American Workers: Lazy or Creative? 491
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?"
Web based survey (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither (Score:5, Insightful)
America lost its internet economy when we realized we'd made it too easy to operate and it could be shipped anywhere people could put text into editboxes.
Now we're giving massages and filling out divorce forms for a living.
This isn't the New World Order we paid for.
Uncompetitive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Web based survey (Score:3, Insightful)
Amount of time spent at work (Score:4, Insightful)
"A Lazy Engineer is a Good Engineer" (Score:5, Insightful)
3 observations (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise, studies have shown that workers produce the most when they spend a full 20% of their time off-task. That means roughly two hours of their day should be spent doing something else as recovery time to produce the most overall. People burn out if they focus too much, and 2 hours sounds about right based on the studies I've seen.
Employers should grab the above and run. Never give an employee one thing to do... always have several things they can rotate between when they're tired. Give them little projects with other people that can open lines of communication, rather than just one daily grind task.
Re:I can waste time (Score:3, Insightful)
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
Sounds right on... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Depends (Score:3, Insightful)
Not, lazy, no (Score:5, Insightful)
Another factor is that more and more people are working in jobs where it is difficult if not impossible to quantitatively assess their hourly productivity. For example, if you work on an assembly line screwing parts togethe, it's pretty obvious if you are slacking off during a given hour, and what's worse, you'll slow the whole line down. But if your task is to write a chunk of code, or draft a certain number of letters, it becomes almost impossible to figure out whether you are working fast and loafing, or working slowly but steady. From the employer's standpoint, they don't usually care as long as the total work gets done in about the same amount of time.
It also gets harder to second-guess the employee when certain tasks take longer, because some tasks are more difficult than others and will inevitably take more time. Unless the manager is willing to personally do the task and figure out exactly how hard it was, they can only rely on what the employee tells them.
Re:Case in point (Score:4, Insightful)
Readers of Slashdot freely admit that they are reading and commenting while at work. They rationalize it by saying that they are getting news and info directly related to their work. And sometimes, sometimes, that might actually happen. That could be, what? Twenty percent of the time? Less?
The rest of the time they are debating the finer points of Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Dr.Who, evolution vs. intelligent design, politics, NASA, Hubble, flying men to Mars, flying cars, and what old people in Korea are doing, etc.
Lazy AND creative (Score:5, Insightful)
If you manage to accomplish in an hour as much as other people in a year why not be lazy?
Yo can see that in all fields which require special talent like mathematics, theoretical physics, literature, art, etc.
For example, Adolf Hitler dreamed to become an artist, worked very hard, was not lazy but had no talent and only managed to become a dictator. (He did design the Nazi flag, however)
There are Nobel Laureates in literature which only wrote a few books. On the other hand there are hard working mediocre writers which wrote hundreds of books and nobody knows them.
See, 6 hours. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Europeans are kicking our asses on even the most basic technology, and they don't work nearly as much as we do.
False dichotomy (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe this is a rationalization ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fact is if you have to work all the time you cannot be creative. You need to pu tyour brain in different modes.
Re:My Motto (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I use my wasted time constructively... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but the big question is: is it worth it?
Is it worth giving your blood to the company, working on a idea they themselves don't encourage you to do and are not paying you to do it? What are you going to get in the end, a big "thanks"?
That's something i've been thinking a lot lately.
Re:Sounds right on... (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah... I know I'd give a raise to the guy that decided that he was only going to work 35 hours a week when I'm paying him for 40.
As far as justifying working for "such a pittance", by your own admission you did justify just that when you took that job because "there was nothing else available".
Either stand by your convictions (by NOT working a job that's "beneath" you) or get over yourself and realize that you're probably only worth the under $40k that you were being paid.
Re:My Motto (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"A Lazy Engineer is a Good Engineer" (Score:2, Insightful)
mr c
Re:Vacation... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In the rest of the world Labor Day is on May 1 (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not responsible for enough (Score:3, Insightful)
People get a lot less satisfaction if they have to ask permission for every move they make and their job consists of a to do list made by someone else. I work at a place where I need approval from several different bosses before I can do any sort of work and the details are all but laid out for me.
Where I work, when a project gets behind schedule for any of a hundred reasons, often the lag time in the approval process, the answer is always the same, more meetings and more bosses to answer to. More bosses more meetings [office space reference goes here] just slow things down and take away the last few shreds of satisfaction from the work. I'm guessing I'm not alone in this.
