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A Fifth of Telecommuters Work Less Than An Hour Per Day
MrCrassic writes "Working at home isn't vacation...or is it?" Quoting an article in The Register: "Almost one in five Americans who work from home only clock in for an hour or less a day, according to a survey, while a third stay in their pyjamas. Forty per cent of telecommuters say they work between four and seven hours, 17 per cent are doing the bare minimum and just 35 per cent are working eight or more hours, the CareerBuilder survey of 5,299 people revealed. ... Stay-at-home workers also said getting dressed for the day was far too strenuous: 41 per cent of women and 22 per cent of men — a third in total — stayed in their PJs."
Crap... all these years I've been coming in to the office to work that hard.
Trolling is a art,
Wow, I get dressed and work 10 hours. I mush be doing it wrong.
Surveys like this are going ruin it for the rest of us!
Interesting that there's no indication of how much the people from this study make.
Could it be presumed that the slackers working less than an hour a day are making a garbage wage?
How would it be any different if those employees were in the office? I'd bet they'd still only work one hour a day. And heck, if they are being given work that only takes an hour to complete (as opposed to not doing all the work they've been given) then more power to them. They can spend more time with their families and not waste time and gas commuting or being in the office.
This kind of reminds me of the study that found only a small percentage of soldiers actually fired their weapons at the enemy during combat.
4 out of 5 respondents to surveys on CareerBuilder lie on surveys.
It makes people lazy. Anyone that's worked from home due to weather, etc. knows this.
I also tend to drink and possibly get drunk if there is very little work to do.
It shouldn't be surprising that people are inherently lazy, on average. If we can work 1 hour and convince our boss we worked 8, most people will do that. More than anything, this reveals just how pointless most jobs are, if they can be done with 1/8th the "expected" effort.
From what I've seen, office workers are really working 4-7 hrs mostly, too.
So 75% of people work at home like they work in the office. Seems like telecommuting can be made to work well enough if you do productivity monitoring.
And heck, if you can do 8 hours of work at home in 2 hours, why not get 8 hours of pay! The key is productivity.
--PM
Who can doubt the results of such a scientifically valid survey? Surely it must be accurate. My guess is most of those filling out the survey were doing it from their cubicles at work, pissed off that one of their co-workers was working from home.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
If they get the work done, who cares? I work remotely often and I always get my work done whether it requires 1 hour or 12 hours a day. Or even weekend or late night work. You just get it done and your quality of life goes up.
While never explicitly stated, the OP seems to indicate that the telecommuters are getting away with murder by working only 1 hour on an 8 hour shift. Perhaps they are part time workers, or were only hired to log a few hours per week?
Looking around any office I've been in, I'm sure these stats probably match up with how people are working in offices as well.
I don't wear pajamas when I sleep, and I generally am only in my underwear around the house. However, its not really a sloth thing. When I work from home I might get dressed, drive my wife to work, get undressed when I return, dress to go to lunch at the local deli, and undress on my return. Getting dressed is not a demarcation that my day is started, its a demarcation that I am leaving the house. It will be different when I have kids, and was different when I lived with my parents of course.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
More importantly: do they get all their assigned work done? If so who cares if they only work one hour.
Would be interesting to know how many of those telecommuters are the stay at home mom types selling Avon or running an online Etsy store as opposed to a full time employee clocking in a typical work week.
If everyone in the survey is a full time worker that's supposed to be doing a 40 hour work week then title should be changed to 'A Fifth of Telecommuters and their Managers Need to be Fired'.
Ever since I started working from home for 3/5 days, I put in my normal time but, since I've got the code, I always end up coming back to it later in the evening for another hour or four...
I'm clearly doing it wrong...
My experience over the years is that one in five probably do work only an hour a day. The catch is, it's absolutely true of the non-telecommuters as well. I remember there always being a few employees who were "well liked" by management so never went away, but yet spent their days goofing off and doing the minimum required to keep their jobs. Being -at- a desk for 8 hours in an office, is not the same as working productively.
Meanwhile, owning my own company now, I work as hard as I have to keeping my company successful.
only clock in for an hour or less a day
None of those people run their own freelance business. There are days when I'm writing from 7:30 in the morning to 8 or 9 at night and I have to quit because my hands are cramping.
