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Don't Let Your Boss Catch You Reading This
Stony Stevenson writes "iTnews is running a piece on the culture of cyberslacking in the business arena. Studies worldwide suggest employees spend about a fifth of their work shifts engaging in personal activities. Most of that 'wasted time' is, of course, spent online. From the article: 'A recent survey by online compensation firm Salary.com showed about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work. About 34 percent listed personal Internet use as the leading time-wasting activity in the workplace. Employees said they did so because they were bored, worked too many hours, were underpaid or were unchallenged at work. Firms all over the world are concerned about potentially harmful effects of surfing they deem to be inappropriate may have on their company's image.'"
In the first place, the Internet didn't create the ability to waste time at work. These "studies" never quantify the amount of time wasted at work today to that which was wasted before the Internet. Without comparing before vs. after, one cannot reach any absolute conclusions.
In the second place, I work practically everywhere these days because of the Internet. I work at home, in the airport, in restaurants, in the car, etc. So counting all these other working locations, my productivity is significantly better than it was 20 years ago.
In the third place, people aren't machines. People are more productive, and more creative, if they take a mental break now and then. And people make better business decisions if they stay current with social trends and events. It's not a time waster, it's a cost of doing business.
Nuff said. Now quit bothering me, I really need to get back to work before my boss comes in.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Just because I read Slashdot at work means I'm slacking off.
Just a sec, I see someone in my monitor mirror *alt-tabs to Eclipse*
Okay, I'm back, just started a 6000 test JUnit test suite so if anyone wonders if I'm being productive, I can point to the green status bar slowly approaching 100%...
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Facebook didnt spend all my time, so I signed up for myspace as well
My employees are free to spend as much time as they want in the office surfing any site they want do: slashdot, porn, the anarchist's cookbook, whatever. It is useless to me to tell them what they can or can't do when they've met their personal goals for projects.
I also pay my employees differently than most consulting firms. We pay close to minimum wage, plus a very large bonus on each project. I've never had anyone quit, and I've never had anyone complain about their monthly paychecks. By offering a large portion of a project's profits, I know my employees won't waste my money (in salary), won't have to lie on their time sheets, and they'll do the best job they can do because they won't want to go and finish a punch list without pay or handle warranty work at a low rate. It is win-win, and a big reason why I'd prefer full 1099's than W2's if the IRS didn't prevent us from working that way.
When you're salaried or on wages, the employer has to focus a lot more on containing the employee and sending them in the proper direction, constantly. We have zero managers at my company, just consultants. It works fine. Our customers love us because we're 40% cheaper than others in the industry but we excel at handling their needs.
So this all lets me "not care" if an employee decides to spend all day long on the web, and only 1 hour on a project. If the customer is happy, and the work is good, and they do it quickly and correctly, they'll make a killing on the profit sharing, and they'll have a ton of free time to kill at the office if they want to be there. Our top employee works 2 days a week, I think, and earns a very respectable income. He can now spend 3 days at the office playing some MMOG, or go home and sleep. I could care less, the customers are happy.
No, we're not hiring.
I think 1/5th of the time wasted is a huge underestimate. At my former job (IT), I easily spent the greater part of my days idly surfing the web. I wasn't avoiding work either - I really just had nothing else to do, but if in those situations I asked my boss for some more work, he would just give me some BS busy work like organizing a file cabinet. So after a few instances of that I just stopped asking him for things to do.
As a developer i'm productive at work for 2-4 hours per day. That's less than 50%. You cannot expect from developer to code non-stop for 8 hours and be proficient at it. It simply doesn't work that way... and any employer expecting this is an idiot.
Because in todays economy, it's not how good you are, it's how good you look.
If I look like I'm working, logicly, the company must also look like it's doing good, right ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Yeah, productivity thrives in tightly controlled workplaces where the management doesn't trust the employees.
I personally would like to thank the internet for saving the trees. Think of all the stupid faxes the office secretary used to forward every day. There is scientific proof the net is saving the planet.
1. Claim you are researching business value of deploying Linux.
2. Fess up and tell your boss you are cyberslacking.
3. Tell your boss you are researching the viability of a CmdrTaco-based CRM.
4. You quickly hit the "boss" key combination which brings up vi in a console and opens the source code you were supposed to be finishing by the deadline.
5. You point out the window and tell your boss someone is picking the lock on his car.
Thank you. I'll be here all week!
