The workplace is where people go to work. But much of the day is increasingly padded out with less productive activities, writes Peter Fleming. A few years ago a disturbing story appeared in the media that seemed to perfectly capture the contemporary experience of work and its ever increasing grip over our lives: "Man Dies at Office Desk - Nobody Notices for Five Days".
The case was unnerving for one reason mainly. People die all the time, but usually we notice. Are things so bad in the modern workplace that we can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead? Of course, the story turned out to be a hoax. An urban myth.
As it happens, each country has its own variation that still fools people when they periodically appear. In the US the dead person is a publisher. In other countries, a management consultant.
Apart from getting the actual task done, which is typically completed in short bursts, there is also a good deal of messing about, chatting, paying the bills, surfing the net, daydreaming and waiting for the day to finish. Most importantly, much of our day is spent busy being busy rather than doing things that are socially useful.
A recent study of overworked management consultants in the US found that 35% employed in this occupation actually "faked" an 80-hour work week. For various reasons these individuals pretended to sacrifice themselves on the altar of work and still got everything done.
In this respect, entire occupations might be considered phoney - from life coaches to "atmosphere co-ordinators" (people hired to create a party vibe in bars) to "chief learning officers" in the corporate world. For those economists trying to figure out the present "productivity puzzle" in the UK, best start looking here.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32829232
[Source]: http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2015/may/why-do-people-waste-so-much-time-at-the-office
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @10:52PM
The think about work time and efficiency is that the think don't work as most assume, depending of the type of work the human has different behaviors that affect various spans like for the attention, concentration and others. There also exist natural work cycles, basically cycle of times off high performance separated by times of low performance, this cycles tend to be only seen in the modern specialized work as in older works those where hidden because the non specialized nature where the different overlapped job activities compensate for it, also the intellectual work is more extenuating that the people think, making the times of high efficiency short.
One think about repetitive work is that somethings that are normally accounted as distraction actually can boost its efficiency, like chatting with others about not work related things, music... the reason is that they act as a mental distractions that reduce the stress that is produced by their repetitive nature of the work reducing the low performance time. This is a more complex think that it appears as it can actually reduce peak performance but at the same time boost the average performance, for example whiteout the distraction you can have a efficiency of 100 during 10 minutes and efficiency of 20 during 20 minutes and with the distraction you can have a efficiency of 80 during 20 minutes and a efficiency of 15 during 10 minutes.
One big problem that I see with most work related studies is that the number off studies done from the management and company perspective are overwhelming and the number of studies done from the physiological and psychological perspective are marginal. Making most of this studies moot in practice as they point the behavior and don't study the real reason of the behavior, making any solution and conclusion misleading.