If I only booked an hour a day I would starve. If you're going to work at home, you really have to be a self-motivated person.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I rarely if ever telecommute, except in when one of my kids is sick and has to stay home from school. I have a commute that is at least an hour each way. If I'm working from home, I'm getting up at my normal time, but I'm starting my work at least an hour early. I don't have to go out for lunch, so that break ends up being shorter. And since I don't have to wind things down to leave the office at a certain time, I usually end up working past my normal stop time. It sounds like I'm doing it wrong.
There are alot of people who would like to be me. I just haven't met them yet.
I wish I could work at home some days. As long as I keep my servers running as they should (which is almost all the time), then I just deal with petty end-user garbage which I can do remotely. Reports? I can run them from home. "I accidentally deleted my file and need it back." I can do it from home.
I could do most of my job from home and not have to sit in an uncomfortable chair all day to do it. I could also get a lot more done around the house, which would be great. Some days I would only have a couple hours of work, others I might have more than 8 hours. But as it stands now, the administration of my company is old fashioned and doesn't believe in working from home. :-/
If they are only reporting actual worked hours then 4 per day makes them as productive as an office bound drone. MSFT has a concept they push called "Core Hours" or did some time back. The core hours that can be scheduled in normal expectation is 20 per week. The rest is taken up by the social miscellany of office life.
Personally I work almost all my contracts from home, lately doing either software forensics or Apple iOS development, and I work a pretty solid 8-10 hours each day, sometimes more. Sometimes a lot more for the lawyers who schedule at the last minute. Sometimes less if demand is low. And occasionally I am forced by a job to fly all over the country and my actual work hours plummet. So for me at least, I am much more productive at my home office, though my social life suffers greatly. Well, more than greatly.
The metric the employers should be using is "Are they getting the job done as expected?" and if not change the situation, either pull them into the office a few days a week, or fire them. Do let them know they are below expectations and allow them to fix the behavior! Also I find a daily scheduled audio chat helps keep expectations aligned. My company has not had an office downtown for several years now and we are pretty much pure cottage industry with an on demand office for clients visiting us. And I dress for work, same as I would for an office, I am pretty casual though, jeans, tee shirts and slip on shoes.
YOU LAZY A$$ BUMS LOAFING OUT THERE, GET TO WORK, YOU'RE SPOILING IT FOR THE OTHERS
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
This video explains the phenomena: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk
This is *exactly* the sort of progress we should be making. With a jobs gap that is getting increasingly wider (job creation has not matched population growth for a long time now) with no end in sight we should be adjusting to the idea that we don't just want, but need to work less. Our standard of living depends on it.
The number of jobs per head is already less than 1, and will only go down as we move beyond the industrial age (at least for now, who knows what the future holds?). Spreading those roles still available to more people by reducing hours (and maintaining pay) should be something we consider an absolute priority. Enormous challenges, certainly, but we cannot keep pretending to ourselves that any of our industrial age economic systems can make the gap as it stands now.
People will call them slackers or call them lazy or whatever other moralistic snap value judgments people think of, but I think anyone who manages to achieve a shorter working day, away from the office for the same money is doing something worthy of admiration, not derision. It is something to emulate.
Those telecommuters who work the time that they report have honest work ethics. If they only work 3 hours one day and report 3 hours, then the next day they work 15 hours and note that as 15 hours, then in 2 days time they worked more than most people did that went into the office. If a company receives the same productivity from a telecommuting employee as they would if they were in the office, does it really matter? The company has just save $$ on office space.
And those who stay in their PJ's who get up and start work, they may be putting in extra hours. The average employee may take 1 hour to get ready in the morning, plus a commute to work, a lunch hour, and then a commute home. For some this adds up to several hours a day. Those telecommuters who suddenly don't have all that extra drive time may be some of the more productive ones.
Now those who claim 8 hrs of work and did 1 or 2 disgust me. But that is because I have a work ethic where I expect people to do what they say they do.
.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I don't think I've ever seen someone telecommute who was FLSA non-exempt. The supposed perk of being exempt is not to be constantly tracking your hours, you are paid to do your job, regardless of how long it takes you (obviously as long as that amount of time is acceptable to your employer). The worst places to work are those that make you exempt, but expect you to put in at least X number of hours a week/day.
are being allowed to telework.
