What Counts as Wasting Time?

What is wasting time? How do you define it?

Lately, I have been coming across some odd ideas about time and how it is wasted. Some say that the top ways employees waste time at work are:

• surfing the internet
• socializing with co-workers
• conducting personal business
• spacing out
• running errands off-premises

To me, nothing noted above counts as wasted time. It can be argued that surfing the internet fosters creativity and new ideas, socializing with co-workers leads to collaboration and more effective teamwork, and spacing out is your brain boycotting you due to fatigue.

“A certain amount of slacking off is already built into the salary structure.”
-Senior Vice President at Salary.com

Really? Well I’ll be sure to slack off for precisely the time allotted, then. With that quid pro quo attitude, how can the same people turn around and complain about employee disengagement?

“Chatting with your online friends is unethical, and wasting your boss’s money.”
-General Manger of Sales & Marketing

Maybe it’s just me, but this makes no sense. Not quite sure what is unethical about it, since answering my overly chatty co-worker is pretty much the same thing, just face-to-face rather than online. It takes about 5 seconds to type out a response to the occasional IM. In that line of thinking, you may as well add in restroom breaks as a waste of your employer’s money.

Counterproductive workplace behavior is behavior that is counter to the goals of an organization and includes mundane activities such as ineffective job performance and absenteeism all the way up to the criminal such as theft or violence. My take is that much of what people consider “wasting time” is NOT counterproductive workplace behavior. Instead, it is an excuse. It is displacing blame.

If an employee is performing poorly and missing deadlines, that’s a problem in the area of performance management. Don’t blame it on wasting time. It has nothing to do with time. Actually, the same article that mentioned the top time wasters also mentioned that the top three reasons for it. Those reasons were:

• not enough work to do
• a perception of being underpaid
• being distracted by co-workers

To me, that sounds like a problem with the organizational structures and processes rather than a specific employee’s motivation, work ethic, or ability to perform. So let’s take responsibility and fix what’s broken rather than simply pointing fingers.