Slackers at the Office

American workers are slackers. We goof off to the tune of
“$759 billion a year in salaries for which [employers] receive no apparent benefit.”

Why do employers put up with it? Lawrence Henry thinks he knows.

I spent a year in an advertising agency where we worked very hard, especially hard on those four occasions a year when the company’s nationwide sales force got together and we had to create displays, training programs, and media material for the meetings. The creative director, a good guy, asked me what I thought would be the best reward for people who had put in long extra hours.

“Time off,” I said.

It was the one thing he couldn’t do. The company didn’t have the time to give. They could only take. And companies take a lot of people’s time.

Why is this? Why do companies have to have their people at the office all the time?

They do it because the alternative is too hard. Managers have only
so much management in them, and keeping track of a herd of people coming in and out at all times would
be too hard on them. So they keep people sitting around who don’t do too much work.