Why ‘wasted time’ is wasted column inches
Posted by scott on October 29th, 2009I see this week it was that time of year when surveys or reports come out detailing how much the UK economy is effected by ‘wasted time’ in the workplace. Of course, there is always a scapegoat for this and the headline in the Daily Telegraph ‘Twitter ‘costs British economy £1.38bn’ tells you where the finger is pointing this year.
IT services and technology company, Morse, commissioned the survey (no doubt for the purpose of getting headlines and stories like the one above mentioning them) Indeed they actually said the true cost to the economy could be substantially higher than the £1.38bn estimate, due to the fact that the people they spoke to may have lied about their ‘time wasting’ (this maybe due to the fact that of the 1,460 workers polled 57% said they spent an average of 40 minutes a WEEK on social networking sites).
A couple of years ago we had a slew of similar articles, all with Facebook in the headline. That time it was a study from UK employment law firm Peninsula. They found that the time employees spend online on social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace was costing the economy more than £130 million per day.
All I can say is I hope none of these people smoke too. A London School of Economics report earlier this year said smokers are costing businesses £2.1 million a year in sickness and yet more ‘time-wasting’ cigarette breaks.
The Solution from the Dragon’s Den
Of course the problem with the whole idea of ‘time-wasting’ and articles talking about it, complete with pointing fingers is that they seem to exist in some kind of vacuum where it is reported as being a newand (of course) a bad thing. Morse are not to only people to be identifying the damage all this social networking and time-wasting is doing to the economy. Take this article by Theo Paphitis – from Dragon’s Den - in the Daily Mail last month, entitled ‘Why all bosses should do what I did and ban staff from Facebook’.
According to Theo ‘we have banned smoking in the office because it is bad for health and undermines the focus on work. All employers should be doing the same with frivolous networking on the net.’ [ I don’t know about you, but I have been guilty of some frivolous networking today]
Despite the article’s title he goes on to say that they didn’t ban Facebook or My Space outright but adopted a limited internet access policy ‘whereby employees were only able to visit certain sites which could be justified as useful for their work — such as business information or news services.’ The result ‘At a stroke, the creeping march of time-wasting came to a halt.’ [Wow, he’s good]
Theo is still a worried man though. He can see the future and the future’s Orange … O2, Vodafone, 3 etc . Yes, mobile. The solution ? Employers will have to institute ‘bans on the use of mobiles during working hours.’ This apparently is ‘only fair’ as ‘In the end, businesses and public services cannot survive if staff prefer to be socialising online rather than doing the job for which they are paid.’
Now, I’ve always quite liked Theo on Dragon’s Den, he is obviously a talented businessman. He is also apparently serious deluded if he believes that his suggestion is anything other than stupid, counterproductive and totally missing the point.
Neil Franklin, digital and social media advisor at the Department for Work and Pensions, cuts right to the chase when he said that employees who waste time on Facebook and other social networking sites have always wasted time. Social networks simply provide them with a new way of doing so.
You mean Twitter and Facebook didn’t invent time-wasting?
Yes, I know it seems hard to believe, but apparently workers were doing things that people classed as time-wasting before social networking sites. Let’s think back to when the internet and email started to be allowed into the workplace shall we. The FT reported on 21 May 2001 (Employer software will limit workers’ ‘e-breaks’) how employers were installing software to limit staff use of the internet ‘to crack down on time-wasting’. But, even further back in time than that, it was going on. No really, it was.
According to Norris Arthur Brisco ‘The Problem of preventing loafing or soldiering is a most serious one with every employer. The average workman is naturally inclined to take things easy and do the least amount of work necessary … soldiering is often deliberate as wasting time in order to make a job last’ He wrote this in 1913 in his book Economics of Business.
The reasons for not working flat out for the whole day may have been different – although ‘making the job last’ is by no means a practice that has disappeared – but workers have always ‘wasted-time’.
Is ‘non time-wasting’ a good goal?
Back in June 2001 the Daily Telegraph ran an article by Alison Eadie (’Even the sharpest minds need an occasional duvet day’ - Management matters - June 21, 2001 ) which commented on two recent studies one about the cost of people being off sick (whether real or otherwise) and one on time-wasting. She started totting up all the ‘lost money’ to the economy from this time off sick; playing solitaire on their PCs and surfing the internet for an hour each day; having fag breaks and tea and coffee breaks; going to the toilet; ‘water cooler’ type chats with colleagues etc. She concluded is was a wonder ‘UK plc is solvent’ (some today might question it is, of course)
What she concluded – correctly, in my opinion – is that ‘ Rather than telling us how many billions the economy is losing, these surveys show the pointlessness of worrying about every minute of the working day. We are supposed to be knowledge workers these days, not robots.’
