Right now, somebody is on the job reading this article instead of working. Another employee is looking for a job. Someone else is phoning a friend to make dinner plans. Are they slacking off, or are they engaging in harmless downtime?
According to a survey by America Online and Salary.com, the average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time.
As a matter of practice, companies assume a certain amount of wasted time when determining employee pay. However, what this survey indicates is that employees are in fact wasting about twice as much time as their employers expect.
The biggest distraction for respondents? Personal Internet use. 44.7 percent of the people polled cited web surfing as their Number One distraction at work. Socialising with co-workers came in second at 23.4 percent. Conducting personal business, “spacing out,” running errands, and making personal phone calls were the other popular time-wasting activities in the workplace.
Top Time-Wasting Activities in the workplace (%)
- Surfing Internet (personal use) 44.7%
- Socialising with co-workers 23.4%
- Conducting personal business 6.8%
- Spacing out 3.9%
- Running errands off-premises 3.1%
- Making personal phone calls 2.3%
- Applying for other jobs 1.3%
- Planning personal events 1.0%
- Arriving late / Leaving early 1.0%
- Other 12.5%
So are workers really expected to work 8 hours per day, non-stop? According to a Salary.com follow-up survey of HR managers, companies assume that employees will waste 0.94 hours per day.
They take this into account when they do their compensation planning. However, those managers privately suspect that employees waste 1.6 hours per day. In fact, employees admit to wasting 2.09 hours per day.
“To some bosses, that’s a startling figure,” said Salary.com’s Senior Vice President Bill Coleman. “Others, though, will view this extra wasted time as so-called ‘creative waste’ – wasted time that may well have a positive impact on the company’s culture, work environment, and even business results.”
Trolling the Internet or having casual office conversations can turn into new business ideas, ways to improve efficiency or just strengthen the bond between workers.
It also can bolster the reputation of a company as worker-friendly, especially if managers don’t mind when an employee takes more downtime than usual after, say, cramming to finish a project, or has family concerns that need to be addressed during the day.
Of course, there’s a difference between employees who are truly slackers and those who slack off occasionally to recharge their batteries or attend to personal business. If nothing else, managers often can tell from the quality of someone’s work the amount of effort put in.
This article may contain 3rd party information which CaribbeanJobs.com has approval to use.
