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?"
I can only speak for myself,
Yes, I am lazy.
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.
No, one of the reasons this survey got such a good response is because no one was busy working and had time to fill it out.
Indulged, entitled.
Deleted
We are really a creative nation, we have a day called labor day on which no one acctualy labors! America is so great!
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.
Creatively lazy.
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.
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.
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
ather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
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
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.
hmm, physically lazier, yes maybe. but what evidence is there for your statement? It seems that most higher ups in the coporate chain tend to have gotten there from being workoholics, and that condition is a hard one to drop.
ôó
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.
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 ...
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"
Lazy or creative? This is a false dichotomy (or bifurcation), i.e. a logically fallucious reasoning, for being lazy and creative is not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, I would tend to think that only lazy people can be truly creative in the most metaphysical sense. In any case I consider this survey highly biased (biased sample). Needless to say, it would be unwise to draw any serious conclusions especially when the so called "non-productive" time (e.g. writing in an on-line forum) may be indeed much more productive than the work proper (e.g. working in a factory). And for those reasons et al. I would take the results of this survey with a grain of salt.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
My work does not involve a great deal of routine "productivity." I fix things, I monitor things, I make decisions. There are plenty of things I could make myself busy doing but generally, I maintain my readiness and do very little.
That said, there have been times when I would work tirelessly for 12 days without a day off at more than 12 hours a day. This is when major projects are happening and it requries a lot of work. It' rare but it happens. When the time comes, I am there 100%. (Some might say 110% but that's just dramatic expression isn't it?)
So mostly, I get paid for being available as much or more than anything else. I guess this sort of study doesn't apply to my occupation.
"Well you see, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy... it's that I just don't care"
golfing is all about networking, man.
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.
I can only speak for myself and my coworkers. And thats a crock of shit, or maybe we're in the minority, who knows.
At this point we're working continuously from morning to lunch, then from lunch to late into the night.
I've never worked with a better group of people. When we do goof off or have a laugh, which is more like a max of 15 minutes day, its usually helping to get the team to gel more or to help relieve some of the tensions from the hectic schedule.
My situation can't be that rare.
My father was an IT manager and eventually worked his was as a director of supply chain management.
How he got his first managerial job? Someone asked him in an interview what his favorite productivity tool was. His answer was the water cooler and coffee machine.
He summarized it as this. IF you chat with your employees before work or during breaks you can find out the most of what needs to be done and what is going on with the various projects. Needless to say he got the job.
Breaks including talking to those around the water cooler was alot more productive then serious talk in an unproductive meeting everyday.
I wonder how many hours each day are lost doing busy work or meetings, etc? Something to think about.
http://saveie6.com/
Bertrand Russell wrote an essay called "In Praise of Idleness" which argues that creative work arises out of constructive idleness. That's why we have academia. ;-)
Full text here:
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
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
What is this "wife" of which you speak?
When you figure people are working 10 or 11 hour days and being "paid" for 8, I figure that means some of us can waste another whole hour and still break even!
The reality in the American business model today is that most workers are not paid appropriately for what is supposedly expected out of them. So, the average American worker compensates by downgrading their productivity level.
While this may seem lazy, often the corporate has erred by locating their corporate offices in the centre of traffic issues, resulting in extended commute times. Workers make up for this by paying bills, ordering gifts, etc. during said expected work time.
When there is a clear expectation of a possibility of a raise, then most workers will work hard to compete for that raise. Unfortunately, in the current American work climate, the most likely raise would come from changing jobs, hence researching other positions also becomes a way to waste time at work.
So, in response, the average American worker, if foolish enough to blindly believe that working harder will get them a raise, would more likely work themselves into burnout or at least severe disillusion on your recommendation.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
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
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.
Then a bunch of lazy, shiftless fucks will want to work at his company. Some with very good resumés.
Guess what? High school is the real world, kid. If you don't work hard, and just barely pass, you're not going to get into a very good college. And you're going to be used to not working much or very hard, and will be in over your head at even the crappiest of schools. You'll drink a lot and party and have fun and then, after a semester or two, you'll drop out and move back home, and forever look back at how great it was in high school when you were carefree and worthless ... never noticing that you're exactly the same as you were back then. Worthless and carefree. And people still treat you like a kid, because that's all you are.
Grow up. Do enough to get a B+. And more importantly, work harder on your own stuff than on your schoolwork. High school is a great place to spend several hours a day not at home. You see your friends, and make new ones. But when you go home, do something. Read books. Write computer programs. Learn things that you like learning, and that you like doing. If you've done a lot on your own time, school gets easier. You'll be able to spend even less time doing schoolwork, and you'll get better grades. And, more importantly, you won't have people like me telling you to stop being a complete moron, because you wouldn't be one any more.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Don't remember where I first saw this, but I've remembered it ever since:
The 3 qualities of a good programmer
1. Hubris
2. Impatience
3. Laziness
Time spent in the office is easy to measure, but is not necessarily a good measure of productivity. Kind of like "lines of code".
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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
Engineer, fresh out of college. I get 3 weeks vacation, 7 personal days, plus the standard federal holidays and three "floating" holidays.
Basically, it all depends on skill level. More skilled jobs, in general, give better vacation. However, the other variable to consider is some employers offer better pay or other benefits in lieu of vacation. For example, I could have taken another job in town and made 10% more money, but I would have had less vacation and a crappier insurance policy. The safety of the insurance policy and time off to visit relatives who are all several states away was worth it to me.
-everphilski-
"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)"
And yet, France with far fewer resources, 7 weeks of paid holidays, a 35 hour workweek and an attitude from here to Indistan, yet they still are the 5th largest economy in the world.
"*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."
There are scores of americans who can't get by even while doing two full-time jobs.
I'm not out to bash the U.S., just making some points on trying to measure success by looking at GNP and working hours.
IMO a country that has less working hours with in comparison better GNP has to do better. But that is my opinion, mingled with a somewhat typical Euro-bias (not shared by all Europeans, just very common).
IMO also one could argue that GNP in the U.S. should be considered gross GNP and should be corrected to include cost of health, parent/child care and stuff like that.
That's of course considered a private matter in the U.S. but we all have to pay the price somehow or suffer the consequences.
Bottom line argument: comparing figures with the rest of the world doesn't really work unless you are prepared to compare what the average worker gets or doesn't get for his money and citizenship.
The cultural dimension is a funny one: Americans tend to downplay the actual amount of state intervention because it implies failure of the system, while in Europe state intervention is a source of pride (and endless grumbling about taxes of course).
This means that if the U.S. and Europe spend an equal amount on a social issue, it will be criticized in the U.S. (because private initiative HAS to be better) and praised in Europe (because the state MUST care).
If in that same scenario something goes wrong, the U.S. will argue the state does too much, and Europe will argue the state does too little.
It's a funny old world...
I think, therefore I am...I think.