Anyone that can’t fritter away more than 3 hours per 8 hour workday isn’t very motivated.
Older workers waste less time
Duh, Older workers have less time to waste.
LOL Damn… That’s true! (Looks at the clock)
Or maybe older workers just have more practice at hoodwinking HR and survey takers alike.
All this talk about “lost productivity” is nonsense. How many people that don’t do mindless mechanical work can or ever have been “productive” for more than four hours at a stretch? Even a super busy plumber (not a mindless task BTW) will spend a big chunk of their working day driving from A to B, staring at the wall trying to figure out how to route the pipes, or similar “unproductive” tasks.
Almost all talk about productivity is based on the assumption that all work is little more than mindlessly pressing a button on an assembly line all day.
Younger workers over-share info (e.g. Facebook)
Older workers understand when the 2nd survey question is “how much time do you feel you fritter away in a workday?”,
that this survey just may influence their employment and future with said company. They’re more experienced liars.
18-24 folks know they can always fall back to Arby’s cuz step-dad pays the rent! Try being an out-of-work 50yr-old who specializes in web-surfing pr0n.
How about this: A human being is not a machine and cannot work 8 hours straight. There have to be breaks (and I don’t mean sanctioned ones), and the less monotonous the work is, the more effectively it is done when the worker is doing it.
Imagine a truck driver driving for eight hours. He is exhausted and the risk of an accident is huge. Imagine a barista making coffee for eight hours. The will suck, and “soy milk” is not enough distraction to keep him concentrated.
So: In every company, time is wasted. It always has been, it always will. Because you cannot hire people and expect them to be as effective as a machine you switch on for eight hours. Also, being allowed to go on Facebook when there is no rush in the work to be done, may relax the worker and will better the work climate. If I were a boss, I’d allow anything as long as it doesn’t affect productivity, plus I’d be people-friendly and not expect 110% all the time. But that’s just me and my european standpoint.
Does that count time spent viewing THIS website? 10 Million page views was it? 😉
I guarantee that more time is wasted in government offices and school system offices than in real jobs…what do you think Bill & Gary?
I’ve done a lot of work in government buildings (and I would imagine you both have as well), where people have actually insisted I “slow down”, I’m “working too hard” and “making them tired just watching” me.
I think about 20-30% of the people in govt and school admin are redundant dead wood.
Oh yeah…I’ve heard all of these a few times
“Do you always work like this?”
“Where’s the fire?”
“You’re going to work yourself out of a job.”
“It’ll be here tomorrow.” my response “I won’t, I’m finishing yesterday.”
In the time some of these people take their coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and long potty breaks (so they don’t have to flush their own water at home), I’ve done two or three more hours of work.
I would have spent much more time on the net, but with 2 half hour breaks and a 2 hour lunch, it was tough squeezing in more than 3 hours of surfing in a seven and a half hour workday.
I suspect that a lot of older workers don’t spend as much time surfing is because they either don’t know how, or porn doesn’t interest them as much as it used to…
LOL!
Speaking from experience: I’ve been at my job for over 11 years, and I’m all over the building doing one job or another person’s job. I get plenty of opportunity to see other employees “hanging around” and shooting the bull. For some reason, if I even stop for a minute to say something to another employee, I’ve got management up my butt about it. If I’m on the internet, it’s for a client – but other employees can sit there and check out sports scores and what-not. And these employees are of different age groups. Slackers are slackers, no matter how old they are.
A very elitist “observation”. What about all those that never (or rarely) see or have access to a computer during their workday.
Doctors, lawyers, Indian Chiefs, assembly line workers, outdoor workers, police, firefighters, etc. etc.
These “stats” must only refer to those that sit on their asses all day with a keyboard in front of them. Thank goodness for all the rest that do all the real work.
Oh yeah, the members of the military. That’s a job too.
At my work (subsidary of the 2nd richest Alaskan based company), the following are banned on the Internet:
facebook
myspace
youtube
google videos
google cached pages
gmail
yahoo mail
hotmail
craigslist
ebay
photobucket
flickr
blogspot
fox news
of course: porn
probably much more that i’m not aware of…..but sports related sites are available
Thank God Bits and Pieces wasn’t on that list!!!!! 🙂
Sorry jonco, i forgot to mention B&P. and i think it is my fault…..i discovered B&P while at work and use to spend way too much time on it looking at older posts. no prob, now i enjoy B&P nightly after getting home from work while enjoying a cold beer.
We have the same kind of crappy thing where I work, Even if we had tim to get on the internet, there’s not much we can do, they have it locked down pretty tight. We don’t have time to do much we see clients from 7 am until we close at 5:30 pm. Trust me, they are banging on the door in the morning, and we have to push them out in the afternoon.