Anonymous Coward Sig 2.0:
--
Madonna > *
My bosses fixed this by having me implement an unavoidable proxy server with a whitelist of approved sites. If you want to get onto a site that's not on the list, a manager must approve the site. Needless to say, anything not work related (including news, weather, banking sites, etc) are not on the list. Oh, and they're not playing Solitaire, either, thanks to the group policies in place that prevent the running of sol.exe and all other Windows games. And it's not like they're going to download new ones.
Problem solved, says management, who are not subject to the filter!
Of course all the employees resent being treated like children, and it's created a tremendous amount of ill will toward management, and people gripe about it all the time. At least one good employee switched companies because of the restrictive policy. But hey, at least they aren't wasting time on the 'net!
End of lesson. You may press the button.
This whole subject of "losing time at work" is idiotic for all intellectual professions. Especially ones involving creativity, such as programming, or systems development in general.
Of course there are guys that are paied and do nothing. But even the most job-oriented person needs some time to let the brain do its work.
This entire hype of "spending time on the internet" is IMHO a production of HR staff that want to further decrease wages. Something like the RIAA counting losses.
1. People work too many hours == freakin' unproductive
2. People are poorly managed (nothing to do, boring tasks, other crap)
The problem isn't the internet, nor talking to your co-workers about other stuff that work. The problem is the way we work today. It's freakin' unproductive! We are worn out and tired, and there are few things that require less effort than surfing on the web. Attack the real problem and you'll see that productivity will skyrocket, employees will be a lot happier and have a lot more spare time where they can *gasp* surf on their own, or go hiking, or learn a new language, or travel the world (lots of vacation is GOOD for productivity, not the other way around!).
And yet, somehow, I'm pretty productive.
See, brains are complicated things, and sometimes what I really need is a half hour or so NOT looking straight at the problem, although I tend to be sort of absently thinking about it. And then suddenly I know what to do, and I go do it.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
When I first started at my office job during college, I was so used to being in the basic service industry that I didn't fit in right away. I was used to just taking a task, doing it, and immediately going back to the boss for the next thing. I didn't realize that the culture I was in was for slower progress on tasks and there wasn't a need to rush and be essentially managed by the boss every second of the day.
Just some things to think about. A lot of people don't realize that for a lot of American workers, and 8 hour day really means 8 hours.
I think there's a fine line (for some) between cyberslacking and taking periodic breaks from the tedium of work. For me, my periodic checks at Slashdot and other news sites are a way to stay sane, so I can hyper focus for other periods of time during the day to get things done. I have a set of sites I visit daily, mostly news/information sites, and my flow works something like this (my days average nine hours sans lunch):
*Arrive, log in, check voice/email messages, responding as appropriate. 30 min.
*Check my preferred websites. 30 min.
*Tackle biggest task(s) for the day. 2-3 hrs.
*Check my preferred websites. 10min.
*Tackle those annoying-but-not-critical tasks. 1-2 hrs.
*Lunch. 15-30 min. (usually at my desk while checking and replying to messages).
*Check my preferred websites. 10min.
*Project work, progress on multi-stage tasks. 2-3 hrs.
*Check my preferred websites. 10 min.
*Follow-up tasks, and assignments to other technology groups. 1-2 hrs.
*IF NOT at the end of the day, check some secondary sites or research some new topics until end of day. 15-30 minutes. This is the one time of day that, for me, comes closest to true cyberslacking. Often I'm just waiting for any final help calls or trouble tickets before our designated end-of-day.
The first site check of the day is longer because most headlines/topics refreshed overnight. Later in the day, I'm only scanning for new headlines or topics of interest. Of course, some days (about once a week), I never get to check my sites. Perhaps once a month I'll have a day where I can read every article that interests me. This works well for me and my employer, as my reading keeps me well aware of numerous trends in and outside of our industry, and it allows me to dive in with greater intesity when I am working. Of course, some will not believe this works without a scientific study, and I'll be the first to say this does not work for everyone. For me, however, I'm glad to work for an employer that allows for some personal use during the workday and is more focused on results than on managing every minute we're in the building. I get my work done on time, seek extra assignments, and pick up slack from my coworkers. Some would argue that my employer is overstaffed [I tried to make that point to a former employer for years until I finally bailed for my current gig, so I know the difference], but that is not the case--it comes down to how I handle my workload. I sprint, then I walk, then I sprint again. My diversions are those little walks that let me run full bore from time to time.
Am I the only one who operates like this?
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I do spend most time I should be working "researching" interesting information (the eating habits of horseshoe crabs, super Mario bros. villains, Cambodian cuisine, etc.) and I have no problem getting work done. I used to feel guilty about it, but by now I realize it's part of work, so I work, slack off, work some more, slack off twice as much time as I worked, and repeat. There's too much to "learn", and 8 hours a day work get too much in the way of it. I say find a way to make a living that doesn't take up too much time, and enjoy the rest of your life.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
My company has an authenticating web proxy that users must use to access the internet, and they track personal web use in this way. We also have a VPN that can dial in to the corporate network from home, which is also authenticating but which traffic statistics, for obvious reasons, aren't monitored.
