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

Of course it is quite understandable that everyone has to do some personal staff now and then when in the office – like answer an urgent phone call or have a quick chat on Skype with a friend to decide where to meet in the evening. I believe that it is even worse with IT professionals as we have even more distractions now that often play an important part in our lives – like IMs, discussion forums, Twitter, FriendFeed, various social networks and entertainment applications.

And while for some people this could be a part of the workflow itself if these tools are vital for communications, for others they are nothing but time wasters that their employers don’t pay them to use. These distractions can often drive employers crazy (believe me, I know what I’m talking about watching our designer playing Lines online from the corner of my eye when I still don’t have threaded comments here) but employees seem to think it is just fine to do whatever they want with the time someone else pays them for spending in the office actually working on something.

This is confirmed by the results of a very interesting survey about how IT staff feels about wasting the time their employers pay them for in Europe. Well, not exactly wasting from the employees’ point of view, of course – just innocently spending it on some personal tasks not even remotely related to their work.

The survey has been carried out by The IT Job Board – a recruitment website for IT professionals in Europe. The website owners have interrogated their users (over 700 people replied with the majority of them based in the UK) to see how they feel about personal tasks at work.

The results of the survey are just plain amazing: over three quarters of technology professionals interrogated do not even feel guilty about using their work time for personal tasks. To be more specific, it’s 76.1% in the UK, 75.9% in Belgium, and 81.6% in the Netherlands.

The most popular non-work activities are personal phone calls (50% of people admitted doing them) and emails (about 60% of people) as well as chatting with colleagues on non-work issues. Facebook – the social network that is so often blocked by companies everywhere – seems not to be as dangerous as various free email services like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail where people spend more time with their personal emails than networking on Facebook.

There are certain differences between women and men in their attitude towards their work: only 10% of women in the UK admit spending an hour or more per day on some non-work related tasks compared to 17% of men. Women seem to be more responsible in this case as well trying to commit their work time to work tasks (or maybe failing to admit that we do engage in something that has nothing to do with our work – even when the survey is anonymous we’d rather stick to the idea that we work as hard as we can).

As for the reasons why people don’t feel guilty about engaging in some outside activities when in the office, people mainly referred to two of them. The first reason is astonishing to me: workers admitted they did not have enough work to do to fill all their working time. Of course this should show the companies that they should rethink the process to make sure employees invariably have plenty of work – instead of blocking access to Facebook. The second reason is not all that surprising as people claimed they were not paid enough for the amount of work they did so they thought they deserved doing something else and spend less time on work itself.

I have not seen results of any similar surveys in the US myself so I can’t be sure if the situation is similar or if people take their work more seriously. But I think that it is still some indication that everyone should rethink our attitude to work – both employers and employees – now that we are facing the worst financial meltdown in the recent decades. After all, companies will be even more damaged if they continue to pay for the things that don’t produce any value for the company. At the same time employees should try not to forget that it is much better to have a job and be focused on it 100% of your time than losing the job and focusing on your non-work related activities 100% of your time – for free.

Photo by ninjapoodles used under Creative Commons