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.
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
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.
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.
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'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