She goes on to make a point I have made on this topic before, and one also picked up in an excellent article by Lisa Belkin in the New York Times from 2007 (’Time Wasted? Perhaps It’s Well Spent’, May 31, 2007) that we can’t maintain the same level of concentration at all times throughout the day -“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” (Bob Kustka, Fusion Factor).
So, what is time-wasting?
The question is what constitutes wasted time, and whether you can apply one practice - for example accessing Twitter or Facebook - as wasting time for everyone that does so. I do not think you can. If I go back to Belkin, she hits the nail on the head when she says the problem is “what looks like wasting time from where you sit, could be a whirl of creative thought from where I sit”.
Her article also points to how many of us seem to be working longer hours, and how indeed for many of us the line between work and home has blurred. I work in a law firm where this is very clear. So the question then is, if I’m expected to work out of my contracted hours and check emails, answer calls etc, then it makes sense that at work I should be able to book my holiday, see what friends are up to on Facebook or Twitter and anything else the helps give a hint of the work/life balance we are all supposed to have.
Banning people from accessing things doesn’t work. There are companies and indeed some law firms that ban access (at work) to Facebook and Twitter etc – they probably were against the wheel when that first appeared too. It’s pointless. If you are wise you have a usage policy and you place your trust in your workforce not to abuse that trust. If they do you have a mechanism for warning them, listening to see if they have a justification for the alleged ‘abuse’ (i.e a proper appeal process) and eventually firing them if it is shown there was no justification and that those warnings were not heeded. It is always better to treat adults as adults rather than as children who can’t be trusted. If you don’t trust your employees, why should they invest their time in going that extra mile for you at work?
The only question to be asked in all of this is – Is the person doing their job? Is the work done, is the quality of a standard that is expected by your company, and the people you might work for? If the answer is yes, then maybe part of the reason for that is that some of that ‘wasted time’ has helped them to stay fresh, to be ‘happy’ in their work and to deliver that quality. Yes, I mentioned the ‘H’ word. I do so because the biggest threat to productivity is not staff members posting Tweets and updating their status’ on Facebook but is instead low staff morale, a lack of motivation, and a sense of not being (or feeling) valued by their employer. Many people work in companies and organisations who despite outward facing ‘we are one’ type values and proclamations have inward facing ‘us’ and ‘them’ hierarchies, they don’t make everyone feel part of the team and of the success’ of those teams. This breeds resentment, and a desire to actively waste time.
There is also a tendency – based on this trait – to see the kind of time-wasting we are talking about being levelled at people lower down the organisation chain. The further you go up the chain you soon identify another tried and trusted time-waster – meetings. Whilst many organisations are getting better at this and starting to use tools such as wikis and blogs to reduce the need for some meetings and to better focus the content of those that are still needed, meeting continue to be used by many as an excuse to avoid ‘real work’. How often are you in meetings where nothing is accomplished, where agendas are ignored or don’t exist or are meetings to discuss having another meeting?
How many people do you know who have meetings outside the office that ‘over-ran’ (usually via the shops).
Seriously, it is not a new phenomenon. Time wasting when it is being done in a manner that genuinely effects a person’s job performance, needs to be addressed. But this can be done in a grown up manner. We do not need to take a chain ‘em to the desk approach.
I’ll leave you with two final quotes: the first from Abigail Schoneboom, writing in Project Skive Background Paper: The History and Future of Skiving (November 21, 2004) and then Alison Eadie, and the final line of her article that could almost have been written with Theo Paphitis in mind.
“As the humane workplace reaches further into our lives, skiving is an important means of shielding our private and creative selves from its encroachments. Skiving does make work more fun and, arguably, is a compromise that absorbs our frustrations and prevents us from coming up with more radical challenges to the system. But skiving is also a quiet protest against the banality that underlies so much of white-collar work. And it expresses disdain for the interminable meetings, phone calls, and PowerPoint presentations that comprise our bloated workday.” (Abigail Schoneboom)
“Employers should put their stopwatches away and find something more useful to do. Who knows? It might add billions to the nation’s wealth.” (Alison Eadie)
Amen to that.
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