Work From Home Couple

There’s a bit of a scandal breaking here in Chicago. Nothing new, really, but it seems that city garbage men, who are paid on average $30.70 an hour, spent an average of two hours during every eight-hour shift not working.

The garbage men have been spending those hours loafing, of course, but also taking long lunches and urinating in the street. Ah, the joys of working for the city.

But what interested me most about the story, which I read in the Chicago Tribune, was a sidebar that accompanied it. Turns out, Chicago garbage men are far from the only folks who don’t exactly put in a full-day’s worth of work. According to a 2007 survey by Salary.com, U.S. workers waste an average of one hour and 42 minutes during every eight-hour shift.

This is interesting to me because so many employers worry that this is exactly what workers would do if they weren’t chained to the office. They worry that workers would loaf all day watching TV and eating bon-bons (I suppose) if they happened to work from home. It’s funny that workers are doing the equivalent of that while they’re at the office. I suppose they spend their frittering-away time surfing the Internet, checking sports scores, embezzling funds, the usual.

I’d wager that workers are actually more productive when they’re working from home. I may not work straight eight-hour shifts, but I often return to my computer to write at odd hours, such as now, 6 a.m. or so in the morning while my 1-year-old son, confined to his exer-saucer whines in my ear. And when I do work, I work hard. I don’t stop to chat with my co-workers about the game last night.

So hear this bosses around the world: Your employees aren’t going to waste any more time by working from home. I mean, they’re already wasting time anyway. What have you got to lose?

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