To Work Or Not To Work

BioDylan

For me if i'm at work and I don't have something to do, I can't stand it!! I need to be kept busy otherwise the day just draaags!!

But Some of my friends think it's great, not having any work to do and just burn the day away doing nothing.

What does everyone else think?

phil.winston

You need to start your own business!

CatFromHue

I don't mind a bit of free time at work but certainly having only say half a days work to do per day would annoy me.

I do prefer to be kept going.

In my last job it could vary between having to stay late or having nothing to do all week. I preferred being busy.

Edit: Ha and yeah I have thought about setting up my business....at least that's the dream anyway!

doolox

Human factors people have a theory about speed and rate of work which deals with learning a job and keeping errors to a minimum.

People are happiest doing a job where they have maximum control of the rate of work and the speed at which it is done and like to make no mistakes. Flawless execution of any task gives maximum job satisfaction and self worth, key goals in any job in the mind of any reasonable manager.

Unfortunately modern market forces, high unemployment and unreasonable expectations from owners and shareholders mean that most workers are not in control of the pace of their work and not able to perform with minimum or no errors for several reasons.

JIT or just in time inventory management means that every company and customer is ordering and timing their orders at the last minute. This leads to rush periods and then to quiet periods and an uneven pace of work for most workers and this leads to errors and recalls and conflict and tension in the workplace just to keep the accountants happy.

Most workplaces have cut their workforces to the bone, if anything happens to one worker all other colleagues have to take up the slack with a much more onerous set of demands than previously. Longer working hours, working weekends at short notice, cancelled holiday arrangements are now commonplace in the workplace.

You find periods of idleness waiting for hesitant and uncertain customers to place and confirm their orders, followed by periods of hectic activity while workers seek to fulfill these orders in unreasonably short time frames then followed by recalls and rectification of mistakes and this generally leads to increasing job disatisfaction, alienation, disharmony and conflict in the present day workplace.

There needs to be more input and control from the ordinary shopfloor worker in the workplace when determining workflow, rate of work and methods needed to reduce and eliminate mistakes. Most people want to do a good job.

Eoin

I had about 2 months with very little work to do at one stage while the company I worked for was in the process of going belly up. So I did lots of on-line tutorials, pet web development projects and just generally tried to skill up as much as I could. I'd go mad having a lot of spare time at work and just arsing about.

If it's an ongoing thing I'd be pretty worried about my job security.

Mrs OBumble

BioDylan wrote: »

I need to be kept busy otherwise the day just draaags!!

I keep myself busy.

One of the first workforce-life lessons I learned in Macccas many years ago: the person who volunteers often gets to do the stuff they like doing. The person who doesn't gets told to do the stuff that no one else has volunteered for. Which one do you wanna be?


That said, that's now. I've had some very boring jobs in the past, including one gig as a computer operator, where we were specifically forbidden from doing anything else, in case we missed a message on the screen. I coped 'cos it was a three month student job. To this day, I have no idea how the permies stayed sane.