Reports like this give me pause, do we know the requirements these surveyed people are under? Are they meeting deadlines? What do their employers think?
If they are meeting the needs assigned to them by their employer then who cares how many hours they "log". I don't log as many hours as I work, and there are some that log more than they "work". It comes down to the needs of the business, if its satisfied then fine. If not, the wrong people are being permitted.
I know where I work we are not permitted to work from home simply because of the work habits of some people at work. Fire them I know some will say, but there are certain people you can't do that to easily and you also require history of issues to back your side and many are loathe or lazy to do that. Still those who can do work unofficially many hours from home because they are proven workers.
I would not celebrate a study like this or try to excuse it with hearsay, it is articles like this which day in day out are used to curtain, stop from starting, and end telework agreements. Too many people lack the discipline needed to work unsupervised and too many are concerned with hurting someones feelings telling them the reason they can't be allowed to work from home.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
So a study conducted by a career site. Doesn't it seem like most of the people on CareerBuilder would sort of be, what's the word for it? Oh, yeah: Un-Employed.
So people without jobs are only working an hour a day.
So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
Try looking here....
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
how much time is waiting for others to work there part / call backs?
I have been on IT projects where I have waiting longs times for people on the other end to get back to be / work on back end issues that are getting in the way of doing the projects on the user end.
Why does it matter if we stay in our pajamas? How am I less effective if I spend my time working rather than grooming?
This is a typical anti-labor attack. Try to build a movement against a pro-worker stance by coming up with a laundry list of complaints that make other envious and/or disgusted.
If I only work an hour a day at home. Then my employer shouldn't be wondering what he's paying me for. He should be wondering why he's paying rent on a building for 7 unproductive hours a day for my co-workers.
Have been waiting long times.
What about jobs where you set something and have to just look over it as it runs and after the run you set the next batch now that can end up being a job with 1-2 hours of real work and 7-6 of just sitting back and let stuff run.
You don't get to wear your pajamas.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Hardwire them to a central consciousness and eliminate their free will, then command them to . . . do, uh, what? I don't know, that's why we hired them, isn't it? Not sure. Perhaps if we hire a consultant . . .
Disclaimer: I AM telecommuting today and I AM reading Slashdot right now...
Seriously, though - what's with the "getting dressed for the day was far too strenuous" tripe? I wear sweats or shorts when I work from home - so what? What's wrong with being comfortable?
I suppose they'd also complain that people like me are sitting on the couch rather than on a hard wooden chair. Also, I have a window open and am enjoying the breeze - maybe I should relocate into a closet instead.
This "study" is garbage. At the end of the day I'll give my boss a list of what I worked on today - just like I do every time I work from home. He's happy with my performance, and recognizes I can focus on longer-term tasks much better when I don't have the near-constant interruptions of the office environment. I just wish I knew who commissioned that study - should I ever leave my current job, I don't want to bother applying to that old geezer.
#DeleteChrome
This particular logical fallacy is called Fallacy of false cause. The mistake is in assuming that telecommuting causes people to work one hour per day in their pajamas. In fact: 1) I have observed people working considerably less than an hour per day, on site, at Google among other places, and 2) I have observed people working on site in their pajamas.
The bottom line is, if someone is determined to dissipate their productivity, it does not matter where they are physically located, they will be successful at it.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
some job are like firemen where you are waiting for the call.
Now some help desk / IT tasks can be like that where mainly people are there to cover calls / issues that come up as well working on longer term projects and on a slow days you may only have 1-2 hours of real work to do.
Sounds like a select few of us have achieved the Jetson's standard of living, doesn't it? The Jetsons are all "flying around the uber-skyscrapers" literally living the high life, but what about the rest of us? Morlocks! You and I know what the morlocks are into, (soylent green) but the Jetsons don't know that yet, do they? I don't seem to remember the Jetson's Robomaid toting heavy weapons....