It doesn't really matter what the job is. Teaching kids with a to do list takes the creative part out of teaching. My mom is a teacher and that part of the work makes the job something people want to do. 25 years of going through the motions is an awful way to spend your time. This sort of thing turns schools and other places where creativity was important into assembly lines.
Re:yes, lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're a factory worker who's paid to assemble widgets and you goof off for a couple of hours, you probably ARE ripping off your employer. However, many of us, even hourly employees, aren't being paid to assemble as many widgets as possible. We're being paid to accomplish tasks, and one person might do a better job of it working hard six hours a day and goofing off for two than another person working hard for eight hours a day. If you're a sysadmin, is your network functional and secure? If so, does it really matter if you spend a couple of hours browsing
Re:See, 6 hours. (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not love my job. It's nice, occasionally interesting, but it's not my passion. I don't think that's such a terrible thing either. However, I work 8 hours a day five days a week. I come home hoping to work on some of my many hobbies (exercise, art, programming), and I either don't have the energy or I end up staying up late making work the next day a drag. Even if I had a "dream job" doing one of my hobbies, I'd still have other interests I'd want to pursue.
I'd like to believe society in general would be healthier with a shorter work week because that could give people time to socialize, work on hobbies, volunteer, participate in politics, etc. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, and time not working would just be wasted, but I feel like work is a vampire sucking all of my energy. I can't imagine what it would be like if I had kids.
Re:Not responsible for enough (Score:3, Insightful)
Even so, you shouldn't be communicating to your students that you're "unenthused" because you have a tiny budget.
Now this sentence is just a load of crap. If people don't speak up, how do things change? Reminds me a lot of things Bush says about those that criticize the war. Hurting the troops with your dissention and what not.
Re:Not responsible for enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Schools tend to account for over 50% of a municipality's budget. In most states, they aren't required to (and sometimes are strictly prohibited from) run their budget as just another government department. Most departments have to justify the need for money, and get approvals for expenditures. Schools get their money, and can move it around and spend it how they like, never requiring authorization from the government body that they're a part of.
That person you're talking about is likely the school system equivalent of a financial board; perhaps a business administrator or similar. They're making sure the budget monies that they get from municipal revenues are being spent in the right places. You don't want to get too detailed, though, because then you have to move money around all the time. You can't just have a massive "teaching" budget, since you need more accountability than that offers.
If you were to do it your way, you would have to allocate a pool of money to each school. Then each school would have to allocate it to different functions, and split the rest among departments, and then among teachers. That would actually reduce flexibility, because each pool of money would be quite small. You would get rid of a few administrators by making everyone be accountants.
As a teacher, your job is first to teach your students. Optimally, you shouldn't be worrying about money at all. You ask for something, and you either get it, or you get some reason why you aren't getting it. That all has to be worked out before budgets are decided. Realistically, you probably are working against a department budget, and have another small budget for your classroom for more specific things. Your department head would seem to be the person to talk to about budgets, or perhaps the school principal.
When the school systems decided their budget, they'll break down system-wide requirements, and lay down the budgets for individual schools. Those school budgets will be decided by talking to each principal and determining requirements. Then they'll go to the municipality and request that amount of money as their department budget. If it is granted, then they're done. Otherwise, they have to go and decide what school things get cut, etc.
Then pricipal of each school determines what they need by determining what the whole school requires, and then what each department within the school needs. If there is a budget cut that hits them, they need to decide what to cut.
That is why you can't just entrust the staff with the budget. There are too many things to consider, many of which are outside of a teacher's expertise. I think you'd find that if you let the teachers decide about the budget, you would have lots of classroom equipment, and buildings/grounds that are falling apart with infrastructures that don't work right. Management is just not what a teacher does, and it isn't likely to turn out well.
Re:Lazy AND creative (Score:1, Insightful)
Both my father and grandfather were workaholics and I came to be one myself. When I met my wife I noticed that she didn't work nearly as hard as I did, but she was able to accomplish far more than I was because she worked effectively.
She knows how to prioritize, accurately estimate how long a job should take, and doesn't get distracted by work that needs to get done but isn't her responsibility.
When I worked in sales, some of the laziest guys in the store wallopped my numbers because they stepped up when it mattered. I was 'working too hard' to notice that working hard wasn't what was needed.
I still enjoy working hard, but I now know that it isn't the key to success, but only one small component.
