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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?"
People working full time in America, despite these figures, still work relatively hard. There is little to no vacations available to a lot of workers here. How many times do you hear of someone going to Europe for a vacation, for a month? Rarely. Yet, this happens a lot in other nations. Many companies in Europe and Asia, for example, give 3-4+ weeks of vacation a year. Here in the U.S., it's called "sick days" and you get a very limited amount of them. Obviously not all companies, but most I have dealt with.
I know that in my job as a teacher I often feel that I'm not entrusted with enough responsibility and, because of that, am unenthused. Now, before I get too flamed for whining about my job, let me say that this is a result of having what I call six layers of idiocy (bureaucracy) above me.
Case in point: the budget for our school is divided into strict segments with fixed dollar amounts for each. Someone in the layers above me decides how much our school can spend in each area. My thought, rather than pay that person, entrust us, the staff at our school, to use the money to our best advantage. That person, whose salary is likely over $100,000 (over twice what I'm paid), could be put to more useful work or that position could be deleted. We would be able to spend the money more effectively and would be much more invested in the budgeting process.
As it is, the way it is, I only care about the money so long as it lasts in any given account. I'm lazy about the money, because I'm not allowed to be creative with it.
And thus ends my whining about my job.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Give a lazy man a job and he finds the easiest way to do it.
I think I read that in Beetle Bailey 20 years ago....words to live by.
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. Going to the boss and saying, "Hey I have this cool idea..." usually gets a, "That's nice, now get back to work."
I've made a habit of using time at work I'm not supposed to be using to write the programs I think need to be written. I then casually show it to the boss and say, "Oh by the way, if you're interested, I mocked this up 'over the weekend', tell me what you think." That almost always gets a "Cool! Let's go for it!"
My company's present flagship product was spawned out of my little "time stealing" sessions.
A web-based survey on how people fritter time away at work? Hands up if you think the results are going to be just a hint biased toward a certain group.
If you do just enough to pass, you're the real sucker. Poor performance in school doesn't make you predestined to a life of burger flipping. It does make it much more likely though.
I managed a small dev/production team for a publishing company. My highest priority after I was hired was to make myself redundant and not altogether needed in the office. I did this by "empowering" those that worked for me. By that I mean I analysed what the manager (me) needed to do and delegated the responsibilities evenly. Although I was always available to "ok" team decisions, in practise it meant I did very little during the day. I made myself obsolete! The key to all this was papering over all this by using my office time to work on my writing. I also managed to be "at home" far more than anyone else. By steadfastly refusing to actually "do" anything, I very quickly learned how to put together a damn good team that produced quantifiable (and quality) results every time. Am I lazy? Hmmmm ... not sure. The department brought lots of projects in on time and under budget. The affairs of the department flowed smoothly. But I really didn't need more than a few hours of time in the morning (and a few hours in the evening) to do the job.
Hmmm ...
Where I work we follow the whole "Agile" paradigm and when we task ourselves with work, we are to assume that we'll only be 60% productive. This isn't something we made up, this is in the books, apparently many studies find that the ideal time is about 60% for programmers, its just enough for you to get in the zone and do some good coding, but its not too much to mentally strain you, thus causing poor quality work later. That also accounts for time in meetings etc... There are no restricitons on what we browse on the net, or what we can install on our computers (including games like WoW). My company just wants us to get our work done, and to do it well. We come in when we want, leave when we want, and they aren't allowed to ask us to come in anyother time unless we want to. Noone assigns the teams with work, they tell us what needs to get done and we choose what we think we can get done each sprint. The 60% thing works really well, a lot of people constantly dread going to work but when you go to work and its actually kind of fun and you dont get stressed out, you find that the time you are working you're 2 to 3 times more productive. We have everything from basketball and football to foosball, ping pong, etc... too. I look foward to going to work, I like not only the way they treat us but I'm genuinely interested in the work I do there (I work at a defense contractor on 2 classified projects for the DoD). I feel bad for people who dont feel the way I do about their jobs, its not fair that they'd have to do that.
Regards,
Steve
Because of course every worker is supposed to be productive every minute of every work day. We're primates! We were not built to work eight or nine hours a day at the same pace and intensity. If you want that sort of efficiency use robots.
Seriously. There are plenty of jobs where robots would be better suited to the task. When you're talking about office jobs, there's simply no way for human beings to be productive all the time. Due to the fact that we are social creatures, many of the best insights and increases in overall productivity in the white collar environment (and in blue collar jobs too, from my limited experience) actually happen when people are standing around chatting, or even when their minds are allowed to wander off a bit while they goof off.
