Have Time....Will Waste (Managers passion for wasting time at work!!)

I found a nice article detailing research that has been conducted into the time wasting strategies of employees at work, particularly managers. It is also backed by nice anecdotes, some of which really hit home. These surveys should really encourage debate amongst professionals on how to get hold of and solve this problem, since productivity issues are becoming increasingly important in the current world.

Posting the article in Full: Source - Rediff with (c) Business Standard
The Mumbai branch head of a navratna public sector company wanted to replace a 10-year-old wooden showcase with something that occupied lesser space.

He wanted to just dismantle the showcase, but stopped after his veteran secretary suggested that he should at least inform the administration department in Delhi. The branch head succeeded in disposing of the showcase last week - but almost eight months after he had initiated the process.

Listen to what happened in between. The administration head asked him to send a formal letter detailing the reasons for his inclination to get rid of the showcase. That is required, he was told, as none of his predecessors had any problem with it.

Two months after the sending the letter, the branch head was told that inspections by the local administration and accounts staff showed that the book value of the showcase was Rs 1,900, and that he should ask for quotations from at least three interested buyers and send them for approval.

The process of getting quotations took a long time, as the branch head found it difficult to get anybody interested in the rickety showcase. After much coaxing and cajoling, he managed three quotations from local furniture shops. The highest quotation was for Rs 700.

The documents were despatched to Delhi immediately and the branch head hoped his ordeal was over. But, it took the headquarters another two months to send him a letter informing him that the quotations were considered too low by an eight-member purchase/disposal committee and he should advertise in a local newspaper asking for fresh quotations, according to office rules.

The advertisements elicited four responses and, this time, the highest bid was for Rs 850. The branch head was told that the purchase/disposal committee was preoccupied with other work and he would have to wait for his turn. The approval came after three months.

In the meantime, the owner of the furniture shop who was the highest bidder lost interest in buying the stuff. The branch head says he paid the money himself and somehow convinced the gentleman to give him a receipt. The showcase was broken down by the office boys as there were no takers.

The branch head says he is unable to figure out why it took the eight members of the committee so long to decide on something that yielded the company just Rs 850. "The company spent much more on courier charges alone," says the young man.

The eight members of the purchase/disposal committee are certainly not alone in perfecting the art of wasting time at work. Late Sumantra Ghoshal used to often say that a whopping 90 per cent of managers waste their time by procrastinating, becoming emotionally detached, and distracting themselves with supposedly busy work.

Here are some examples of how many things "busy" people are doing that will never be missed. Some managers will just stare at just about anything so that people around them think that they are pondering something intense. Some will go a step ahead and schedule meetings just to tell juniors to "work smarter, not harder" and to "think out of the box" etc. Some managers will send emails and call up sales people to find out about things that would have got done anyway without their intervention.

Yet others will insist on a written report for just about everything. But on being given a written report, these managers would say that they don't have the time to wade through all that garbage and ask juniors to tell them about the matter in their own words briefly. If the subordinates come in with a verbal suggestion next time, these managers would choke them off in mid sentence with, "I can't even begin to think about it until you put it in writing."

In their delightful book, The Peter Principle, Laurence J Peter and Raymond Hull (people who have devoted many years to the study of incompetence) have talked about managers having Rigor Cartis, an abnormal interest in the construction of organisation and flow charts, and a stubborn insistence upon routing every scrap of business in strict accordance with the lines and arrows of the chart, no matter what delays or losses may result.

The Rigor Cartis patient will often display his charts prominently on the office walls, and may sometimes be seen, his work lying neglected, standing in worshipful contemplation of his icons.

These type of managers are always frantically busy, drawing up reports and flow charts and making appointments to confer with one another. Another vice-president of a company has been labouring for three years to write the company's history, which the top management hopes will remain incomplete when he retires.

The most popular form of wasting time at work is, of course, social networking. Walk into any large office, and you will most likely hear the telltale computer bleeps of chat programmes and online games, accompanied by furious mouse-clicking. Employees may seem busy, but many are wasting time on the Internet, or are "cyberslacking".

A study by Assocham last month has warned that employees waste a minimum one hour of office time every day accessing social networking sites for reasons other than work. Assocham's Social Development Foundation survey says companies effectively lose 12.5 per cent of total productivity each day.

Nearly 82 per cent of workers have a Facebook account and the average worker uses it for 30-40 minutes a day which adds up to a lost week each year. Also, 77 per cent of workers who have an Orkut account use it during work hours. And 83 per cent see nothing wrong in surfing during the office hours. Four in every 10 workers built their entire Orkut, Facebook profiles during work. The survey says most organisations do not monitor and manage these sites as closely as email.