Bob Slydell: You see, what we're actually trying to do here is, we're trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work... so, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
As far as I can tell, it's extremely rare for senior management to have any idea what the actual staff do, or especially what value they bring to the company. As far as most senior management know, their employees primarily produce warm chair seats. It follows that the only differences between employees in any job category is:
1) How many hours the seat stays warm, and
2) How much it costs to keep the chair warm.
Thus, the principal employee quality metric is hours/dollar because most employees keep chairs at nearly the same temperature. Longer hours are good, and it's an added bonus to not have to pay for the chairs. An employee who works from home is presumably keeping a chair warm even more than one who comes to the office, so the best possible employee is one who will accept a low wage (typically entry-level in someplace like Nigeria; the chair-warming learning curve isn't terribly steep) and who answers e-mails at all hours of the day, night, and weekend.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
They should conduct the same study in China and report back to slashdot the results.
Telecommuters work on a fifth.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
My husband did this for a university for a while. He stayed home with the baby and periodically set up 4-5 hour simulations to run. He got paid and we didn't have to pay for daycare.
You will find that, when you are telecommuting and billing for hours, you will be able to bill for actual hours you work. 1 hr of work in house will amount to 3-4 hrs of work in office, because office work generally gets diluted with all kinds of shit. emails, someone asking a question, meetings, reports, this that. have to go to dinner, have to take a crap and so on.
it is still possible for people to slack while telecommuting, especially if they are working for a corporation, and not as freelance, or with contract clients. but, it will show up eventually. especially, if youre not working as a corporate employee. and then you will need to face it.
on the opposite side, if you are actually delivering your hours, it will get better and better. especially if youre doing contract work (anything other than being a corp. employee basically), people will start to see your hours' worth, and be willing to pay you properly for them. you will find that, you will end up seeming to do less work when timed, but do as much as you did before in office, and paid exactly the same. efficiency.
i currently employ a stopwatch for doing my timing. my client(s) trust me with my timing. and they are quite happy, as well as i. i find that i am quite productive. like, handling something that is billed for around 2.5 to 3 hours in the freelance markets in a period of just 15 minutes. but, if we would make an example with numbers, the freelance markets rate those 3 hours generally from 15/hr, amounting to 45, and i charge 30/hr. i let the difference in between what i could make at these rates and what i charge as a courtesy to my clients, in return for our comfortable arrangement.
all in all, there is more work done, in less time, with less depreciation (physiologically and psychologically), for same money, in same quality.
Do they differentiate at all between a "Full-time employee" and a part-time freelancer? That can make a huge difference.
Having worked with a few guys who either worked remotely (i.e. telecommuted from Wyoming to California), or were just anti-social SOB's I found their work ethic to be above average. I could see their license usage for our simulation software (EM and circuit tools), and they were often working many more hours than me, and were the best engineers I've worked with to date (partially why they were given permission to telecommute).
I know better than to telecommute myself, as the few times I have done so for a day here and they (while dealing with a sick dog, or snowy weather) my work ethic was less than stellar. When the work is good and fun I log on from home and crank through stuff before driving in, after dinner etc. When working on the grind portion of a project however, I keep finding myself playing some version of Quake...
That survey is absolutely rubbish. Those that I know who work from home work longer hours. Sometimes they are available at 11:00 at night. Telecommuters report higher job satisfaction too with less turnover. Turnover actually hurts companies, whether or not management chooses to pay attention to this.
I telecommute. I get up each morning at *mumble*. I shower, get my office clothes on, and actually wind up putting in a lot more hours than I would at the office. I have concrete tasks to finish and deadlines. If I didn't have concrete tasks and deadlines, I'd probably just sit around in my underwearing, gnawing on a crumbling block of cheese as big as a car battery as well.
Employers who would embrace telecommuting and give up old, stodgy, antiquated views of working would find that their costs go down because they need not have expensive office space with upkeep, utility bills, etc. Meetings can be done via video conference. The wonders of VOIP allow people to have office phones. It is stubborn, old-fasioned thinking and outmoded management philosophies that force people into an office. An insurance company that I know closed down its office-based claims processing center and let everyone work from home. Turnover went down by a large factor. The minimum time in employment averaged 6 years.