I understand that businesses always want their employees to be as productive as possible, but this notion of "lost productivity" is a canard, built on a baseline assumption of 60 minutes an hour of productivity per worker. In reality when you pay people an hourly wage, you know you're not paying for 100% efficiency. If you're a smart employer, you try to keep your employees happy, and you reward actual work results.
The mentality that workers should be monitored (all your emails and web browsing are belong to us!) stems from the same idiotic view of employer/employee relations. Hey, here's an idea: Why don't companies actually train their managers in *leadership* so they know what their employees are doing?
If Employee A is getting a lot of excellent work done, should we really care if he's being productive 100% of every hour on the job? In my experience the person who seems to be working the hardest is usually the one who is not getting the most work done. Eventually that person is also the one who poisons the work environment because their mindless buzzing about to and fro raises the stress level for everyone else. The only way to measure real productivity is by measuring worker output. Even then, you run into all kinds of problems quantifying output, because quality and quantity are often totally unrelated and difficult to evaluate as aspects of overall output.
I want to see someone quantify how many wasted hours CEOs create with about-face decisions, late decisions, and "make work" plans. I want to see a study of how many wasted hours are the product of incompetent people being placed into management positions. I want to see how many wasted hours are created through mid-level manager infighting.
Sorry, I'm having a pissy day. But this is just the most absurd quote, particularly on Labor Day.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The problem with what you're talking about is establishing an initial metric. For example, how many machines should your sysadmin be able to manage? And what happens when technology improves to the point where you sysadmin can do something else for a living?
I think the better metric is in how a person contributes to the company's bottom line. That doesn't mean how much they sold, but rather how much they contributed. You could write a really cool report that your customers love and that improves customer retention. You write a program that makes it possible for your sales force to be 10% more effective. Those are the real metrics to use. "Getting a job done" is only as good as what that job contributes to the greater good.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
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.
The Dutch National Bureau of Statistics actually researches the skew in their polling once in a while; 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. Amazingly, the research indicates that the usual means of selecting respondents (they usually don't go for purely randomized samples, but stratified samples; i.e. a fair selection of people distributed over different variable - such as age group, income, etc. - in the same pattern as the general populace) actually holds up well. People who don't respond usually only do so because they don't feel like it at the time.
(Of course, that won't be true for many other surveys and the type of (self)selection they employ.)
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
What about people who work on strategic projects which might pay off tommorrow, in two years, in 10 years, or never?
It's simple: their contribution is very poor, and you compensate them accordingly. This is America: the only thing that's important is the next quarter or two. Anything beyond that isn't important.
This is also the way my company works. If you're working on a project which isn't contributing to the company's bottom line either right now or very soon, you're going to get punished at the year-end review. It doesn't matter if that's what your manager wanted you to work on, because as an employee you're responsible for your contribution to the company. So you have to make sure you're working on something seen as important by the upper management or you're screwed.
How do you measure by how much the work of the internal training department has contributed to the company's bottom-line?
Simple; you don't. You outsource the training to other companies and count it as an expense.
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?
You don't. Each person is measured individually.
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?
Where I work, basically, yes. Consideration is given if the failure wasn't their fault ("missed the market window" or some other external factor), but in that case they just won't be getting any raises or especially bonuses, while teams who worked on highly successful projects will be getting raises and big bonuses.
After all, the company bottom-line has suffered, even if a part of the team has done a marvelous work.
Yep, but they're supposed to know when they're working on something that won't be successful, and not work on that. What good is marvelous work if it's shitcanned and doesn't earn the company any money?
Quote from legendary German Field Marshal Rommel:
Men are basically smart or dumb and lazy or ambitious. The dumb and ambitious ones are dangerous and I get rid of them. The dumb and lazy ones I give mundane duties. The smart ambitious ones I put on my staff. The smart and lazy ones I make my commanders
My problem is that my boss does not like video games. He wants to see some (frentic) activity whenever he walks in our labs and offices and he is deeply suspicious that I am slacking off as much as I can. The results are no excuse for him.
Plus, since he is from a different field, he does not realy understand the details of our work (=ammount of work required) so whenever he assigns me a new (urgent) subproject and I would tell him how much time I will need to complete it, he starts arguing with me that I should finish it faster if I did not make excuses and work harder.
Now, he actualy stopped harrasing me lately (because it did not get him anywhere and I was about to quit) but he stil thinks that I am an overpaid slob and primadona.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it