At first, the ability to check email, read ESPN, or browse Zappos while on the job may feel like a luxury. But in time, many crave more meaningful—and more demanding—responsibilities.
I can't imagine being in a job like this. I have never been in a job (post college) where my activity and performance weren't directly tied to my compensation. Hell, even waiting tables required that I was fully engaged and busy as hell. Part of my current job is to sell to both the private and govt sectors. The difference between the two is staggering. It's not a cliche to suggest that hose in the govt sector usually could give two shits about revenue, profitability, waste etc. They take FOREVER to make a decision and normally convene a committee for the most mundane of decisions. It's honestly not real. It's like a fake little world without consequence.The municipality of Menden sent out a press release regretting that the employee never informed his superiors of his inactivity.
Yes, because clearly it's the job of the employee to let the supervisor know that they do nothing. It's not the supervisor's role to, oh.. I don't know.... supervise.
The issue is far simpler than the author wishes it to be: Fundamentally, labor and industry have been judged on productivity and efficiency since the invention of the assembly line, rather than on value. It comes down to this: an employer hires an employee to "fill a position" not to "do a job." Say you hire an accountant. He's going to be extremely busy once a year, majorly busy once a quarter, kind of busy once a month and slack the rest of the time. If that accountant is an independent contractor who works off-site, you get invoices for services rendered. You see a direct comparison between money paid and value added. Let's suppose, though, that you strike a bargain with the accountant to take him in house. You'll put him on salary. And you'll see just how busy he is during his busy times, and you'll be delighted by the bargain you struck. But you'll also see just how busy he isn't during his slack times, and you'll feel annoyed that this leech is sucking down your profits with no regard for your bottom line. Worse than that, he's an employee. You own him. He has contracted with you to give over his labors for 40 hours a week (or if he's on salary, as many hours as you can trick out of him). So when he's not working hard on something, you give him something to do - something that you would never bother him with if he could bill you for the time. You and he both know that it's busywork. For you, it's busy work that adds value. For him, it's labor above and beyond what he's actually contracted for. And he knows he can avoid that busywork by appearing to be busy even when he's not. And you know that he's appearing to be busy so he can suck value from your bottom line. And you both hate each other as a consequence, even though you're getting a bargain on his services and he's benefitting from the security of non-seasonal employment. IT'S A STUPID FUCKING SYSTEM. There's this idea that since you're in the chair, you belong to the man who owns the chair, rather than that the chair is there to increase the efficiency of your labor for your contracted employer. But since it's an employer-run system, articles like this are written which cant the discussion in the direction of "those lazy, dissatisfied employees" and how - get this - "there isn't enough work to do." Check this out: Richard Branson tells his employees to take as much vacation as they need. What does the article do: 1) state the facts in an off-kilter way (140 employees out of 40,000) 2) immediately launch into the downside ("The lack of a formal policy can leave some people feeling pressured to take less time off, rather than more") 3) For some reason, mention that Netflix does the same and Carlos Slim has called for a 3-day work week. Dunno. I left the land of TPS reports in 2007. I now get hired by the day, to do a gig. When there isn't a gig to do, we do other things. There's a little bit of the "look busy the boss is coming" pantomime to it, but it really only comes out when representatives of the networks are on set. We know that they come from the land of TPS reports, and we know that they simply don't understand that "looking busy" when we "aren't busy" is an insult to both of us.
Seriously dude, sometimes you are so succinct it's beautiful. I really mean it too. I am sure you know how well you are able to dismantle a subject a put a new light on it, and then to express it clearly. But JESUS, this whole comment left me with an entirely better understanding of the worker/employer relationship. It's such an odd system and one that irritates me, to some extent, everyday. We are judged not by what we add but how much we add. It reminds me of this comic: http://xkcd.com/303/ a lot of time for me, work means using the Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm:
Write down the problem.
Think very hard.
Write down the answer.
But because my employer doesn't get to see me "thinking" it creates tension until a product is delivered. Let me give a small example: We needed to find a large amount of files over several servers, and replace one line of text if it matched. Several solutions were given for this problem which would cause a lot of headache because they were so input/output intensive. But when I sat down for a while and just thought about how things interacted on our network, I was able to come up with a solution which was both efficient and easy to track. But the thinking didn't please anyone, people were agitated, why was no WORK being done? Why can't we just do it NOW? The misunderstanding was that I am doing work, I am actually doing work very efficiently, but because I haven't started building with bricks, I couldn't demonstrate it. I really suspect at some point this is going to have to change, while I don't buy the whole "Singularity" project, we're going to be depending more and more on mathematics and algorithms to run our world which means we're going to have more hard problems to solve, and we're going to need to pay people to "work by thinking". Employers are either going to have to get used to it, get out of the way, or hold us back.
