Therefore, we worms at work – Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet

Therefore, we worms at work – Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet

Coherent research shows that we spend several hours of the working day to pretend to work.

From the sociological point of view, it is a great mystery.

– Enough is it is strange. For while the persistent reports of how the work intensified in most workplaces and how busy everyone is, says sociologist Roland Paulsen at Lund University, who has written an internationally acclaimed book on the subject – “Empty Labor: Idleness and Workplace Resistance”.

– The people I’ve interviewed devotes half working day for personal activities. Why is individual, but often they perceive that the work is pointless and boring. Or so they do not have enough tasks.

One problem is that managers often do not have an eye on how long a task will take. Maybe because he or she does not have the employees’ expertise.

– Managers have mostly administrative tasks, it is not certain that they, for example, have technical skills. Stir your job engineering manager can probably not judge how long it takes to perform the job.

Generally speaking, the smaller the specified work, the greater the scope for masking.

Monitoring has some importance.

– In industry, the work is often very supervised, so there are virtually no cheating. But I’m not so sure that more monitoring in the service solves the problem. Sure, there are some potential in the form of computer programs that can see exactly what employees are surfing around on for pages, but it’s the way you want to go? says Roland Paulsen.

He does not want to single out any particular industry where jobs Mask making is more common than in others, but the caricature that it mainly occurs in the public sector is not true.

– There I can see is that it is largely prevalent in the private sector.

For many Mask making is not an active action but a situation they have landed in against their will, as it can be difficult to get out of. No one wants to lose face and admit that they slackened for years. The risk is that you get fired.

– My analysis is that human tasks rationalized away with new technology. Man invents new tasks, but they can be unproductive and pointless. And it is of course problematic. Site work is not just a problem for the company, for the individual it can lead to dissatisfaction and deep depression.

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