American Workers: Lazy or Creative?

Nofsck Ingcloo writes "CNET News.com is carrying an article by Ed Frauenheim in which he interviews Bill Coleman of salary.com. Coleman and company have conducted a web based survey regarding how workers spend their "non-productive" time at work. Here are some snippets from the CNET article. " Click to read more.

"The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch and scheduled break time."

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

"Work is invading our personal time and therefore it makes sense that personal activities are invading work time."

"Not all nonproductive time that an employee spends is a complete waste. Some of it is creative or constructive waste."

"[P]of the reason that this [survey] got such a good response was that it's an issue that people think about on some sort of regular basis."

"[O]ne of the reasons people gave for wasting time is they feel that they're not being paid appropriately for the work they're doing. And so it is sort of quid pro quo, in that an individual employee's ability to increase his or her pay is limited, but their ability to decrease the number of hours they actually work is not as limited."

Coleman is definitely on to something. I see this phenomenon, and this reasoning, all around me. How much of the reasoning is rational, and how much is rationalization?"

One of the reasons...

[connah0047]

No, one of the reasons this survey got such a good response is because no one was busy working and had time to fill it out.

Labor Day

[a_greer2005]

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

Lazy or Creative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Creatively lazy.

Re:yes, lazy

[Allen Zadr]

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

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

(see my journal).

Re:"A Lazy Engineer is a Good Engineer"

[phulshof]

Exactly! Power steering was not invented by a body builder I bet!

Peter Gibbons said it best

[glomph]

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

Re:Depends

[Xaositecte]

golfing is all about networking, man.

Re:Lunch and scheduled break time?

[subl33t]

What is this "wife" of which you speak?

Re:yes, lazy

[FidelCatsro]

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

Re:yes, lazy

[Grishnakh's Boss]

This is also the way my company works. If you're working on a project which isn't contributing to the company's bottom line either right now or very soon, you're going to get punished at the year-end review.

You are so fired.