As they say: "qui prodest"- this is a british newspaper. The island has been and remains our enemy since day one, only lately disguised under an amicable grimace. Their teeth have mostly rotten and fallen out, but they still hiss and spit. Look at how much freeware is coming from the island as well - you bet it's not because they suddenly feel like being helpful. All they do, including the crappy ubuntu, is to make a dent in the US software industry. This article has a similar goal.
If you truly have to check on it, you better bill for the entire time. Unless you can really leave it alone for hours and go do something else. In that case, bill for the time you spend "working". If there is any chance that the process is going to error out or stop some time and you have to be there to start it again, charge for the entire time. It is not like you can really go do something else.
Very few people are involved in the production of food, shelter, clothing, and a few other vital services such as health care (and note, but health care I mean actually making decisions about what drug to prescribe or performing surgery as opposed to filling out insurance paperwork).
I wager only about 2% of society does work that would make any kind of sense to somebody from 100 years ago. Yeah, you could call writing software work; but most people don't really want software. They want a sandwich, or to go someplace, or something. The software is just something that we think will help us get more sandwiches; but it doesn't. Our economic systems still haven't figured out how to cope with the dramaticly reduced need for labor. We keep coming up with lames substitutes for real work, like writing FaceBook apps or fighting pointless wars.
I work at home a lot. On the weekends and occasional evenings when something is bugging me. Sometimes I'm logged in. Sometimes not. Rarely do my Sunday afternoon sessions start later than 10 am or end before 8 pm. Most of the people in my department who are any good do something similar.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Obviously this depends on what you do for a living, but working less than an hour a day doesn't mean that you're not productive, or, more to the point, that you're not delivering a product to your employer that's worth what you're paid. I telecommute, and depending on what deadlines are approaching, or how much work across the entire project there is to be done, I might work anywhere from 1 to 10 hours in a day. I'm salaried; I'm paid to put forth a certain quantity of deliverables, and to a lesser extent, simply to be available. If I worked in customer service, for example, I could understand being worried about putting in X number of hours, but I've always felt that most of the point of telecommuting was the ability to make your own schedule, more or less.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
That is all.
I don't know any _real_ telecommuters, at least not developers, who would ever be compelled to click on anything related to CareerBuilder. Thus, this survey obviously only attracted monkeys. Worse yet, it is/will be picked up by news sites and used to dissuade companies from considering allowing workers to work remotely.
I say this survey was entirely bunk and unscientific. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the results weren't purely made up by a hungry "writer".
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
4 out of 5 people reading this will be at work. I am.
The amount of time spent doing work is irrelevant. The important thing, is what amount of work is done within any deadline set.
Measuring employees clocking in and out is an archaic way of managing. It was something developed in the Industrial Revolution where employees were near slaves. Measure work done, and its quality, set tasks accordingly, set deadlines accordingly, require set times for meetings etc, but that's all you need to do.
Secondly, fire all HR staff. Yes, ALL of them. They are a worthless cost center that kills productivity and quality. Small businesses do not have HR staff, they tend to hire better quality employees. They tend to manage employees better. With the technology currently available there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that supervisors and managers can't actually do real managing, and take care of anything and everything that HR does -- and do a much better job of it too. The only purpose of HR now, is for weak managers to use them as a CYA excuse. But HR does nothing else but cost money and kill quality, productivity and innovation. HR is probably the single biggest fail, and brake, on the world's economy.
Nobody EVER grows up wanting to work in HR. They have all failed at something else, most of them also have an huge chip on their shoulder. They are failed people. Fire ALL of them everywhere, and watch the economy grow, if not surge.
There's no reason why most people need to work in offices most of the time. Anything desk or phone based could be done at home. Considering the massive cost to the environment of all those cars going to business parks, city centers and the like, and the increasing personal cost to employees of fuel etc, It's also often quieter and easier to work at home, with less distractions. Open plan offices are hellish places in which to concentrate. Telecommuting is an excellent solution to a lot of business problems. Not to mention that your business may well get access to much better quality employees who live too far away to work for you in person.
Other than bad management, and bad economics, there's no reason why telecommuting isn't massively more prevalent in modern businesses and organizations. It's the future... if only HR would allow organizations to hire good enough managers to make it happen.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Per cent wise, that's a pretty good deal!
