Working on staying awake

Too much employee downtime

What are the new tools for US workers?

According to a new study, they are Facebook, Snapchat and Candy Crush, as idle workers struggle to get through their day, according to a new study.

Idle time in fact occurs frequently across all occupational categories in the US, and is costing employers roughly $100 billion each year, according to a draft paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.

While much has been written in the media and explored in academic research about the dilemma facing overstressed workers with too much to do and too little time in which to do it, the reverse is also true.

Idle time is not due to laziness on the part of workers, but rather a variety of causes, including the tendency of companies to carry more employees than they need as an insurance against busy times. After all, nobody likes waiting on hold for a customer service representative.

In other instances, the downtime may be caused by managers allocating work poorly, leaving employees with nothing to do, or by equipment malfunctions which leave the help unable to complete necessary tasks.

In the new survey conducted of 2,103 workers across 29 broad job categories, a team led by Andrew Brodsky of the University of Texas and Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School found that the vast majority (78.1 percent) reported experiencing idle time, and a healthy minority of 21.7 percent reported being idle (and bored) for at least part of the day.

“The financial implications of this idle time are substantial,” says Brodsky, who calls the $100 billion estimate a “conservative” one, based on the assumption that workers earned the median annual US pay rate of $17.09 per hour rather than the higher $22.71 based on the mean wage cited by the 2014 Census Bureau survey.

“When the boss is seen as running around with a stopwatch, people are going to work more,” he said, noting that underworked workers have a tendency to get stressed out and slow down as the deadline attached to a task looms, rather than make it obvious to their managers that they have little or nothing to do.

And this, which Brodsky and others call “the dead-time effect,” doesn’t only apply to customer service reps and parking lot attendants, for whom sitting around doing nothing may actually be part of the job description.

“A friend of mine is an on-air news reporter responsible for one story a day, but when she finishes, she has to sit around the rest of the day,” he relates by way of example.

According to Abigail Thomas, who as branch manager for Robert Half specializes in the recruitment of administrative and human resource professionals, the senior managers she talks to estimate that US workers spend an average six hours per week doing nothing. For higher professional categories, this number jumps to 10.5 hours.

“It is important for managers to regularly check what’s going on and remind workers to take breaks and encourage them to take on new challenges,” she advises.

On the other hand, “boredom isn’t always a bad thing,” Thomas argues. “Sometimes you can come up with new approaches and new ways of doing things.

Chronic boredom is what you need to watch out for.”