I've been so committed to slacking, as it were, that I committed significant time to creating a backwards web gateway for myself using an automated dial-in from home, which creates a remote ssh tunnel to my work computer that forwards certain port traffic back to a proxy server on my home network. So now at work I just set my web proxy to the localhost at the specified port and surf backwards through the VPN, only using our corporate web-proxy to do job-related surfing.
And all so I can slack. Never underestimate the laziness of a programmer.
Facebook and MySpace are blocked here, but not Slashdot. Presumably because IT read it.
It's just that my code's compiling.
I'm just guessing here, but...
When the network takes a dive, he's the one working nights and weekends to get it back up, while you're at home playing WoW or watching Firefly on DVD.
If he never puts in the time, then he is a slacker and I hope he gets canned. If he is like most other netadmins I know, he probably logs a crapload of time when everyone else is away, yet he's still expected to put in face time during the workday. In cases like that, he's probably judged on network availability and other metrics. When all is going well, he has slack time. When all is not going well, he could put in a couple hundred hours in a couple of weeks.
If I were your manager, I'd be wondering how you found time to look at your netadmin's time in the ticket logs if you are already so busy--just something to think about.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
So you're saying that you're making your job application process arduous to weed out the useless, and you still claim not to trust your employees?
If an employer has a reason to complain about workforce productivity and sketchy work ethics, he can logically surmise that the problem began when he hired the people he's complaining about.
People do what they feel necessary to keep themselves "running". You can outlaw it, but that doesn't change the fact that they do it, maybe you can change what exactly they do.
If it's not the Internet it's smoke-breaks, talking at the coffee/water machine, or just looking out of the window. Also, lots of people are good at appearing busy.
And I think that's ok.
One, if you really put people in the grinder, force them to work 8 hours, no breaks or diversions, I'm sure you will soon see the quality of their work plummet, as well as their motivation. If you're a factory in backland China that might be a winning strategy, if your business is in any way dependent on thinking employees, it isn't.
Two, if you pay by the hour, and your people are only there for the money, then two things shouldn't surprise you. One, that they try to get as much money for as little work as possible. You do the same, except that you don't call it "goofing off", but "profit maximizing", or maybe your consultants have found an even nicer buzzword. But it's just capitalism. If you don't like it, go somewhere where they haven't dumped Communism, yet.
Two, you shouldn't be surprised that someday soon, some institute, consultant or survey will reveal your employees are rather badly motivated. Money alone doesn't do it. Do your homework in leadership. Throughout history, brilliant leaders weren't the guys who paid best, and that's not they are remembered for.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
At my first real job, this side of the college world, I tried my damndest to make sure I was keeping busy 95% of the time I was on the clock. (Working a tech support line and burning CD patches for the shipping dept to send out.) As they inevitably do, things slowed down during a lean month and it became impossible to keep busy all the time. The real problem occurred when I asked my manager for more duties; since by 3pm I had finished all of my tasks for the day. My manager was incensed at the idea and wanted to know if I needed to resign or a new job. In the business world, managers don't care if you're wasting time or working efficiently. All they care about is if the work assigned to you gets finished in the timeframe they required. If that means you spend 2 hours in the morning checking your e-bay auctions, so be it. Who cares, the numbers on their reports are all within spec. Yet, 6 years later I'm the manager now and I'm perpetuating the somewhat hypocritical business world.
So I'm eating lunch, glancing at slashdot.
My boss walks up behind me and says "Don't let your boss catch you reading this? What is that Dave?"
"Umm, its slashdot boss, and Its my lunch time."
"You know Dave, internet usage isnt for personal activities...."
*sigh*
If it wasn't solitaire or the internet, it would be their iPhones, cell phones, Blackberry, portable video players, mp3 player or host of other electronic gadgets they have at their disposal. If you invest in monitoring their internet use, they'll find a way to proxy around it...those who don't have iPhones. Trying to regulate people's behavior turns into an endless goat rope.
If they're getting their work done and they're profitable, leave them alone. If not, let them go. It's that simple. Inappropriate material is an issue everyone should be aware of by now. If they're not smart enough to leave their p0rn on their iPhone, then they deserve to get fired. If they're not smart enough to keep their steamy email affair off the company mail system, b-bye. This isn't rocket science. So many companies over-think the problem.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I work at a place that actually understands this, and love it. We do agile dev, and 4 "hours" is the daily level.