However, this problem is not restricted to India alone. Managers of the world seem to be united in their passion for wasting time in office.

Time-wasting at work was spoofed in the 1999 cult film Office Space, while The Office, a British TV comedy that now has a US version, has shown characters playing a computer war game as part of what they described as a team-building exercise.

Consider this: Americans do work hard at surfing the Internet and catching up on gossip, according to studies done by Salary.com and America Online. The average worker admits to frittering away 2.09 hours per 8-hour workday, not including lunch and scheduled break-time. As a matter of practice, companies assume a certain amount of wasted time when determining employee pay.

The average yearly American salary is $39,795 per year, or $19.13 per hour. If the average worker wastes 1.15 hours more than employers suspect, per 8-hour work day, that adds up to $5,720 per year, per worker in wasted salary dollars. So with the American workforce 132 million (non-farm) employees-strong, the total in lost salary dollars adds up to $759 billion per year, the studies have shown.

No such detailed study has been done in India. But the money companies lose due to time wasting by employees would surely not be insignificant.

Author: Shyamal Majumdar

PRESENTEEISM

The hidden Costs of Business

Authors

Dhruv Sonthalia

Saket Sanganeria

Presenteeism is opposite of absenteeism, both are a headache for the industries. Absenteeism it refers to the absence from duty or obligation. The obvious reason for absenteeism seems illness or sickness but an employee may be absent due to many reasons. Some other reasons for regular absence are emotional problems, family problems, etc. Absenteeism cost mainly consists of payment paid in the form of wages to absent employees, additional overtime and temporary staff covers. It is estimated that the cost of absenteeism was around 12 billion pounds for United Kingdom for the year 2002. It is considered to be a major concern not only because of the actual absence of the employees, but also because the absence is without sufficient notice or justified using fake reasons.

However recently there has been a marked shift in discussion from absenteeism to presenteeism. Presenteeism is the complement of absenteeism. It refers to the problem off employees showing up for work but not being able to be fully productive because of ill-health or other problems. It is a concept close to employee engagement. Some researchers believe that the cost of presenteeism could be around 7-9 times more than that of absenteeism. Many Indian companies have also started to take note of this and are developing policies to solve it. Some believe that increasing number of days of sick leaves, better health insurance coverage and better work environment can help reduce this cost. But these are just some solutions which may or may not have the desirable effect on the cost of presenteeism.

A better understanding of the problem helps

Presenteeism exists in various forms. These forms have their specific modalities and reasons. Each of these problems give rise to a clear distinct situation. To help us appreciate the real face of the problem we need to look at it various forms in details

Working with illness

Working with illness or any other factor which hinder the performance of an employee is presenteeism. The fear of loss of income or employment on the part of the employee is a major cause of presenteeism. Many workers and employees come to work when they are ill – they work with headache, mental pressure, anxiety, and other undesirable conditions that impair their performance. The below par performance adds to cost for the employer and adds to the peril of employee. The effect may not be very serious for a person working manually on repetitive jobs. However, with the growth in contribution by the knowledge workforce the impact is much higher. Mental performance is the key to productivity and output here. Given the nature and requirement of the work, if the employee’s mind is not on the job or if he is unable to contribute his hundred percent he (she) becomes a liability to his (her) organization.

Erratic working hours and instability in work life balance

Erratic working hours give rise to presenteeism. Presently there has been a growing trend among white collar employees to devote extra hours to their work. Employees work in a culture where coming in early, working till late and battling illness is expected and required. This is done to enhance career prospects and sometimes demanded by the work culture in the organization. In many cases it has been found that the employer makes it clear to employees that working till late and reporting early is expected of them, as normal job requirement. Presenteeism disrupts the work life-balance and is like taxing the employee off his normal life. Both employer and employee are confusing between hard-work and over-work.

The rise of corporate work culture and specialisation in each field in India the problem of presenteeism is expected to engulf a large portion of the Indian economy. The transition phase is bound to demand its casualty. The employees moving towards the more organised fields are prone to presenteeism as they are ambitious and not shy to over-work. On the other hand, the managers and employers do not realise that this over work would come at a cost much higher that the revenue being generated from it. In an economy where unemployment is prevalent the employees don’t have much choice but to play by the rules formulated by the employers.