Re:Stupid rather than lazy (Score:3, Insightful)
The reality in the American business model today is that most workers are not paid appropriately for what is supposedly expected out of them. So, the average American worker compensates by downgrading their productivity level.
While this may seem lazy, often the corporate has erred by locating their corporate offices in the centre of traffic issues, resulting in extended commute times. Workers make up for this by paying bills, ordering gifts, etc. during said expected work time.
When there is a clear expectation of a possibility of a raise, then most workers will work hard to compete for that raise. Unfortunately, in the current American work climate, the most likely raise would come from changing jobs, hence researching other positions also becomes a way to waste time at work.
So, in response, the average American worker, if foolish enough to blindly believe that working harder will get them a raise, would more likely work themselves into burnout or at least severe disillusion on your recommendation.
Re:yes, lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
What about people who work on strategic projects which might pay off tommorrow, in two years, in 10 years, or never? How do you measure by how much the work of the internal training department has contributed to the company's bottom-line?
Even if you came up with a perfect way to measure one person's contribution to the company's bottom line when working alone, how do you account for influence of other people on the team? Imagine a project which is a complete failure, bringing the company loss instead of profit. How do you now evaluate the people on the team? Have they all failed? After all, the company bottom-line has suffered, even if a part of the team has done a marvelous work. The same goes in another direction as well: if a project turns profit, it is often indistinguishable who contributed how much to it. Who do you reward, who do you fire?
Quite a few people have tried to come up with means of measuring a software developer's productivity. All failed the real-life check miserably (although some of them seem to refuse to go away and die the thousand deaths they deserve, but rather remain present in mid- or high-level management's minds; think counting lines of code, for example).
Re:yes, lazy (Score:3, Insightful)
I never said that it would be easy. :-)
How do you now evaluate the people on the team? Have they all failed? After all, the company bottom-line has suffered, even if a part of the team has done a marvelous work.
Yes and no. Obviously the guy in charge of them is ultimately responsible and should pay the price. If he had crap people on his team then too bad for him. He should have spoken up, fired some folks, or otherwise attempted to mitigate the problem.
Not everybody works in a place where they can "write a program that makes it possible for your sales force to be 10% more effective". As the matter of fact, I could bet almost *nobody* has such a job.
You're wrong. I've seen more of these kinds of opportunities than I can shake a stick at. The problem is that most people just expect them to fall into their lap. I bet you that if you were to go to the head of your sales force and ask him what's the biggest computer-related issue holding back his team, you'd get a pretty long list. The problem is that no one ever seems to ask the question. (If you do decide to try this, please make sure to send me a portion of the huge raise that you're going to receive for solving real problems for your company rather than working on what your "analysts" tell you is important.)
Quite a few people have tried to come up with means of measuring a software developer's productivity. All failed the real-life check miserably...
Agreed. Measuring lines of code is stupid. How many lines of code are there in BitTorrent? I always tell people that number of lines doesn't matter. It's whether the application meets the need. Which is my whole point. :-)
Re:Not responsible for enough (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd be surprised by how restrictive teaching can be. My mother teaches algebra to 13 year olds (talk about thankless tasks). At one point the district decided math scores were too low. Their solution? They created a mandated lesson plan, with a specific timeline; i.e. "you will teach lesson X for Y number of days, then give the test. You will then teach lesson X+1...". The teachers were essentially reduced to robots executing software. Students didn't understand Lesson 5 after the 3 days alotted? Tough nuts, man. On to Lesson 6. As a result, test scores got even worse. Who'd they blame? Why, the teachers of course! They obviously weren't following the lesson plans properly. So they instituted mandatory "teacher education" classes where some jackass bureaucrat from the district basically chided them about following the asinine lesson plans more closely. The district superintendant who instituted the plan in the first place fortunately left at the end of the year so the bullshit ended, but only after basically pissing away a year's worth of math education from a heck of a lot of kids. Yeah, teachers have a responsibility to teach children, but responsibility is a direct function of power. If you have no power, yuo have no responsibility.