The only job I've ever had that I truly enjoyed was umpiring baseball games -- paid quite well and if I took ten seconds off it was made eminently clear to several hundred angry people. Barring that, I've never had a job where this was true.my activity and performance weren't directly tied to my compensation
I work in R&D now on salary. I like what I get paid to do. I even have fun while doing it. But I still rather be somewhere else the vast majority of the day. Even when I'm under pressure to finish an assignment I'll still do other things more immediately fulfilling or socially spy on my peer groups. I understand the need to do tasks that directly benefit my survival. I do not understand this attitude that I'm supposed to give my life over to a company and make a small group of people exponentially more money than I'll ever see. That's absurd. I was happier as human being being payed barely nothing at a start up where I had far more genuine autonomy and input over my day vs. building something for others who appear to not care very much about my existence.
So first off take a look at this: https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ , I believe its a highly fictionalised account of something that does happen. In a previous job, over a decade ago, I worked for a large US multinational as an Analyst. Ironically part of my job involved developing systems that route customer calls to the most effective, low cost distributed call centre based on the call type. That type of work will have you seeing inefficiencies everywhere if you do it for too long. I did it for too long. Close to where my desk was located there was another Guy who worked in a different department to me, he had a different set of responsibilities and a different management structure above him. He did almost nothing for 40 hours per week, he LOOKED busy but his entire week workload could have been completed in 1-2 hours. After a while he would be missing every Tuesday as he "had external tasks to attend to", his job to some extent would require this so it was an adequate cover to fool most people. After about 12 months he was only in the office on Mondays. In fairness to him he played the game well and when he did come in he started at 8 and stayed till after 6 and made sure everyone saw he was there. To my knowledge he was still doing this for years after I left. His salary would have been around €30K which is an average yearly wage. If you consider it as payment for 1 day a week it works out at around €75 an hour... Now that’s one extreme example where obviously something should have been done to correct it and management oversight is to blame. Another form is when employees have tasks that reoccur on an annual basis, creating lots of work for 2-3 months and then relatively lax periods for the remainder of the year. This is highly typical across lots of different companies including many of the top fortune 500 companies. These companies are extremely successful and that success helps to create the conditions where under-employment can occur. As kleinbl00 mentioned they absorb the cost of having Employees with fluctuating workloads as it is easier to manage for several reasons; Contractors are expensive, Training new hires is expensive and time consuming, a certain level of confidence is provided when you have the workforce available should an opportunity arise (a big customer arrives at a non-busy time for example). So the upper management accept the working arrangement as a pragmatic solution. Imagine for a second you have a company that makes a billion dollars a year without really needing to try. This does NOT include the likes of Apple or other tech companies that live or die by their power to innovate consistently. No I am talking about the rest of the top 500, the ones that have a brand, an established consumer base; they own a niche of the market. To them the mind-set from the top down is not to innovate so much as to protect the status quo. They don't want to risk their brand or continued consumers’ goodwill by rocking the boat too much. They occasionally have to take on an external threat but that’s for another post. In a nutshell they neither desire nor should desire to make widespread changes to how the company operates, they are on a gravy train so don't mess up. Now that’s all well and good for the stockholders but what about the young hotshot managers who want to make CEO one day. How do you show your quality? How do you differentiate yourself from all the other managers? You could potentially do it by trying to fix internal department problems, streamlining processes, reducing waste, cutting costs but everyone else is already doing that. You could try innovating but that’s not REALLY a runner as no one is interested in innovation right now. So what are you left with, how do you make sure you are the loudest voice at the table? Well one way is headcount. The more staff you have the bigger your department is, the more budget you command, the more projects you can take on (which is a double win as it means someone else’s’ department losses out). Headcount matters to the higher ups as it is the biggest cost and the biggest talking point. Remember that annual busy period? Well the guy with the biggest headcount gets the bigger share of the work and by extension the biggest share of rewards afterwards (Where rewards is your department taking up a sizeable chunk of the pie chart in those end of year revenue handling reports). If you want to become a manager, you need to be able to lead a small team effectively, that concept remains as you move up the ladder. "Oh Mr.X must be good, he has 200 people under him". The outcome from this is that there is a direct incentive for upwardly motivated persons who already have a say in how the company is run to want more employees to be hired and most importantly, to be hired into the team/department/whatever he is responsible for. So essentially the fact that someone is underemployed and not directly contributing to the company does not necessarily mean they are not directly contributing to their managers’ promotion chances. Companies realise they have a problem eventually, they are not very good at openly acknowledging why the underemployment was created, mostly because the guy identifying the problem is potentially someone who has already benefited from it... So how is it resolved? There is a cull every few years when conditions make it acceptable. You can take it from me that very profitable companies took the downturn a few years ago as an advantageous time to cull off lots of its employees and blame it on external economic problems rather than what it really was. Survival of the fittest, corporate style. The biggest problem with using a cull as the solution is that somewhere in the company (and every large company has one) is a guy with a spreadsheet. And every now and again he is asked to produce a list and if your names on the list you are culled. It doesn’t matter if you are a slacker or a hard worker, incompetent or a superhero; the spreadsheet doesn’t care. Good men and women go to the wall sometimes which is a real shame. Thankfully I have moved on from those and haven’t had to deal with any of it for years but I still hear about it from old acquaintances.