Let me tell you about some of MY wasted time in the business world:
Having to let the boss ‘finish his story’ before I can talk to him about work
Sitting in a meeting while the boss has somebody ‘read the minutes’ of the last meeting (one time, some brave soul actually said: “Mike, we were all at the last meeting. We know what was said. Can we please move on?”
Taking ‘productivity surveys’ for HR
Having meetings about how to get more work done (How about not having this meeting?)
In my experience, the BIGGEST waste of corporate time is by middle managers and HR.
I was a teacher. I guess that’s a government worker. You try not working when you’ve got a classroom full of 40 high school kids. I know there are so-called teachers who don’t teach at all, just practice classroom control, but real teaching is work. I wore a pedometer for a week, and never did less than 10,000 steps once.
Before I started teaching, I was a bookkeeper (before computers). I could concentrate absolutely for about an hour, then had to get up and walk around for a few minutes. Then I could go back to concentrating. So I agree that no one can work like a machine for 8 hours.
Certainly Barb, that’s why there are, usually, 2 “coffee breaks” and a “lunch break” during a working day. At least for adult workers in the west, may not be the same for children in the east.
This survey is BS. People are not machines. I hate it when business claim that employees are stealing money from them if don’t spend 100% of their time working their asses off.
Law offices are the worst. They must teach them in law school that humans are machines.
A good friend of mine actually “worked himself out of a job” because he was efficient and implemented a lot of improvements that increased the company’s productivity. He told me that he’s learned the hard way not to be over-zealous when you’re working for someone else.
Wow, just wow. I can see now that it is common for most people to be lazy slugs. I was brought up differently. My last position was very busy, I was doing the work of FOUR engineers. I didn’t go out with people at work socially and didn’t BS in the hall. My middle manager thought I was worthless because I didn’t BS with him like other people. When I was laid off it was a shock to them that they had to hire FOUR people to do my job. I consulted with them until they got the positions filled at over twice my previous salary. I’ve worked for another company that laid off all it’s workers (200) then called back 12 of us to do the same amount of work. Many of us could not even speculate at what the lazy people would do during the day. You’re getting paid to do a job! Not to be a slug. Wow
none of this makes any sense to me. I spent 2 hours of my own time today reading a book on power supplies which i will use at my job soemtime in the near future, of course I am not paid for this and it doesnt count as work, but the 15 minutes i spent on friday waiting for my boss to finish a phone call does count.
Anyone that can’t fritter away more than 3 hours per 8 hour workday isn’t very motivated.
Older workers waste less time
Duh, Older workers have less time to waste.
LOL Damn… That’s true! (Looks at the clock)
Or maybe older workers just have more practice at hoodwinking HR and survey takers alike.
All this talk about “lost productivity” is nonsense. How many people that don’t do mindless mechanical work can or ever have been “productive” for more than four hours at a stretch? Even a super busy plumber (not a mindless task BTW) will spend a big chunk of their working day driving from A to B, staring at the wall trying to figure out how to route the pipes, or similar “unproductive” tasks.
Almost all talk about productivity is based on the assumption that all work is little more than mindlessly pressing a button on an assembly line all day.
Younger workers over-share info (e.g. Facebook)
Older workers understand when the 2nd survey question is “how much time do you feel you fritter away in a workday?”,
that this survey just may influence their employment and future with said company. They’re more experienced liars.
18-24 folks know they can always fall back to Arby’s cuz step-dad pays the rent! Try being an out-of-work 50yr-old who specializes in web-surfing pr0n.
How about this: A human being is not a machine and cannot work 8 hours straight. There have to be breaks (and I don’t mean sanctioned ones), and the less monotonous the work is, the more effectively it is done when the worker is doing it.
Imagine a truck driver driving for eight hours. He is exhausted and the risk of an accident is huge. Imagine a barista making coffee for eight hours. The will suck, and “soy milk” is not enough distraction to keep him concentrated.
So: In every company, time is wasted. It always has been, it always will. Because you cannot hire people and expect them to be as effective as a machine you switch on for eight hours. Also, being allowed to go on Facebook when there is no rush in the work to be done, may relax the worker and will better the work climate. If I were a boss, I’d allow anything as long as it doesn’t affect productivity, plus I’d be people-friendly and not expect 110% all the time. But that’s just me and my european standpoint.
Does that count time spent viewing THIS website? 10 Million page views was it? 😉
I guarantee that more time is wasted in government offices and school system offices than in real jobs…what do you think Bill & Gary?
I’ve done a lot of work in government buildings (and I would imagine you both have as well), where people have actually insisted I “slow down”, I’m “working too hard” and “making them tired just watching” me.
I think about 20-30% of the people in govt and school admin are redundant dead wood.
Oh yeah…I’ve heard all of these a few times
“Do you always work like this?”
