PERFECTING THE ART OF WASTING TIME AT WORK

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Writing in his column THE HUMAN FACTOR in the Business Standard, January 22, 2010, Shyamal Majumdar rightly announces, 

Managers of the world seem to be united in their passion for wasting time at work.

According to the Late Sumantra Ghoshal a whopping 90 per cent of managers waste their time by procrastinating, becoming emotionally detached, and distracting themselves with supposedly busy work.

Some examples of how many things “busy” people are doing that will never be missed.
·         just stare at just about anything so that people around them think that they are pondering something intense.
·         schedule meetings just to tell juniors to “work smarter, not harder” and to “think out of the box” etc.
·         send emails and call up people to find out about things that would have got done anyway without their intervention
·         insist on a written report for just about everything.
(on being given a written report, they will ask juniors to tell them about the matter in their own words briefly. If the subordinates come in with a verbal suggestion next time, these managers would demand a written report.)

In The Peter Principle, Laurence J Peter and Raymond Hull (people who have devoted many years to the study of incompetence) talk about managers having Rigor Cartis, an abnormal interest in the construction of organization and flow charts, and a stubborn insistence upon routing every scrap of business in strict accordance with the lines and arrows of the chart, no matter what delays or losses may result. These type of managers are always frantically busy, drawing up reports and flow charts and making appointments to confer with one another. 

The most popular form of wasting time at work is, of course, social networking. Employees may seem busy, but many are wasting time on the Internet, or are “cyberslacking”.

A study by Assocham last month has warned that employees waste a minimum one hour of office time every day accessing social networking sites for reasons other than work. Assocham’s Social Development Foundation (ASDF) survey says companies effectively lose 12.5 per cent of total productivity each day. The survey says most organisations do not monitor and manage these sites as closely as email.

However, this problem is not restricted to India alone. Managers of the world seem to be united in their passion for wasting time in office. Time-wasting at work was spoofed in the 1999 cult film Office Space, while The Office, a British TV comedy that now has a US version, has shown characters playing a computer war game as part of what they described as a team-building exercise.

Americans do work hard at surfing the Internet and catching up on gossip, according to studies done by Salary.com and America Online. The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time. The total in lost salary dollars adds up to $759 billion per year, the studies have shown.











Comments

Yogesh Shastri said…
Well Saurabh, A nice one again. But I wonder, that doesn't employee "disengagement" says something about the culture of the organization itself? I am not saying that the organizations alone are to blame, but in my opinion it is the responsibility of the organization to engage its employees so that they can get the best out of them.

The earlier organizations were based on beliefs or religion or some purpose higher than the self (Even if it seems a percieved one). And we know people in these organizations worked frantically, still do. That is only possible when the modern conglomerates cocktail the spirit of community with efficiency of the industrial corporation. Unfortunately, its only the later which we are after.

The so called modern professional organizations work very hard to detatch its own employees from itself and then complains about employees wasting hours. Of course there are some exceptions where companies get full engagement of employees without ever doing anything(I think you get the hint -:)), but such examples fall into non-systemic category and there is another dyanmics working behind the curtains. Regards
January 26, 2010 at 8:36 AM
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