Three Quarters of Techies Think It’s Ok to Waste the Time Their Employers Pay For

Svetlana,

You’ve framed the “knowledge worker productivity” discussion in limiting terms. Most of us reading this blog are paid to think and to create.

Keeping our minds limber and our perspectives fresh requires regular reading, writing, and conversation with thought leaders in business and technology. That’s what we’re getting out of blogging, out of Twitter, out of FriendFeed.

I’ll admit that it’s hard to strike the proper balance between staying informed and getting things done but to call the aforementioned activities “wasting time” is unfair.

I’ve written a bit on this topic at my own blog. You can read that as well as a few links to related articles here: http://www.sharingatwork.com/2008/09/trusting-employees-to-know-their-jobs.html

Daniel, thank you for the comment and I actually deliberately started the post mentioning that for some people social media services ARE work and they should engage in the activities required to do the work right. But the post was mainly about people dealing with personal emails, phone calls, IM chats - things that can hardly be referred to as work. Staying informed (by reading and talking to experts) is one thing while chatting with one’s boy/girlfriend is a very different thing. And this is exactly why I think it is strange people don’t feel guilty about this type of activity.

You’re right on that, Svetlana. Everything I read about Generation Y says they disregard the lines between work and home, but I can’t say whether or not things ought to be that way.

Daniel, I think it just depends on your position - you will hardly think it is Ok if it is you who pay these people for doing their home staff at work. I guess this is why I sounded negative in the post.

For the most part I agree with you. I see more coworkers reading celebrity news than I see reading industry blogs.

Daniel, this is exactly what I’m talking about - there is a big difference in how you use tools like Twitter and FriendFeed even: as a distraction or as a useful tool. Unfortunately many people don’t feel guilty about crossing the line.

Are most techies paid by the hour, though? For me, it doesn’t matter if I put in an 8 hour day or a 12 hour day.

Victor: This is an important factor but there was no information on this in the survey results. I guess here it comes to by-hour payments as otherwise it does not make sense to waste time when you will only be paid for the job done.

The nature of the extracurricular activity isn’t so much of an issue as the nature of work and time in the modern world. Honestly, I’m not sure if it’s still fundamentally valid to do things like measure work in hours. This might have been useful back when work was much more serious manual labor, and it might still be valid for certain professions or mechanisms of work exchange (i.e. consulting), however the modern tech job doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to this form of measurement.

The real question is about the nature of tech jobs and when work is actually being lost. For example:

If I am a machinist making parts, and I take a 2-hour nap during work hours, this is a a pretty quantifiable “theft” of time. In those 2 hours, I could have made X parts, which would have been sold for Y dollars. I have taken money from the company.

If I am a construction worker and spend an hour goofing off instead of building the house I’m working on, that’s also a quantifiable loss for the company. Even though the precise nature of my work is not fixed, I have spent a billable hour on non-billable activity and that’s inappropriate.

But what if I’m an IT support guy at a midsize company. I respond to support phone calls and resolve whatever issues people have. But today’s a slow day, the phone’s not ringing. So I sit around and browse Facebook, there’s nothing else for me to do. Now things get a bit hazy, because I am NOT wasting company time as per my job description. It’s my job to resolve issues when they arise in a prompt and professional matter. However, if no issues have arisen, then I’m being paid more as insurance than as labor - I’m being paid to be there to take care of the issues that WILL inevitably arise in the future. As long as I stop doing whatever else I’m doing as soon as the phone rings or a ticket comes in, can it be said that I’m inappropriately using company time?

That’s the problem with a lot of tech positions - it’s rare to be hired because an employer has need for constant, 8-hours-a-day solid technical work. Tech is also much more project-oriented, it’s rare that simply spending more time on something is going to result in “more” or “better” end result. If a good programmer can keep the project perfectly on schedule while spending an hour a day on Facebook, is there any harm in that? Is that “stealing” company time, or is that providing the work that’s asked of you?

If my company expects me to work off hours at home, I expect to play at work. Most companies don’t leave you alone outside of the normal 9-5. Plus, they don’t pay me hourly, they pay me to meet deliverables.

So if the question was rephrased to “Do you feel guilty not making deliverable commitments?” I bet the answers would be very different.

David’s comment hit the mark, I think. There are two (very common) IT employment situations where an employee -shouldn’t- feel too bad about engaging in personal activities on “Company time”.

The first is when an employee is hired to complete a job, not to give up 40-45 hours of their week. Generally speaking, this is the case with any employees who are salaried (the majority?) or who do not earn overtime pay for overtime work - this is an indication that the company considers the job to be goal-focused rather than time-focused. In that situation the Company should feel they are being robbed if the goal is not being met in a timely fashion. If it is, the employee should not feel obliged to make sure they fill the minutes or hours passed between goal-oriented activities with busy-work.

The second (and somewhat overlapping) situation is described by David. Many positions require IT personnel to be available for support during working hours. In situations where there is not a predictable call/ticket flow, it’s common for there to be periods of downtime, and unless the company is prepared to find meaningful ways to engage the employees with substantial work during those downtimes, they shouldn’t be surprised to see employees engaged in personal activities.

In all of the IT jobs I’ve had, from helpdesk through network manager through project manager, there has been substantial downtime in which I engage in personal activity, and with the full and explicit knowledge of our manager and theirs. IT is not many other departments - there isn’t an assembly line always waiting for our attention.

Companies should rethink keeping people at work for 8 hours a day. It’s pointless for tech jobs where you could do work throughout the entire day from a laptop.