“Where’s the fire?”
“You’re going to work yourself out of a job.”
“It’ll be here tomorrow.” my response “I won’t, I’m finishing yesterday.”
In the time some of these people take their coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and long potty breaks (so they don’t have to flush their own water at home), I’ve done two or three more hours of work.
I would have spent much more time on the net, but with 2 half hour breaks and a 2 hour lunch, it was tough squeezing in more than 3 hours of surfing in a seven and a half hour workday.
I suspect that a lot of older workers don’t spend as much time surfing is because they either don’t know how, or porn doesn’t interest them as much as it used to…
LOL!
Speaking from experience: I’ve been at my job for over 11 years, and I’m all over the building doing one job or another person’s job. I get plenty of opportunity to see other employees “hanging around” and shooting the bull. For some reason, if I even stop for a minute to say something to another employee, I’ve got management up my butt about it. If I’m on the internet, it’s for a client – but other employees can sit there and check out sports scores and what-not. And these employees are of different age groups. Slackers are slackers, no matter how old they are.
A very elitist “observation”. What about all those that never (or rarely) see or have access to a computer during their workday.
Doctors, lawyers, Indian Chiefs, assembly line workers, outdoor workers, police, firefighters, etc. etc.
These “stats” must only refer to those that sit on their asses all day with a keyboard in front of them. Thank goodness for all the rest that do all the real work.
Oh yeah, the members of the military. That’s a job too.
At my work (subsidary of the 2nd richest Alaskan based company), the following are banned on the Internet:
facebook
myspace
youtube
google videos
google cached pages
gmail
yahoo mail
hotmail
craigslist
ebay
photobucket
flickr
blogspot
fox news
of course: porn
probably much more that i’m not aware of…..but sports related sites are available
Thank God Bits and Pieces wasn’t on that list!!!!! 🙂
Sorry jonco, i forgot to mention B&P. and i think it is my fault…..i discovered B&P while at work and use to spend way too much time on it looking at older posts. no prob, now i enjoy B&P nightly after getting home from work while enjoying a cold beer.
We have the same kind of crappy thing where I work, Even if we had tim to get on the internet, there’s not much we can do, they have it locked down pretty tight. We don’t have time to do much we see clients from 7 am until we close at 5:30 pm. Trust me, they are banging on the door in the morning, and we have to push them out in the afternoon.
Let me tell you about some of MY wasted time in the business world:
Having to let the boss ‘finish his story’ before I can talk to him about work
Sitting in a meeting while the boss has somebody ‘read the minutes’ of the last meeting (one time, some brave soul actually said: “Mike, we were all at the last meeting. We know what was said. Can we please move on?”
Taking ‘productivity surveys’ for HR
Having meetings about how to get more work done (How about not having this meeting?)
In my experience, the BIGGEST waste of corporate time is by middle managers and HR.
I was a teacher. I guess that’s a government worker. You try not working when you’ve got a classroom full of 40 high school kids. I know there are so-called teachers who don’t teach at all, just practice classroom control, but real teaching is work. I wore a pedometer for a week, and never did less than 10,000 steps once.
Before I started teaching, I was a bookkeeper (before computers). I could concentrate absolutely for about an hour, then had to get up and walk around for a few minutes. Then I could go back to concentrating. So I agree that no one can work like a machine for 8 hours.
Certainly Barb, that’s why there are, usually, 2 “coffee breaks” and a “lunch break” during a working day. At least for adult workers in the west, may not be the same for children in the east.
This survey is BS. People are not machines. I hate it when business claim that employees are stealing money from them if don’t spend 100% of their time working their asses off.
Law offices are the worst. They must teach them in law school that humans are machines.
A good friend of mine actually “worked himself out of a job” because he was efficient and implemented a lot of improvements that increased the company’s productivity. He told me that he’s learned the hard way not to be over-zealous when you’re working for someone else.
Wow, just wow. I can see now that it is common for most people to be lazy slugs. I was brought up differently. My last position was very busy, I was doing the work of FOUR engineers. I didn’t go out with people at work socially and didn’t BS in the hall. My middle manager thought I was worthless because I didn’t BS with him like other people. When I was laid off it was a shock to them that they had to hire FOUR people to do my job. I consulted with them until they got the positions filled at over twice my previous salary. I’ve worked for another company that laid off all it’s workers (200) then called back 12 of us to do the same amount of work. Many of us could not even speculate at what the lazy people would do during the day. You’re getting paid to do a job! Not to be a slug. Wow
none of this makes any sense to me. I spent 2 hours of my own time today reading a book on power supplies which i will use at my job soemtime in the near future, of course I am not paid for this and it doesnt count as work, but the 15 minutes i spent on friday waiting for my boss to finish a phone call does count.