I am a C/C++ programmer. Every few months I work on a new project (feature/product etc). The initial couple of weeks (up to four some times). I am not doing any "work". I am reading up, researching etc to get the design started up and documenting it. After that I "work", starting around 11/12 noon to 3AM (some times).
While commuting, I am thinking over the design, while trying to get some sleep, I am thinking about the design. A mind at work job is 24/7 job. It doesn't let you alone even if you wanted to. If one is a programmer, the design task is always running in the background, that is what I can tell.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-vitamin-d/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d/vitamin-d-supplementation/
Happened to me too from working so much. And it was made worse by me getting a treadmilll workstation setup, so I exercised, but indoors.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And heck, if you can do 8 hours of work at home in 2 hours, why not get 8 hours of pay! The key is productivity.
--PM
If the key is productivity, you need to think " If you can do 8 hours of work at home in 2 hours, why not work 8 hours and complete 32 hours of work!". That's how a productive person thinks. It does wonders for your career, and the economy.
yeah, whatever, uncle Tom
I once worked in a large organization where we shuffled paper. Literally. I'd get a file folder, put the forms in order, dispose of duplicates, fill out a summary sheet for the terminal operator to input into a dumb terminal connected to a mainframe half a state away, bind it all together and stick it in my outbox.
We had an entire intake unit that did nothing but classify the work. It was possible to glance briefly over each folder and determine how complex the work was. A bad case with lots of arithmetic (manual interest calculations and the like) might take 8 hours. Simple cases might take two minutes. Similar work was bundled together with a coded ticket on top.
Each morning, I and the other drones would pull the work we were qualified for. We had to pull at least 8 hours of work, as per the Work Planning and Control system and the classifiers who fed it data.
Some people pulled 8 hours of work and struggled to get it done in 8 hours. Most people could pull 8 hours and have it done in 5 or 6. I preferred to pull 10 hours work, finish it in 90 minutes, and spend the rest of the day wandering around.
My bosses knew exactly what I was doing and didn't care. In crunches, they could ask me to help and I'd happily pull 40 hours work per day for a few days. Generally, though, they left me alone to do the minimum and then help out wherever a special problem came up.
If it hadn't been for the need to physically pick up the case files, this is exactly the sort of thing that would work well for a telecommuter.
Why the heck should my employer care if I'm only working for 1.5 hours a day as long as I'm delivering 10 hours worth of work? Good for those telecommuters who can do in an hour the amount of work that their employers expect in a day. That was the promise of technology, wasn't it? That we could do the same amount of work in less time?
Cool. Seriously cool.
If these workers are on the clock, then the employers are getting shafted.
The way to fix it is to have performance based pay. Here is a piece of work: do this work and you get this pay.
That's the way I am outsourcing some of the work nowadays, so it doesn't matter how many hours are spent working or watching porn (as your metered TV apparently shows now.)
You can't handle the truth.
So what? If you are telecommuting and don't have video, what difference does it make what you are wearing.
I also think the true number is far lower. This sounds like the beginnings of a gartner scam to get people to come into the office and claim it was their idea
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I am insanely productive between the hours of 8AM and 4PM when I work from home. The wife is at work, kids at school, house is silent, and I work like a beast.
I make sure to answer email immediately, make sure everyone has my cell phone and Skype info, and am extra responsive. The payback is that I get to avoid a hellish DC commute for a day and save about $8 in gas.
It annoys me that some lazy bums are going to ruin it for all of us.
I fail to see how wardrobe enters into this (I throw on a T shirt and jeans, BTW).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Sounds almost exactly like any workplace.
Seriously.
I thought we are offshoreing all those jobs that require really hard work so we can work from home 1hr/day. Besides by the looks of the unemployment rate, soon we don't have to work at all. Yay, go us / U.S.!
