When entering into a discussion of why employees waste time at work, you will get a number of different answers depending on who you are talking to. Managers will say that employees are just lazy, and employees will give any number of excuses. The word “excuses” is used here because “reasons” does not fit the context. There is no good reason an employee should be paid a salary for doing something else other than being a productive member of the company.
No Use For an Excuse
In a recent survey, employees ranked what they did that qualified as time wasters. Among the top selections were checking personal email, checking up on the latest news on the web, checking out Facebook and other social media sites and shopping. The personal email and news sites get a pass to a large degree because mobile technology has changed the way the culture functions. There is nothing wrong with wanting to check up on the news or finding out if anything important has landed in an employee’s personal email box.
As for the Facebook and shopping excuses, this is just a legal way to steal time and money from the company. Suggesting that an employee is on a social media site conducting business does not recognize that the survey was asking people how they wasted time at work. How an employee can justify shopping online during company time eludes simple, responsible business conduct and behavior.
The Whys
The survey dug deeper and asked employees why they wasted time. There was a close result for the number-one slot. Not being challenged enough, long working hours, lack of incentive to work harder and generally being dissatisfied were cited within 5 percentage points or less of one another. It seems employees fail to understand that their purpose when being hired is to bring a set of skills that benefit the company, and to use those skills that will earn them an agreed-to salary and benefit package.
Not being challenged enough and not finding a reason to work harder are similar in that they ignore the idea that the employee knew the conditions of employment and their job responsibilities. If the hours required were too long, they could have refused the job. As far as being challenged, this is more of an issue with the employee. The skills they brought to the job interview were a result of their education, training and experience. If the work they have chosen to do or the career path they have chosen is not challenging enough, that does not make the employer responsible for changing their career opportunities. It is possible that the employee wanted a job that would not be challenging at the beginning so they would not have to work as hard.
Incentivising
That leaves not having enough incentive to work and general dissatisfaction as the other top reasons to deal with. The idea that a job should be 100 percent satisfying is, at the least, naïve. Everyone who works at a company will have to do tasks they prefer not to do. It is part of being employed. Lack of incentive is a vague excuse because the question becomes of what it would take to meet a given employee’s request for incentives. There are no golden parachutes for 99.9 percent of all employees. A company can only offer the incentives it has as part of its benefit package. It would be chaos for a company to try to tailor incentive packages for each employee based on their personal need or expectations.
The other side of the coin on employee time wasting is that there are employers who create work that neither benefits the company or the employee. Work for the sake of simply having employees look busy is more likely to result in employees engaging in any one of the major time-wasting behaviors. But employees need to accept the fact that they were hired to work—not play—a certain number of hours each day and week. Regardless of how long someone has been employed, that basic reality will not change.
