Time’s a Wasting—Particularly at the Office, Survey Finds
written by Kathy Gurchiek

“You can’t invent things like time,” Violet said. “You can invent things like automatic popcorn poppers. You can invent things like steam-powered window washers. But you can’t invent more time.”

Despite that observation by a character in the children’s book series, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, a good deal of time at work is wasted, according to findings of a web survey released July 11. Nonwork Internet use, young workers, people in Kentucky and those working in insurance are the top culprits, the results indicate.

America Online and Salary.com conducted its research among 10,044 employees, including AOL.com users and members, Salary Wizard users and corporate human resource professionals.

“A certain amount of slacking off is already built into the salary structures,” Salary.com Senior Vice President Bill Coleman said in a press release. In fact, HR managers assume U.S. employees will waste 0.94 hour per day and suspect they waste 1.60 hours per day.

It appears worse than they thought, though. The average employee admits to slacking off 2.09 hours per day, not counting lunch, the survey found.

That adds up to $759 billion in salaries for which companies receive no apparent benefit, AOL said.

Nonwork Internet use (44.7 percent) and co-worker socializing (23.4 percent) were the top two ways workers said they wasted time at work, the survey found. That included e-mail, instant messages, online polls, interactive games, message boards and chat rooms.

Browsing the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) bulletin boards and chat rooms is a leading time-wasting activity, according to some SHRM members responding to a bulletin board (BB) query.

“Seriously and no joke, I am addicted to the SHRM BB,” said one poster. Another, who responded less than two minutes after the question was posted, said reading the bulletin board was that person’s prime time-wasting method “because work is slow and the one big project I need to do, I’m avoiding.”

Other top time-wasting activities, the AOL survey found: conducting personal business (6.8 percent); “spacing out” (3.9 percent); running off-premise errands (3.1 percent); personal phone calls (2.3 percent); applying for other jobs (1.3 percent); planning personal events and arriving late or leaving early (1 percent); and other (12 percent).

However, Laura Stack, president of The Productivity Pro, a training and development company in Denver, views the findings with some skepticism. For starters, the survey assumed an average eight-hour, 40-hour work week, which she calls “as mythical as the hydra in Greek mythology.”

For another, the blurring of personal and work boundaries in the past few years may be a contributor.

“They’re saying they’re frittering away [time], but it doesn’t take into account how many of those people put in those 2.09 hours [of work] at home. We’re working on the buses, on the trains, on the taxis,” she said.

She even has seen people on the sidelines of her child’s T-ball game attending to work. “For one hour the parents are sitting there … banging away on their laptops” and Blackberries, she said.

Also, given their schedules, employees may have no alternative but to conduct personal business at work, she pointed out.

“If you don’t run errands, you don’t make phone calls [at work] … when else are you going to do that?” she said. “If anything, it’s indicative of a lack of corporate policy and procedures to support the change in lifestyles in how people work and reflects a need for flexibility.”

She also questioned socializing with co-workers as a waste of time, suggesting some may confuse the difference between “just yapping about your Aunt Sally’s sailboat trip vs. socializing that is necessary ... to build strong teams,” adding, “there are necessary social niceties that have to take place.”

Among other survey findings:

• Insurance (an average of 2.5 hours wasted per person per day), noneducation public- sector jobs (2.4 hours) and research and development (2.3 hours) are the industries where employees waste the most time. They are followed by education, and software and Internet industries (2.2 hours); specialized trades, nonmanufacturing automotive and retail industries (2.1 hours); marketing and communications (2 hours); and finance and banking (1.8 hours).
• Kentucky is the No. 1 state for time wasting, with an average of 4.0 hours wasted per person per day. Following it are Missouri (3.5 hours per day); Nevada (3.1 hours); Mississippi (3 hours); Wisconsin and Indiana (2.8 hours); Oklahoma and Virginia (2.7 hours); Pennsylvania (2.6 hours); and Connecticut (2.5 hours).
• Baby boomer, thy name is workaholic. Those born between 1950 and 1959 (ages 55 to 46) waste 0.68 hours per day compared to those born between 1980 and 1985 (ages 20 to 25), who say they waste nearly two hours per day.
• Venus and Mars collide. Men and women waste about the same amount of time per day—2.1 hours, “despite that most HR managers surveyed suspected that women waste more time at work than men,” the report said.
• One-third of respondents say they waste time at work because they don’t have enough to do; 23.4 percent say it’s because they are underpaid for the amount of work they do; 14.7 percent say co-workers distract them; 12 percent cite not enough evening or weekend time; 16.7 percent note other, nonspecified, reasons.

Lack of work is not the reason one SHRM member, in a bulletin board posting, says she goofs off at work.  “It’s because I’m procrastinating on a project. But I also do it when I’m stumped, like when I hit a roadblock or when I’m trying to write an HR article for our employee newsletter and can’t come up with the right phrasing.  “If thinking about it directly doesn’t work, sometimes actively NOT thinking about it seems to cause the solution to pop into my head,” she wrote.

She also saw chatting with co-workers and helping with projects below her level of expertise, such as setting up meeting rooms for training or improving the formatting of a form, as ways she wasted time.  Another says her need to be a perfectionist prompts her time wasting.  “I re-read, re-check, re-design, re-evaluate, re-write, re-do everything multiple times before I’m satisfied with it! If I could just learn to accept things as they are, I could get a whole lot more done each day!”

A manager needs to be aware of his or her employees’ performance levels, Stack said.  “If you do have a poor performer who is truly wasting time and does not put in any extra hours and is not meeting performance expectations, then I might turn the screw a little bit more … but managers for the most part know who their stars are and I don’t think this is reflective of a poor work ethic.

“It’s called sanity.”

Although the AOL survey did not include this among its findings, perhaps some workers engage in time-wasting activities between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. and noon to 2 p.m.  A survey of 150 senior executives with the nation’s 1,000 largest companies found those are the top two most unproductive times of the day, respectively, according to Accountemps, a specialized staffing service for temporary accounting, finance and bookkeeping professionals, which released the survey June 30.

It’s something to keep in mind for managers when scheduling meetings, Stack said. If a meeting must be called during those times, make sure it’s for project updates and informational purposes—not for something such as brainstorming and strategic planning, which require high energy levels.

To avoid the afternoon lull, consider the following, Accountemps chairman Max Messner suggested:

• Don’t delay difficult activities until the end of the day, when your energy level may be low. Instead, use this time to catch up on basic tasks such as filing, organizing files and responding to routine e-mails.
• Periodically stretch or take a short walk to refuel, or enjoy your lunch outside.
• No matter how busy you are, make time for nutritious snacks and a complete meal midway through the day.
• Take a mental break to provide the boost you need to finish the day on a strong note.

Kathy Gurchiek is an associate editor at HR News. She wasted no time writing this article.

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