Employees are wasting time all over the place...and costing employers' big money. The problem is that the ideology of the worker and the employer are on two separate levels of existence. The employee wants more pay for less work and the employer wants more work for less pay.
According to Salary.com and American online salaried employees are wasting around 2.9 hours of each 8 hour day. Of course this also doesn't include lunch and other breaks. Thus the total amount may actually be half of a work day. The study indicates that employers are paying an additional 759 billion annual for work that was expected but not received.
The study polled 10,000 employees and found that the following were the big time wasters:
- Personal Use of Internet 44.7%
- Talking with Others 23.4%
- Working on Personal Business 6.8%
- Day Dreaming 3.9%
- Running around Town 3.1%
- Personal Phone Calls 2.3%
- Applying to Other Companies 1.3%
- Planning Personal Events 1.0%
- Tardiness 1.0%
- Other stuff 12.5%
It appears that this study cites that Internet use and Socializing with others is one of the biggest time wasters. In many cases people browse the internet reading articles, looking at pictures and doing personal things. It also makes sense that socializing is the other problem. This problem is magnified when people work close to each other.
The question then becomes “Why do people waste their time?” It might be interesting to not that one of the top reasons is because they don't have enough work. This is interesting considering the large amount of times people claim that they are “swamped” or “up to their neck”. Consider the following:
- Not enough work 33.2%
- Not enough pay 23.4%
- Distraction from other workers 14.7%
- Not enough off work time 12.0%
- Other 16.7%
If you think all of your workers are working hard and doing what is expected of them please think again. Salaried workers appear to be some of the biggest abusers of your compensation package. Since most claim that they don't have enough work it might be beneficial to help them out by rearranging their assignments. This rearranging might actually help you pay them more (solving the under paid problem) and solving the not enough work problem and improving the company performance (laying off unused workers).