Both! (Score:4, Insightful)
What's creative about it is that what I learn from writing the script can be used in other places, and I can spend some time later trying to find better ways to be even more lazy in the future
Re:Not responsible for enough (Score:5, Insightful)
But, second, as a classroom teacher, let me respond to
What drives teachers crazy is that it seems management isn't done well by managers either. I have assiduously avoided getting "promoted" into administration precisely because I want to teach. But I don't think it's outrageous to ask that those who do take jobs in administration learn to be good at, you know, administering. The grandparent post had a point: The people who make the budgets and track the money often seem openly hostile to hearing from the classroom teachers -- they want to set budgets without asking us what the priorities are from our vantage.
It might or might not be true that if teachers made the budget, we'd all have great classrooms and lousy buildings. I'd like to think that the people in charge of educating the young would be smart enough to understand infrastructure; in fact, I'd be willing to bet that, among professionals not directly involved in infrastructure, teachers probably rank among the highest in their appreciation of those issues. But that's anecdotal and I could be wrong. In any event, if the decision makes sense, why not actually explain it and show people?
In fact, in my experience, most bad management involves a desparate, almost pathological need to control the flow of information and a corresponding disdain for transparency.
Re:These kinds of quotes drive me insane (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, so some asshole is poking fun, and insulting american workers. Fair enough. They probably have some agenda which is helped by getting quotes like these into the newspapers at regular intervals.
Getting annoyed at how wrong they are is amusing but pointless. However...
Imagine if at some strategic moment every 2-3 months, a study came out estimating how many billions of dollars were wasted each year by management monitoring peoples' email?
Or calculated the cost to the american economy of unpaid overtime (spending = the economy, especially spending on labour), as a scientific study linked-to from major websites.
Perhaps a study which took a formerly-inconspicuous CEO's salary, and calculated that it wasted more company money than, say, 40 days' solid slacking by a typical employee. Released one week before his pay review, and pushed into a major newspaper.
Be imaginative with the response here -- the idea of playing such corporate trolls at their own game would be worth it just to see them needled by it
Americans, Lazy? WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
The US work week is tied for first as the longest in the industrialized world at an average of 2040 hours. (France is around 1400 by comparison)
Screwing around at work for 2 hours is extremely reasonable considering that tens of millions of Americans go home after work and keep on working. Then there's overrepresentation of young people by virtue of the fact that it's a web survey. Young people have a strong representation in the retail sector, where screwing off causes little to no economic loss to companies.
*In general*, if you work hard, you can get ahead. That's the American Dream, and people here are pretty good at it. Just check out the GNP.
Re:Whilst working in corporate America ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just so you know, making yourself useless is not a good way to keep a job. In fact, that's why getting fired is often called being "made redundant."
Yeah, right.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:See, 6 hours. (Score:3, Insightful)
Typical white collar jobs are *not* about sustained work outputting certain goods like a robot. Your power company is an example for that. The generators run all the time, it's not like we need slaves in treadmills for that these days (although with the rising oil prices we might get back to that...)
Same goes for the chef and the checkout guy.
I work in research. Paying me by the hour is basically a stupid thing, because there are days where I just sit there and don't come to the right conclusion, and others where I'm the most productive work horse you could imagine. In general, it evens out, so the pay-by-the-hour stuff works more or less in favor of both.
What, however, would be far more sensible is being paid by the project with a given deadline. Noone cares *when* you work and how much, as long as you meet the given deadline (or have a really, really good excuse for not being able to do the job). BTDT, and to me this is a far more realistic and appropriate paying model. It doesn't force me to get up at ridicule hours (which in term force me to go to bed during my most productive hours which happen to be between 10pm and 4am) just because some dipstick in the past defined that working hours have to be 9-to-5.
You, in term, seem to be entirely stuck to the 9-to-5 scenario as you're not able to imagine shifting hours where people actually work, when they work best. Of course there are jobs, where people demand attention all the time. Take your chef, for instance, or the supermarkez cashier. OTOH, there are people who *love* to get up at 5am and work from 6-12. Others love to go to bed at 6am and work from 10pm to 4am. So get rid of the fixed time schedule, productivity will rise, and in the end you even could think about reducing working hours from 8h to 6h while *not* cutting back on income -- which of course will never happen for obvious reasons.
Re:I can waste time (Score:3, Insightful)
Grow up. Do enough to get a B+. And more importantly, work harder on your own stuff than on your schoolwork. High school is a great place to spend several hours a day not at home. You see your friends, and make new ones. But when you go home, do something. Read books. Write computer programs. Learn things that you like learning, and that you like doing. If you've done a lot on your own time, school gets easier. You'll be able to spend even less time doing schoolwork, and you'll get better grades. And, more importantly, you won't have people like me telling you to stop being a complete moron, because you wouldn't be one any more.
