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American Workers: Lazy or Creative?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-battle-wages-on dept.

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?"

18 of 491 comments (clear)

  1. yes, lazy by jshaped · · Score: 5, Informative

    I can only speak for myself,
    Yes, I am lazy.

    1. Re:yes, lazy by B'Trey · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --

      "The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.

    2. Re:yes, lazy by FidelCatsro · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

      --
      The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  2. Web based survey by flynt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Web based survey by Wavicle · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?

      --
      Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
      Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
    2. Re:Web based survey by LnxAddct · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

  3. Neither by blair1q · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. One of the reasons... by connah0047 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  5. Not responsible for enough by bgfay · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  6. I use my wasted time constructively... by connah0047 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:I use my wasted time constructively... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  7. Sounds right on... by Evro · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  8. Excuse me? by mcgroarty · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Whilst working in corporate America ... by QuatermassX · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ...

  10. Lazy AND creative by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  11. These kinds of quotes drive me insane by Infonaut · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "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.

    --
    Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
  12. Re:Vacation... by MidnightBrewer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  13. Rommel Quote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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