Two nice work office related new items hit recently about what people who at work when their not working.
The first one tries to estimate the cost of playing fantasy football during the work day. Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc came up with the number of US$435 million per week in labor is spent on people playing fantasy football while they should be working, or only US$275 million per week if they only spent 10 minutes a day thinking about it. Of course, they also point out that similar productivity is lost due to a host of activities, like smoking breaks and off-topic web surfing.
Another article on Wikipedia made the internet circuit on tracing back changes to entires to various companies and organizations. A lot of fuss has been made about people at Walmart and Congressional offices altering pages about themselves. However, I thought the more interesting findings were the people editing off-topic pages from work.
Someone from the CIA corrected lyrics used in a musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There seems to be Democrat party employee who loves tennis, and keeps tabs on the soon to be retired Tim Henman page. But the best example has to be someone at the Minnesota Republican Party who replaced the entire Harry Potter entry with a one-liner spoiler of the last book.
I find the efforts to quantify money lost due to time spent playing games pretty suspect. First, it ignores the ways in which the natural human approach to work is to have spurts of productivity and rest….not to just punch a clock and turn on for 8 hours and then turn off. The games may well help productivity, because people might just get so bored that they do nothing if they didn’t have the micro-reward of a game to lure them through the micro-boredom of, say, reading lots of dull documents.
Second, once the modern employer stops demanding always-on practices of taking work home, etc., then they can expect the employee to be always-on at work.