Corporate America has long been a source of fodder for comedians, anti-establishment naysayers, and even 9-to-5 workers themselves. Just this morning, as I waited for the bus alongside a cluster of other women, all of us wearing nearly identical black coats and sporting similar bags both on our shoulders and under our eyes, I watched a strapping young EMT with dreadlocks checking us out through the window of his ambulance. He smiled cruelly as he watched, as if thinking, Look at those office drones—they’re like cattle waiting to be herded downtown. They’re probably addicted to canned air.
This snarky sentiment is so prevalent in American society that animator/director Mike Judge wrote an entire movie in 1999—and a brilliant one at that—about just how bleak life inside cubicle walls can get. If you haven’t seen Office Space yet, drop everything and rent it. If you have, you probably laughed as hard as I did during the scene in which the main character, Peter Gibbons, describes a typical workday at his company, Initech, to two consultants who’ve been hired to orchestrate layoffs there. “I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late,” Peter begins, and goes on to say, “Uh, and after that, I just sorta space out for about an hour … I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too … In a given week, I probably do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.”
Peter may seem like an extreme example of workplace lassitude, but the truth is, many Americans aren’t far off from being just like him. According to a 2005 joint study by AOL (formerly America Online) and Salary.com, employees waste 2.09 hours on average in an eight-hour workday—and that doesn’t even include the time they take off for lunch. Those among us who delight in underachieving and finding loopholes may feel empowered by this statistic, but the bigger question is, exactly what are these people doing with all that downtime? And why do they feel justified in wasting so much of their own time and so much of their employers’ money?
Procrastination Station
AOL and Salary.com’s findings were based on an online poll of 10,044 American employees. According to these respondents, the top five time-wasting culprits (in descending order of popularity) were personal Internet use, socializing with coworkers, conducting personal business, spacing out (à la Peter Gibbons), and running personal errands. Of these activities, the first was by far the most prevalent: 44.7 percent of the surveyed workers claimed that surfing the Web was their primary non-work-related activity. The study also found that men and women squandered equal amounts of workday time; notably, however, the majority of human resources managers who participated had the impression that women were less efficient than their male coworkers.
Since 2005, Salary.com has conducted this same poll annually—it’s now known simply as the Wasting Time at Work Survey—and has achieved strikingly similar results each year. In 2008, personal online use, followed by fraternizing with colleagues, still topped the list of time wasters, though personal phone calls replaced spacing out as the fourth-most-popular activity. Differences in efficiency between different age groups have emerged as another common thread since the survey first occurred: since 2005, employees age fifty and older have reported wasting only thirty minutes or less each workday, as opposed to the most egregious group, people born between 1980 and 1985, who spend an average of two hours per day slacking off. (So much for bright young minds.)
Stuck in a Rut
Some employers might be shocked to realize that their worker bees aren’t buzzing quite as busily as they should be, but these yearly Salary.com studies also point the finger at the underserved companies themselves for not providing their staffs with enough incentive to focus on the tasks at hand. In 2008, 46 percent of the Salary.com respondents indicated that professional dissatisfaction was driving them to waste time at work, 34 percent felt underpaid, 24 percent believed they didn’t have sufficient deadlines or incentives to perform, 19 percent claimed their workdays were too long, and 18 percent accused coworkers and friends of distracting them during business hours.
