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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,
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This video explains the phenomena: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk
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.
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?
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,
Telecommuters work on a fifth.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
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!
Yes, you mush be doing it wrong.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I can see how that would be important for some people. But one thing that has led to massive productivity loses in the past has been the assumption that all people think or act the same way, and trying to structure corporations around conformity rather than around productivity.
If I ran the company I would certainly not insist that you attend all meetings in your pajamas, since obviously that's less productive for you.
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)
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.