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

[Allen Zadr]

Today is LABOR DAY. A day to reflect on the HARD WORK that goes into the greatness of this nation. A day which is dedicated to the WORKER.

Of course you're lazy today. It's your Congressional given right.

(see my journal).

Re:yes, lazy

[B'Trey]

I think Larry Wall was right in recognizing that simple metrics are often misleading.

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 /.? 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.

Re:yes, lazy

[FidelCatsro]

I'm not from the USA , but i thought that in honour of your sacred holiday i would lay also lay around doing nothing all day.

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.

Web based survey

[flynt]

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.

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:Web based survey

[LnxAddct]

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

Neither

[blair1q]

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.

One of the reasons...

[connah0047]

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.

Labor Day

[a_greer2005]

We are really a creative nation, we have a day called labor day on which no one acctualy labors! America is so great!

Vacation...

[afra242]

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.

Re:Vacation...

[MidnightBrewer]

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.

Not responsible for enough

[bgfay]

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.

Re:Not responsible for enough

[aaronl]

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.

Re:Not responsible for enough

[gilroy]

First, as a classroom teacher, let me compliment you on a clear articulation as to why these bureaucracies exist. Sure they occasionally go awry but that doesn't they're evil or unnecessary.

But, second, as a classroom teacher, let me respond to

Management is just not what a teacher does, and it isn't likely to turn out well.

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.

Amount of time spent at work

[Targon]

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.

My Motto

[superid]

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.

Re:My Motto

[TheRaven64]

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 use my wasted time constructively...

[connah0047]

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.

Re:I use my wasted time constructively...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"A Lazy Engineer is a Good Engineer"

[Manhigh]

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.

3 observations

[cgenman]

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.

Sounds right on...

[Evro]

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.

Excuse me?

[mcgroarty]

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.

Not, lazy, no

[amliebsch]

I don't think most Americans are lazy. The majority want to support themselves and are willing to work hard to get what they want. THe article had some good explanations as to why more time was being "wasted." But there are a couple of things that are happening here that the article didn't mention much. First, individual productivity has gone way, way up in the past couple of decades. Technology has been the big player here. But just as technology has increased work productivity, so too it has increased personal productivity. Now it becomes possible to borrow a few minutes here, a few minutes there, to get personal things done at work. Ultimately, that all adds up. Of course, as long as personal has been increasing even while less time is spent working, many employers have been willing to put up with it.

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.

Whilst working in corporate America ...

[QuatermassX]

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 ...

Re:Whilst working in corporate America ...

[sean23007]

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."

Lazy AND creative

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

See, 6 hours.

[benjamindees]

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.

Re:See, 6 hours.

[fossa]

I do not love my job. It's nice, occasionally interesting, but it's not my passion. I don't think that's such a terrible thing either. However, I work 8 hours a day five days a week. I come home hoping to work on some of my many hobbies (exercise, art, programming), and I either don't have the energy or I end up staying up late making work the next day a drag. Even if I had a "dream job" doing one of my hobbies, I'd still have other interests I'd want to pursue.

I'd like to believe society in general would be healthier with a shorter work week because that could give people time to socialize, work on hobbies, volunteer, participate in politics, etc. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, and time not working would just be wasted, but I feel like work is a vampire sucking all of my energy. I can't imagine what it would be like if I had kids.

Peter Gibbons said it best

[glomph]

"Well you see, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy... it's that I just don't care"

These kinds of quotes drive me insane

[Infonaut]

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

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.

Americans, Lazy? WTF?

[briancnorton]

Americans aren't perfect, but I don't think that ANYBODY could reasonably think that we are collectively lazy.

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.

Rommel Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

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