I don't think you understand agile or the 4 hours of daily work. It does not mean you only work 4 hours a day, it means that you only get 4 hours of *scheduled* work done per day. The other 4 hours reflect business related interruptions, unanticipated/unscheduled work, etc. Agile still expect you to be doing work for the company for 8 hours.
if your projects are getting done, they don't really care how you're archiving that.
If progress is merely being measured by getting 4 hours of scheduled work done per day then this company is probably doomed due to inefficiency. There has to be an overall look at where time is being spent, and some care to make sure employees are not spending excessive amounts of time "relaxing". An hour spent thinking about how to solve a problem before coding the implementation is great, coding without some thinking often leads to crap. An hour on the web beyond normal break times means estimates are being sandbagged and there is poor overall efficiencency.
I do some minor IT work for the evil phone company ( yeah I know, boo hiss, I hate em too :) )
It is a Union Company. If you are not management, you have to abide by the Union
rules, regardless if you're actually a member or not.
What this means is, I can be the most brilliant employee the company has, the
absolute star performer. Or, I can be the employee who can't even boot their own computer
without calling the help desk.
Our pay will be the same.
That alone is a serious motivation killer. You can single handedly double the companies income
but when layoffs start, he who hath more seniority ( even if he is a complete idiot ) will
stay and you'll be on the street.
There is no motivation to be the ' better / faster / more efficient ' employee because there is
no justification for it. As a result, your more efficient employees will appear to be goofing
off more, yet still seem to be able to get the same amount of work done.
*shrug*
As a sysadmin slacking off means I'm being productive, since no problems are occurring. You could say that the goal of a sysadmin is to legitimately slack off as much as possible.
We have a tracking proxy here too. I set up an old P3-550 in my basement. It's running a proxy, and zebedee.
At work, I run the other side of zebedee with a key on a usb drive. Point your browser to localhost:8080 and you're ready to rock! To the admins, they just see a stream of traffic to some webpage at notmy.real.address.com:443.
Another great slack tool is VMware. Make virtual disks with fun stuff on them and take them to work. Or bring in books in pdf format on your usb drive. Music and movies, if you're daring enough. Use VLC Portable for that. Leaves no trace on your PC.
Another good tool is AutoHotKey. Perfect for making custom panic/boss keys.
I guess the whole point of this is that employees, if motivated enough, will be able to slack off at work. No matter what.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
No, what he has is a communal office for independent consultants. They get paid by the job, but he runs the show - bringing in work and doling it out. It's a bigger-company with individual talents - good to keep clients happy (we have lots of support), but you get targeted experts. He makes money herding the cats. The pay thing is just to keep the government happy.
Bingo. There are two skills spheres I have always been concerned with in my entire business life (I started a successful BBS at the age of 13 with this same mindset):
1. Those who are risk takers and are able to penetrate a market or a project early. These folks are not the most responsible in the long term (that's me).
2. Those who are responsible and are able to carry projects through to completion. These folks are not risk takers (not me).
A successful business needs a combination of both. The consultants who work with me are usually type 2, in fact I have never met a type 1 individual who competes on my level. This isn't egotistic, it is just a fact since I've been looking for a replacement for years.
Herding the cats is exactly what I do. There are 1000 projects in our markets (primarily Midwest US, Southwest US, Poland and India) that I can't reach because I can't find a way to do them more efficiently. Yet when I know what my consultants CAN do, and what they HAVE done, and what they WANT to do, I can jump into a bid or a decision process and sell our talents and come in well under budget. Most of the type 2 people I know won't take the risk of NOT having work or the risk of collections or the risk of keeping customers as contracts in the future. I'm the king of expensive dinners, bid submittals, comparison summaries and collections. I even use factoring companies when necessary to keep the cash coming in, even at a 5-11% hit. Most consultants are good at doing their job and scheduling their responsibilities, where I am not, so we work very well together. If I could find another 2-3 guys like me (type 1), we could probably take on 600% more work, but it is difficult to assess someone's abilities in the grayer business actions that I perform versus what an actual consultant does.
What it all boils down to is that I don't see the point of earning 6-10x what my average consultant earns. In most years, I am the BOTTOM of the income chart at my own company, but I also like to keep capital within the company as much as possible. Happy employees = future stability. People don't quit if they feel like they are earning slightly more than they are worth, but they'll quit if they smell the potential of earning more elsewhere.
Yeah, productivity thrives in tightly controlled workplaces where the management doesn't trust the employees.