I spend plenty of time online doing personal things because I get all of my work done.

Mind you, I go above and beyond what I get paid for - so why should I sit here in boredom or offer to do even more work when I’m not compensated enough the way it is when I can be using the time more effectively for other personal reasons?

This is the most misleading and invalid interpretation of survey results I have seen since yesterday.

“Do you feel guilty about spending your time on personal activities while at work?”

You interpret a high percentage “no” as bad.

That is an extremely misleading interpretation.

If NO ONE is spending time on personal activities, then 100% of people would answer “no”.

The people answering “yes” to a question phrased that way are the ones that feel they are spending too much time on personal activities.

I’m a systems Administrator for a large university. I’m not sure what it is that you do for a living so I won’t degrade it by saying that my job is harder than your. I would like to say a few word in defense of my fellow IT staffers. We don’t work 8to5 jobs. Some of us are on call 24-7, that means that I can be called in to work at 4am on a Sunday to take care of an issue. I don’t get paid overtime, it’s just part of the job. Also with the rate that technology changes I have to read or learn something new everyday of the year. I have no real time to have a life. On top of all this most IT staff are the lowest paid employees but the most blamed in any give company. I catch more grief over my job than most simply because people do not understand what it is that I do. So please if you are not one of “us” don’t try to define our jobs or begrudge us what little joys we get out of our work day. Thank you for your time.

Stephen said it pretty well right above me, but I’ll add this: we can sit on our ass and browse the web because things are running. If you’ve got one of those admins who are always running around fixing things: know that he or she broke it in the first place. The phrase “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is a complete understatement in the field of information technology.

As long as my job gets done my bosses don’t care if I even come in, since most of the stuff I do can be done from anywhere I happen to be.

Well, that would be a wonderful way to work, where every little mail you send a friend is considered “slacking off”.
How can anyone work 8 hours straight without ANY distraction? I can not switch off parts of my life when I go to work, I also don’t want to do it.

I believe banning these things would have a much worse effect than just letting it happen. As long as you do your job right, what’s the problem?

The network, the servers, the databases and applications all have to be up and running during business hours.

Do you think employers feel guilty when a techie is working ‘unsociable’ hours (a union term) so that systems are up and running?

Do they feel guilty about giving their support staff Blackberries (which has to be checked just in case it’s urgent)?

An IT worker’s job sometimes involves doing these things. But they’re not paid for so does that consitute theft on the part of the employer?

We turn a blind eye to these things so long as it doesn’t affect our home lives. Employers, in turn, turn a blind eye to personal use of computers so long as it doesn’t affect our work.
Fair exchange is no robbery.

im one of them

Oh, no! We aren’t squeezing 110% out of our employees! We’d better remove anything that makes work tolerable.

Perhaps a better attitude might be “as long as you meet your deliverable goals then this isn’t an issue.”

Of course, from experience, what tends to happen is that if you are meeting your goals consistently they give you *more* to do; not exactly conducive to a low-stress, manageable workplace environment.

But, hey, if they burn out you just hire a new kid for 1/2 the price, right?

I can on occasion work 20 hours straight. However, I cannot solidly think at a high level for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. I take breaks or my productivity slips in other ways.

Yup, I agree 100%. Makes perfect sense to me.

Huiff
http://www.privacy-tools.at.tc

If my girlfriend has to put up with my putting in a 12 or 14 hour day or a 35 fri-sat-sun at crunch time 3-4 times a year, any employer who makes a big deal about her calling me when it is not crunch time is obviously not going to keep me for long.

Also, what John said. Overall, I’m at least a 20%-er, probably more like a 10 or even 8%er as a developer. But it is not tortoise-like in nature. It is short sprints of phenomenal productivity when a task or problem consumes me and 80%-er level productivity & goofing around as downtime.

I’m the sysadmin at a school, when I put in a content filter that, amond other things, blocks access to AIM, the loudest complaints I got were from two teachers in the English dept who insisted that they have to run it every minute they’re at school, because one of their kids, who are in college, might have some sort of emergency and need to contact them via AIM. Hello, have you people heard of cell phones???? (I showed them meebo. Unlike IM, web filtering is user-dependent, so they could use that, even though students are blocked).

The other quarter of techies are lying.

@David Bresnik: Very reasonable ideas and of course every single job position can be very different in how it is and should be handled depending on the workflow involved and responsibilities. Your call center staff example is very valid here, of course, but I think it is also true that an employer could suggest that at times when there are no calls and no tickets, an employee could engage in some self-educating by studying previous cases, for example. Honestly, I don’t believe that it is really impossible to find work to fill a full-time day with it if you are really determined to work hard and improve your own knowledge or skills further.

@William Bennett: I think from the fact that there is also a list of activities people engage in at work it is evident that only those actually engaged in such activities will answer the “guilty” question. I’m afraid I don’t have access to the full survey results but from what I’ve found I think this question is absolutely valid.

@Stephen: Thank you for such a passionate comment and of course I would not even dream of getting into the “us” category as technically I only write about technology here for a living, never fixing server issues myself or writing a single line of code. And the fact that I spend 12-16 hours per day working will not matter here since my job actually involves twitter and social networking as important parts of it – my problem is that I can hardly enjoy it as much as you do since it is not a personal distraction for me.

You’re hardly helping matters, posting interesting articles for me to read on company time!

Anon, sorry, I can hardly help it and avoid posting anything And thanks for wasting your company’s time so wisely here!