Is wasted time really wasted?
Published: 08 Sep 2005 18:25 BST
The overworked American appears to be fighting back, and Bill Coleman is watching closely.
Coleman is senior vice-president of compensation at Salary.com, a role he describes as being like "a person in charge of computers at Dell or cars at Ford."
Coleman and crew recently conducted a survey on time wasted at work, and they came up with some intriguing findings. Among them: Personal Internet surfing ranked as the top method of cooling one's heels at the office. It was cited by 44.7 percent of respondents as their primary time wasting activity, followed by socialising with co-workers (23.4 percent) and conducting personal business (6.8 percent).
The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch and scheduled break time, according to the report. That's far more time than the roughly one hour per day employers expect the average employee to waste, the report said. The extra unproductive time adds up to $759bn annually in salaries for which companies get no apparent benefit, the report said.
As Coleman sees it, workers are goofing off partly because they're putting in more hours on the job. What's more, he suggested, personal and professional time are blending.
"Work is invading our personal time and therefore it makes sense that personal activities are invading work time," he said.
ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com recently spoke with Coleman about his research on goofing off, including findings about men, women and wasting time, the way loafing in some cases can help the bottom line and the continued importance of the water cooler.
Q: What was surprising to you, if anything, about your survey?
A :There were a few things that were surprising about it. One is that people were comfortable and willing to admit how they were spending their time or not spending their time appropriately at work.
I think that it was also curious men and women appeared to waste the same amount of time at work. What made that an interesting point is that we did a follow-on study asking employers what they thought their employees were doing as far as wasting time at work and we also asked them whether they thought men or women wasted more time. And the employers, their human resource people, pretty much think that women waste more time than men. So that was shocking.
What's the rationale for that perception?
We didn't ask any follow-up questions about why they thought or what they thought; we were just curious as to what they expected. I think that the rationale is, however...
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