Re:yes, lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
I am ashamed to admit that I have what many would consider a dream job (magazine editor, telecommute, set my own work schedule), yet I still bitch about my job. That's just wrong, and I need to stop it. Attitude adjustment in progress.
If necessity is the mother of invention... (Score:1, Insightful)
What made this country great is not the wars we've fought or anything like that, but the creative thinking we as Americans apply to a problem to get things solved. You can take as many 'outside America' engineers you want to throw at a problem, be it a new widget or a new whatsit, and 9 times out of 10 the outside America engineers will constrain their thinking to the confines of the box describing the problem. Americans think outside that description box and often times bring serious innovation to the design, instead of just re-fabbing what's come before to fit the current needs.
If you make me sit and solve problems for the entirety of my work-day and I'll find somewhere else to work that allows for the free flow of ideas and sources.
I often find myself 'browsing the net' while stuck on a particularly nasty problem I'm trying to fix at work. Probably 90% of the time I think of THE solution when I'm not directly working on it... I think it's called 'dis-associative problem solving' or something like that... Of course, I also get the same effect from a nice long shower. Most of my best ideas have come while soaping under the hot spray.
(Just my two cents... No insult meant to the Foreign Engies... Call it pride of citizenship on my part)
Re:Whilst working in corporate America ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, if he/she knows his team well enough to know what each member can/cannot do and can orchestrate their actions effectively, then time and effort of the team members is probably not wasted. I would love a manager who could do that consistently. When I dislike middle management, it's usually because they are brought in to micro-manage. Unless they have a science/engineering background, it's pretty much like having an idiot standing behind you with a clipboard doodling and asking dumb questions.
Re:Vacation... (Score:5, Insightful)
The United States is the only country without a federal law stipulating a minimum guaranteed number of holidays per year. The Japanese actually get more vacation time than Americans(ten days guaranteed, at least another week or so in national holidays.) The solution is to scale back work hours, increase vacation, and encourage people to get the same amount of work done in less time.
Depends on the field/skill level (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, it all depends on skill level. More skilled jobs, in general, give better vacation. However, the other variable to consider is some employers offer better pay or other benefits in lieu of vacation. For example, I could have taken another job in town and made 10% more money, but I would have had less vacation and a crappier insurance policy. The safety of the insurance policy and time off to visit relatives who are all several states away was worth it to me.
-everphilski-
Re:Not responsible for enough (Score:2, Insightful)
If you look at university or college level administration, they were all grad students and teachers at some point. The way to become a dean or the president of a college is to get a PhD in something, teach it for a few years and then try to move up. If you compare this to a highschool/middle/elementary school, the way to become a principal or high-level administrator is to get a degree in Education Administration, no years-long period of teaching required.
At least, that seems to be the way its done.
Some thoughts on balance (Score:3, Insightful)
And yet, France with far fewer resources, 7 weeks of paid holidays, a 35 hour workweek and an attitude from here to Indistan, yet they still are the 5th largest economy in the world.
"*In general*, if you work hard, you can get ahead. That's the American Dream, and people here are pretty good at it. Just check out the GNP."
There are scores of americans who can't get by even while doing two full-time jobs.
I'm not out to bash the U.S., just making some points on trying to measure success by looking at GNP and working hours.
IMO a country that has less working hours with in comparison better GNP has to do better. But that is my opinion, mingled with a somewhat typical Euro-bias (not shared by all Europeans, just very common).
IMO also one could argue that GNP in the U.S. should be considered gross GNP and should be corrected to include cost of health, parent/child care and stuff like that.
That's of course considered a private matter in the U.S. but we all have to pay the price somehow or suffer the consequences.
Bottom line argument: comparing figures with the rest of the world doesn't really work unless you are prepared to compare what the average worker gets or doesn't get for his money and citizenship.
The cultural dimension is a funny one: Americans tend to downplay the actual amount of state intervention because it implies failure of the system, while in Europe state intervention is a source of pride (and endless grumbling about taxes of course).
This means that if the U.S. and Europe spend an equal amount on a social issue, it will be criticized in the U.S. (because private initiative HAS to be better) and praised in Europe (because the state MUST care).
If in that same scenario something goes wrong, the U.S. will argue the state does too much, and Europe will argue the state does too little.
It's a funny old world...