I worked at a place like that for two years. My office was the worst. The boss claimed that they were "human beings" but in an office of 20-25 people (depending on the month), in those two years, 19 people left (apart from the boss and my line manager).
When I joined they warned me that they were a "focused team" but that hard work was rewarded with £££. I worked hard and enthusiastically, but I slipped up one afternoon when I got a cup of coffee after a very long and strenuous coding session and spent 5 minutes glancing at the news headlines on news.bbc.co.uk. The boss told me months later in my appraisal that that sort of thing makes him very angry.
Gradually things tightened, work loads became impossible, there was no planning, we got the stick when things went wrong as a result, people were threatened with Disciplinary Action when something trivial wasn't as the boss wanted (because he had messed up somewhere himself)...
The icing on the cake was the look of disbelief on my line manager's face and his physical shaking the morning I walked calmly into his office and handed in my notice. He started to humbly apologise for his behaviour but it was too late.
In the following fortnight, two more people resigned.
Stick Men
That is what most people are arguing against: normalizing the 8 hour workday against what an employee can actually produce. Who says 8 is the right number? If employees aren't working/can't work that, it sounds to me like 8 is the wrong number. 1 is clearly ridiculous. But we trust that they've done the studies and that's the best number, though from these statistics maybe that's not the case. Other studies have suggested that a 7 hour work day yields more productivity per hour, why aren't we doing that?
The truth is that if companies could make people work 12, they would (they used to) because somehow more employees is worse than maximum productive hours. I know a lot of people who work 9-10 hour days 5 days a week already. They aren't better employees by default just because they get more work done than I do. They're here more, that's why they get more done. I don't want to be here more, work is a means to an end (living), not the end itself.
> about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work
So, from this we can conclude that about 40% of the people surveyed were liars?
Ultimately, that's the real question.... Is the employee really "wasting time" or is he/she learning something potentially useful?
It's a little ironic that most employers have programs where they'll pay a chunk of your tuition to go back to college and take additional courses, and others gladly spend an annual budget on "training", sending you all over the country to seminars and training courses. Yet the self-motivated employee who surfs the net each day to learn more about trends in his/her field, to keep up with the news or current events, or to communicate with others about relevant topics gets labeled a "time waster".
Especially in a field like I.T. - you're paid to basically be the company's "knowledge repository". People come to you with their computer-related questions and expect answers. It's your job to solve their problems and to find more efficient ways to use the tools at the group's disposal.
Same shit, different day. Dada has been puffing his ideas on /. for about 5 yrs now. With only 6 degrees of separation between any two people in the world, and /. being the #1 techie site on the 'Net we should have gotten some confirmation by now that he is legit and the system works. Folks on /. have called him out several times as have others and he then runs and hides. He's a troll. He hopes to sucker in new people every few months.
Unions have served an important place in our history. I just believe they should be temporary, not perpetual entities. They should rise when they are needed and then fade away unless they are needed again. Unions have become self-perpetuating enterprises...
It's interesting, because while I think you're right, you could substitute "corporations" with "unions" and you'd also be right.
Unions are the advocates of their workers. A union is like a lawyer - it doesn't care if you're right or wrong, it will always take your side. Which is why we sometimes see cases where the union allows workers to get away with laziness or incompetence. Because they can become powerful establishments, unions may place the interests of their institution above the interests of their members, which is why we sometimes see unions with corruption scandals or insane bureaucracies.
Corporations are the advocates of their shareholders. A corporation is also like a lawyer - it doesn't care if they're right or wrong, it will always take the shareholder's side. Which is why we see cases where corporations pursue blatantly unethical, exploitive, and even illegal methods for gaining profit. Because they become powerful establishments, corporations may place the interests of their board members and executives above the interests of their shareholders, which is why we sometimes see corporations with corruption scandals or insane bureaucracies.
These institutions are two sides of the same coin - unions arose out of a need to counter the exploitive tendencies of company owners and corporate structures, and companies have conversely adopted more and more aggressive means of exploiting their workers and preventing unionization (see Wal-Mart). Both have their flaws, and generally the flaws increase with the amount of power the institution gains (which is why corporations are the more high profile bad-guys today). But to me, criticizing unions specifically - as though they're the only power structure to ever screw things up - is dishonest, because it carries with it the implication that workers would be better off without a union - just little old them vs. the entire organization of shareholders.
Yes, unions can be fucked up, and it'd be nice if we could get rid of them, or have them be temporary, spontaneously organizing bodies. But it's missing the point to talk about getting rid of institutionalized unions without also talking about getting rid of the institutionalized business structures which made them necessary in the first place.