I used to work for a very large company in telecoms and I generally didn't work more than an hour or so per day when I was in the office from 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. It was a harsh environment to work in because everbody had so little work that some people would steal other people's tasks and try to trump them to delivery. While I was planning my work to fill the two weeks allotted, someone else was filling their time with real work and building their own solution. People hoarded data so that instead of getting it from the database directly, you would get it from Fred who had a spreadsheet that was only a year out of date because his data came from Bob's spreadsheet and Bill's web app. Bob got his data from Business Objects which ran on a data warehouse that was updated weekly, and Bill got his from Harry's database in the USA, which was available at the domain name of a joint venture that had folded 10 years before. Harry's database was an aggregate from several other databased and spreadsheets including Fred's (remember Fred) and every few months it got so out of sync that he ran some jobs to compare it with the real database and laboriously corrected his errors. All the while, the real database sat there with data that was fully up to date (collected once per minute) and lightly loaded, meaning a few extra queries a day for reports would not have been noticed. Fred didn't use this database because it was Oracle and he only knew a bit of SQL Server SQL dialect. Most others didn't use it because they could not wrap their heads around daily partitions.
And that is only one example of hundreds.
I was glad to work at home 4 days a week because my planning meetings with my manager were on the phone and nobody could steal my work. Plus I could sleep instead of pretending to work. After 8 years of spending 6-7 years a day reading Internet documents, I had amassed the knowledge of 2 or 3 university degrees and I was getting tired of the game. In the end, after a couple of years of telecommuting I went to work for a smaller company where I actually have 8 hours of real work to do every day, and everybody else is too busy to try and take over my tasks.
15 to 20 hours a week?
How did the Egyptians build the pyramids?
Lister: They had whips, Rimmer... Massive, massive whips
I guess managers will actually have to start managing now?
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour. Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Which is what happened to the American work ethic. If we were in another "world war", do you think the American public, could put away its squabbles, get up off of its lazy butts, and do what the WW2 generation did? Nope, we are too fat, dumb and lazy.
Link:
http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx?id=pr656&sd=9%2F15%2F2011&ed=9%2F15%2F2099
" This survey was conducted online within the U.S. by Harris Interactive© on behalf of CareerBuilder.com among 5,299 U.S. workers (employed full-time; not self-employed; non-government); ages 18 and over between May 18 and June 8, 2011 (percentages for some questions are based on a subset, based on their responses to certain questions). With a pure probability sample of 5,299 one could say with a 95 percent probability that the overall results have a sampling error of +/- 1.35 percentage points. Sampling error for data from sub-samples is higher and varies. "
The sample size seems good, however, there is zero indication of how the sample is composed. Is the sample truly random and representative of the general population of telecommuters? Do the results vary based on factors such as geography, industry, age, primary method of communication in a company, relative importance of method of communication, etc.?
Those last two bits are important. In my current job role at my current company, instant messenger is the primary form of communication, followed by email, then face-to-face, then teleconference/e-meeting, and lastly phone. Working at home / telecommuting rarely impacts the effectiveness of our communication, which seems to be the primary concern here. However, other job roles / other companies (SO as one example), telecommuting simply would not work and effectiveness of communication would drop dramatically.
By itself, this is a start, but, not sufficient to draw conclusions of any sort. I'm hoping they do a followup to this survey in the future.
Actually, there is evidence to support the fact that the builders of the pyramids were a class of people who were treated quite well. Food, rudimentary health care by our standards, etc. Furthermore, Im talking about the fact that hunter-gatherers, including Native Americans and primitive man worked much less than we do simply because it took them less time to get food. This guy's argument about working 80 hours is "survival of the fittest" is a joke, since we survived tens of thousands of years without working that long.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
When I am coding in Python, I wear pyjamas. But otherwise I switch to regular pajamas. :)
I just finished spending 10 mos. on my first telecommute gig and found myself working harder/longer than usual. My thinking was: "I want them feeling like they're getting everything out of this guy working from home, no need to have him in the office..." Yes, there were days where I was waiting for content and design specs and was able to hang for an hour or two at a time chilling, but every time the bell rang I was humping it and gave extra time when needed regularly for nothing. Bad economy aside, it was just too good being home and not dealing with the expense and annoyance of commuting NOT to put out extra. And now I'm telling the recruiting firms I'll take 10% off my rate for any gig that's 80%+ telecommute. It's the civilized way to earn a living.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
I spent 3 years partially telecommuting. For 6 months during the winter I telecommuted. For 6 months during the summer, I worked in the office.
From my experience, if you're motivated to work in the office, you're just as motivated to work at home. If you only work on an hour a day at home, that means you can get away with that level of productivity. Being in the office is highly unlikely to make you more productive.
