes me 5 minutes to do manually, just so that I don't have to do it manually any more!
:-)
What's creative about it is that what I learn from writing the script can be used in other places, and I can spend some time later trying to find better ways to be even more lazy in the future
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
But, second, as a classroom teacher, let me respond to
What drives teachers crazy is that it seems management isn't done well by managers either. I have assiduously avoided getting "promoted" into administration precisely because I want to teach. But I don't think it's outrageous to ask that those who do take jobs in administration learn to be good at, you know, administering. The grandparent post had a point: The people who make the budgets and track the money often seem openly hostile to hearing from the classroom teachers -- they want to set budgets without asking us what the priorities are from our vantage.
It might or might not be true that if teachers made the budget, we'd all have great classrooms and lousy buildings. I'd like to think that the people in charge of educating the young would be smart enough to understand infrastructure; in fact, I'd be willing to bet that, among professionals not directly involved in infrastructure, teachers probably rank among the highest in their appreciation of those issues. But that's anecdotal and I could be wrong. In any event, if the decision makes sense, why not actually explain it and show people?
In fact, in my experience, most bad management involves a desparate, almost pathological need to control the flow of information and a corresponding disdain for transparency.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The US work week is tied for first as the longest in the industrialized world at an average of 2040 hours. (France is around 1400 by comparison)
Screwing around at work for 2 hours is extremely reasonable considering that tens of millions of Americans go home after work and keep on working. Then there's overrepresentation of young people by virtue of the fact that it's a web survey. Young people have a strong representation in the retail sector, where screwing off causes little to no economic loss to companies.
*In general*, if you work hard, you can get ahead. That's the American Dream, and people here are pretty good at it. Just check out the GNP.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
So you're saying you made yourself redundant and successfully didn't do any work. Congratulations. I presume you made more money than your team members. I also presume you know that you are the reason people dislike middle management. You get paid more to do nothing. What would have happened if there had simply been an email forwarding program in your place, and anything that would have come to you instead got distributed to your team? The same work would have been done, they would have worked exactly as hard as they had been, and the company would have saved whatever your salary was.
Just so you know, making yourself useless is not a good way to keep a job. In fact, that's why getting fired is often called being "made redundant."
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Please give the parent a +5 Insightful.
I am ashamed to admit that I have what many would consider a dream job (magazine editor, telecommute, set my own work schedule), yet I still bitch about my job. That's just wrong, and I need to stop it. Attitude adjustment in progress.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Actually, if he/she knows his team well enough to know what each member can/cannot do and can orchestrate their actions effectively, then time and effort of the team members is probably not wasted. I would love a manager who could do that consistently. When I dislike middle management, it's usually because they are brought in to micro-manage. Unless they have a science/engineering background, it's pretty much like having an idiot standing behind you with a clipboard doodling and asking dumb questions.
I'm an American who has lived in Germany and now lives in Japan, and I can tell you, Americans have it the worst of any country on earth as far as vacation time goes. The problem is, our expectations of work ethic is extreme in the wrong direction. The minute somebody says they want a vacation, everyone else instantly thinks that person is lazy. Why? Why should we spend our lives working all the damn time? There's nothing noble about it. It's been proven time and time again that people who are forced to work long hours spend a large majority of those just goofing around. If you put someone at work for 10 hours a day, they will be no more productive (and possibly less) than somebody working 6-hour days, and less happy to boot.
The United States is the only country without a federal law stipulating a minimum guaranteed number of holidays per year. The Japanese actually get more vacation time than Americans(ten days guaranteed, at least another week or so in national holidays.) The solution is to scale back work hours, increase vacation, and encourage people to get the same amount of work done in less time.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life