Stop wasting time! Or don’t.
August 2, 2007
Max’s note: We’re proud to present this guest post by SuccessFactors’ Director of Research, Erik Berggren.
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What’s the best way to be productive? I wager 99% of you just thought to yourself – “waste less time.” After all, if we used every minute efficiently we could build skyscrapers in days, right? Maybe.
According to a new salary.com survey, young people are wasting more time than ever before (2.1 hours/day) at work and the insinuation is that this is major cause for concern. But, it’s not quite as simple as all that. Productivity has a numerator and a denominator. The denominator is time. There’s only so much in a day. The numerator? Output - how much stuff is getting done. To improve your productivity you could work on either or both sides. But it’s a balance, a single minded focus on the denominator is at best somewhat limited.
SuccessFactors’ stated goal is to increase worldwide productivity by 50% and I can tell you that we’re not going to get there by identifying slack time and eliminating it. Peter Capelli ( a SuccessFactors Research thought leader pictured left) shared his thoughts on this survey this morning on Morning Edition on NPR. Click here to listen.
Peter and I had a great conversation around productivity and HCM last week in preparation for his upcoming webinar highlighting some interesting findings from his coming book “Talent on Demand.” There is much more to driving productivity than cutting slack out of the workday and I invite you to join our webinar next week to find out why and what to do about it from one of the greatest thinkers in this area.
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7 Responses to “Stop wasting time! Or don’t.”
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Personally, I think people are working much, much harder now than in the past - hours of work among full-time employees are way up, and the demands on white-collar workers have also sky-rocketed. It’s hard to believe, but executives really did have three-martini lunches in the 1970s whereas now a quite remarkable number of managers take no time off for lunch whatsoever, continue to work from home, and are on call 24 hours a day.
What I notice is that more senior managers in these companies seem upset that new hires aren’t as committed to their jobs as the senior managers are. There’s nothing new about that - younger workers and new hires have never been as committed. The reason is… wait for it… they’re young! They don’t have families who depend on them, they don’t have all the responsibilities their elders have, and they have yet to do all the traveling/partying, etc. that their elders did when they were younger. They are acting exactly like the senior managers acted when they were young.
Over the past generation, the hours of work in corporate jobs and the pace of work have risen enormously. So I’m always suspicious of complaints that people aren’t working hard enough - hard enough compared to what is the question.
I’m particularly suspicious of claims that young people aren’t working hard enough. It certainly is true that young, new hires are not as committed to their jobs than are their senior managers. The reasons for this is… wait for it… they’re young! They don’t have the obligations, the families dependent on them, and the long-term investments in their careers that the senior managers have. Here’s the other obvious point: Those senior managers were just as party-going, fun-oriented, and uncommitted when they were young, new hires, although they tend to forget that. In fact, new hire managers a generation ago worked much less hard than new hires do now. (The three-martini lunch really was a reality.)
So some perspective on these comparisons is probably in order
I find this discussion on time fascinating, because based on the research I am currently doing, I have to ask are we wasting time or is it a question of how do we use time.
I have just begun the research to author a new series of future scenarios on work. There are many questions to ask ourselves in the US by way of examining what is happening globally right now, that are about exercising intelligence as opposed to working just in time.
For example,
In the US post 9/11 we became very upset about outsourcing to India and other countries for what was perceived as accessing lower rate markets of employment.
Currently we are looking for talent from the US in foreign countries because of the decline in the number of college graduates with the skills we need to recruit for. In addition, when a geographical area loses jobs, e.g. Michigan due to the decline in the US Auto Industry or Massachusetts losing 5 major corporations over 5 years…..we end up retraining people for a lower wage job opportunity.
US is fixated on time,
While in other countries people work fewer hours, are healthier, have access to professional development and education that is affordable and take a month of vacation a year.
Are we wasting time or is a question of how we are spending time and for what? and what is the infrastructure by which we help young adults develop parameters on how to manage their time coming into the workforce for ongoing learning and productivity?
I have found the “Getting Things Done” framework created by David Allen to be an excellent tool for increasing productivity for people of any age.
Good points to ponder on! I think i work on both numerator and denominator, but still some of the time gets wasted …. is there any possibility of third factor?
I would somewhat have to agree with Peter. I agree many managers now are on call 24 hours a day, and many work through lunch (I being one of those), I would have to say there is a new distraction at work that those workers in the 70’s did not have to contend with, the internet. I personally have had to have several discussions with employees, who use the internet for personal reasons while they are on the clock.
Young people are wasting more time at work because, quite simply, they can.
Gen X/Y began technology adoption in their teens, and didn’t have to wait to get into the job market to learn any technical skills. The younger demographic is quick, prolific, and productive.
Often a talented young person can do in 2 hours what may take a “committed” (code for older) employee an entire day or longer to do.
Let’s face it, are children are getting smarter in how they procure resources and get things done.
Yet, society is still holding-on to this 8-hour work standard. I beg to question do we really need 8 hours anymore?