I found little or no difference between my productivity between the alternating 6 month periods.
Whether telecommuting works or not depends on the type of work. Back then, I worked on small development projects with little interaction with other developers. It made little difference whether I was in the office or at home. Nowadays, I work in an agile team practicing SCRUM with plenty of developer interaction. For this type of work, I need to be in the office.
I think the biggest problem with telecommuting is that of perception. A lot of managers like people to be visible and in the office - 'bums on seats' (*). This may be for reasons such as reassurance that are people are 'working' (sitting at a desk is not the same as working), keeping up appearances or something else entirely. What these managers don't realise is that forcing people to be located in the office instead of home doesn't suddenly make them more productive.
As for the pyjamas - if the work is done, who cares?
* UK usage of the 'bum'
As some of you Americans who do not think the rest of the world is Hawaii and dragons might know, the greeks are in a bit of trouble. They are basically bankrupt but everyone is afraid to say it except the people but who listens to them.
When the rest of EU tried to rally their voters to support the greeks one of the arguments was that the Greeks aren't work shy, corrupt, tax dodgers but they work longer hours then say in Holland.
They do. Holland has a rather unique combination of short work hours (40 with many people working 36 or even 32 for a fulltime job) and HIGH productivity, in fact one of the highest in the world... a fact shared by many Northern European nations.
Turns out how many hours you are on the job has nothing to do with how productive you are. The English nations often beat themselves on their chest with their 60 hour weeks totally ignoring that the economic results show that they are doing less work in 60 then we do in 40.
Que outraged Americans claiming that they work 80 hours and more and that clearly their economic results show how much better they do.
Especially in office jobs there is a LOT of time wasted, if you can cut that, you can get the same amount of work done but in fewer hours. I noticed that when I work for English companies that the amount of overhead tends to skyrocket. Estimates, re-estimates, adjustments, time tracking, analysis... and the end result? Projects go overtime by default but hey, at least we got every second accounted for... that most make the figures up that are then ineffectively scrutinized seems to escape them all together.
As for weekly strategy meetings... if you need to change your strategy every week, you don't have a strategy.
I can well imagine that for a lot of jobs, the amount of time saved by skipping all the crud can easily reduce a work day to an hour. As a developer I don't expect any developer to be able to work more then half a day of a work day in the office to begin with. And if it was possible to arrange it that each developer could work without interruption they could either do more OR spend less time to do the same amount of wo...
Hold on, call.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've been saying that the managers will allow us to telecommuting only when the teletransporting will be a reality.
... I would only work about 1 hour a day too.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
I wonder if there is a correlation between people who answer ridiculous statistically-invalid surveys and those who tend to slack off when they should be working?
Work is changing. Whoever wrote the article has an hourly wage assembly line mentality and/or has never tried it. Working from home is win-win-win: Win for individuals who can be more effecient with their time by capturing idle time that would be lost in the office and putting it to good use, win for employers because its a cheap benefit that can boost morale, reduces personal days (personal business can be when businesses and gov't offices are open), reduces sick time (no more mental health days), increase retention, and means that you can employ talent from anywhere (increases talent pool and decreases costs) at any time (24-7 response capability), win for society because it reduces pollution, fuel demand and infrastructure demand (i.e. traffic). This is the wave of the future.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I work from home maybe once a week at most. This is usually because I need to be at home for some reason or another, or have an appointment that would cause me to have to drive around a lot and not be available for as long as I might be, otherwise. I manage a small dev team, and each person takes a regular work-at-home day once a week. I consider it a privilege. I have some suspicions that some of my folks put in light days when they work at home, but as long as work gets done, I'm not going to pry into it very hard. For myself, I prefer to be in the office because it keeps me to more of a regular workday. When I work from home, the machine is always on, and I tend to work for many hours longer than I might when I go to the office. Email and IM become the most common portals for people to get in touch with me, which means that I frequently sit in front of the machine for longer periods. I also tend to stay logged on for much longer, so work-at-home days can frequently go beyond the regular 10 hour day and become 14 to 16 hour days. I like personal interaction at the office, and I miss that when I'm at home. This is why I treat telecommuting (for myself) as the exception more than the rule.