Employee disengagement and lack of motivation

Presenteeism can be viewed as a problem of employee disengagement. The productivity of the employee is low because they are not involved in the work they are doing and thinking about something else like a cricket match, a party or some personal problem. Some researchers also believe that other factors such as loss of productivity due to excess travelling (in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore) also contributes to presenteeism. However this is a controversial issue in the HR world.

Absenteeism vs. Presenteeism

Presenteeism seems to be an absolute opposite of Absenteeism. Absenteeism leads to a direct and apparent increase in cost for the business but presenteeism is no lesser evil. It may be argued upon that due to absenteeism 100% of the worker’s productivity is lost each day as the worker is not on the job and thus the cost of absenteeism is more that presenteeism, but this is not true at all time. The cost here is hidden in the sense that sometimes the cost of low quality work is higher than no work. Working under illness, anxiety or without interest prolongs recovery. Proper rest and care are very important for fast and complete recovery and rejuvenation. Due to presenteeism, employees are devoid off the time and required rest. The ultimate suffering of the employees trickles down as huge cost to the enterprise.

Many companies have been formulating policies to tackle presenteeism. Some Indian companies have used traditional approaches like improving work life balance. However their initiatives are restricted to a few policies or programs which do not last more than six months. Recently things have started changing. Quite a few organizations are now enforcing policies which lay great emphasis on the health of its employees. Employees are also discouraged to come for work when they are sick. Other practices such as encouraging sick employees to work from home are also adopted.

Moving towards a solution

The root cause

The impact of presenteeism has plagued the work culture in public sector and government run organisations. Employees attend work for the sake of attendance and are least interested in the job at hand. The effect is felt on the overall performance of the enterprise. It was believed that the root cause was improper organizational structure and work culture being promoted in these organisations but now the experts accept that as the main focus is to control absenteeism, the problem of presenteeism has aggravated.

Importance of working environment

The trick in tackling employee presenteeism is to ensure a good working environment with employee friendly strategies in place, without encouraging useless absence from work and faking illness. Many employees at Google believe that it is the flexibility and financial security offered by the company keep the employees going as they can do their best without worrying about too many things. Thus promoting a work environment which encourages creativity and flexibility helps Google tackle the problem of presenteeism. This is an example which could be followed by other company.

Importance of work culture

Managing moral is also extremely critical for an organization. A firm which has a culture of promoting intense competition and politics would have a much greater cost of presenteeism than an organization which promotes working in teams. Thus the cost of presenteeism is to some extent dependent on the culture. Managers have to improve the work environment in order to solve the problem of decrease in productivity.

Path for managers

Indian economy needs to prevent presenteeism from stepping into the normal work culture of the economy. It is very easy to stop a disease from spreading than to eradicate it later. Once the total work culture starts indentifying it as a general necessity to step up in life and to meet the requirements of their work, it would be very difficult to break the shackles.

Change in approach

Presenteeism is largely based on the choice of the employer and employee regarding their work schedule. The first measure to solve the problem is the spread of awareness among the employer and employees the fact that presenteeism is indeed a cost that they cannot afford to bear. Once the enterprises start recognising the cost, steps would be taken to reduce it.

External pressure

A complete change in the work culture is not possible just through a spread of information. Government needs to give relaxation to employees in the form of extended leave during illness and regulation of erratic working hours. The same cannot be used for white collar employees. These employees need to understand that although there job structure is such that they do not have much power in their hands but they should demand professionalism from their employers regarding the fixation of office timings and the overall job structure.

Internal process backbone

The biggest implication of presenteeism for an HR manager is to ensure that data on absenteeism is collected and analysed in the correct way. The results should be strategically used. Managers should discourage ill employees from coming to work. A few organizations use flexi hours or give the option of working from home. These strategies have done wonders and reduced the cost of presenteeism.

The performance appraisals of managers should not only be based on the specific business performance but criterions such as absenteeism rate should be included to track absenteeism as well as presenteeism. This would seem strange as it would ideally increase presenteeism. However the managers would be required to keep a track of the health of the employees and this would be one of the criterions on which their performance will be evaluated.

Change in company policy to implement the change

Sick leaves have a huge impact on absenteeism as well as presenteeism. The high cost of presenteeism is primarily due to less number of days for which an employee can avail sick leave forcing him to come to work even if he is unwell. Thus companies can increase the number of days of sick leave. However this could lead to an increase in absenteeism. A solution to this problem could be having such a culture in place where an employees’ absence is not penalised. At the same time the office should be made an interesting place to work which would make him or her come to the office. A number of companies have increased their number of days for sick leave. Even governments are responding to presenteeism. Recently the state of San Francisco passed a regulation requiring organizations to give sick leaves and paid leaves.