Our inner slacker is flourishing

By John Eckberg
Enquirer staff writer

Sunday, May 29, 2005

For all the hub-bub about the stress of over-worked Americans, new research from Microsoft suggests that everybody has an inner Homer Simpson.

And man, oh man, are we ever getting in touch with him.

The inner slacker is flourishing in the American workplace, maybe even taking over, according to a Microsoft Office survey from earlier this spring.

Consider these findings from the survey, accurate to 5 percentage points, of 3,000 people who work in the United States:

In the U.S., workers screw around for 16 hours every five-day work week - a level of slackerism that is stupefying.

The most common productivity pitfalls are unclear objectives, lack of team communication and ineffective meetings.

Seven of 10 Americans believe most meetings are unproductive, if not excruciating, and yet workers average 5.5 hours a week in meetings.

Blame the bosses

Judith Glaser, an executive coach and author of "Creating WE: Change I-Thinking to We-Thinking & Build a Healthy Thriving Organization" (Platinum Press; 2005), calls the trend "attention-deficit trauma."

"Leaders are not sure of how to adjust to the shifts of new competition, the fear of losing market share," Glaser said. "So there is a bigger need for more frequent meetings to 'figure it out.' Yet more meetings does not translate to better meetings."

"Employees go to get clear on what they need to be doing, yet they walk away frustrated. They feel they would have been better off on their own."

The temptation, of course, is to blame the disengaged worker. But experts say another trend is at play.

If the old rule holds up - that 20 percent of the workers do 80 percent of the labor - then a flip side may also be true: Twenty percent of the authority figures cause 80 percent of the personnel problems.

Follow the leaders

No personnel problem is quite as challenging as when formerly productive employees work to avoid work, says Bob Parsanko, president of Executive Insights, a Cincinnati-based executive coaching and consulting firm founded in 1989.

When Parsanko trouble-shoots companies, he first turns to the Gallup Organization to survey employees.

He usually finds three levels of worker: the engaged and productive, the unengaged but productive and the actively disengaged and faking it.

"It's really easy to blame workers, but that is wrong," Parsanko said. "We are losing the so-called engaged people. They are dropping into the category of unengaged.

"Now, we can either blame them or engage them," Parsanko said. "That's what leadership is all about."

Parsanko advises companies to identify its core purpose - what the company does better than anything else - and then emphasize it at meetings, in memos and at water-cooler encounters.

Another important step is to let the passion of engaged workers infect an organization.

"Have them champion new initiatives and be team leaders," he said. "Put them in positions of high influence."

And as for the others?

"Work with them," Parsanko said, "or remove the actively disengaged."