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Employees in Asia are spending most time looking busy at work, says Slack report
- bparsons 3y agoThe thing a lot of organizations do not appreciate is the distinction between needed labour capacity versus needed daily labour output. Much like having a military or a fire department, your organization might need a lot of different people with a lot of different skills sitting around sometimes, just because you know that you will eventually need to use them. Knowledge work is not the same as running a manufacturing line. You have people with highly specialized knowledge and skills who are needed intermittently to keep everything running smoothly. You can try firing them, but in a lot of cases it will end up costing you money in the long run.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tb_technical 3y agoAnd it's no different in the west.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 3y agoI can't speak to other Asian countries, but in Singapore, it's frowned upon to leave the office before your boss leaves. You may be done with your work, but you don't leave until your boss has left. Also, there's "kiasu" mentality - hyper competitive behavior in everything from work, school, etc.
- radicaldreamer 3y agoCultural norms at work... Productivity low but putting in lots of hours.
- bragr 3y agoI was coming here to say something similar. I couldn't wrap my head around the performative work nap that is prevalent in East Asia at first. "Just go home earlier, get a good night's sleep, you won't need to nap at work", but then it's not really about sleep.
- fxtentacle 3y agoThat nap is not performative if you're snoring ;) In my opinion, that cultural napping aspect comes from the fact that it used to be too hot to concentrate around that time of the day. And the tradition has not adapted to aircons yet.
- bragr 3y agoWhat makes it performative is that this type of nap is taken in a conspicuous spot, so you will be seen to be napping at work as apposed to finding some out of the way place. This is what struck me initially, not that people were napping at work, but where they were doing it.
- unmole 3y agoI used to work for Huawei where taking a nap at your desk was the norm. If I'm taking ~15 minutes to recharge, why the hell would I waste any time searching for an out of the way place? And given that napping isn't frowned upon, there won't be any such places left because everyone would be doing it.
- unmole 3y agoThis is a bizzare take. The work nap prevalent in East Asia is taken post lunch. People feel dozey after a meal and a short rest is physically and mentally refreshing. Calling it performative is ridiculous.
- bragr 3y agoI never claimed that every nap taken in East Asia was performative, just that performative naps are prevalent there. For instance much ink has been spilled about "inemuri" in Japan and all the related social dynamics that drive it.
- avgcorrection 3y agoSounds like an insulin spike.
- bilekas 3y agoYeah, after seeing it first hand it triggered me so much that real talent was being hurt out purely on time submitted. I'm not sure why or how this ever became a workplace norm but I think by every measure it's to the detriment of any kind of innovation or even real productivity. In Ireland we were always trying to make our job easier with tools, scripts etc , this was almost taboo when brought on site for a client company in Japan.
- lnsru 3y agoI put sometimes a mechanical watch under my mouse too. I wish, I don’t need to do this at my next job. It’s bad, but the work of my last 2 years was dumped into thrash by clever managers.
- Bendy 3y agoPerformative work is still very important work. It’s that which keeps those who actually matter happy, entertained, and feeling safe, secure, and comfortable. Dance monkey dance.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- felipemnoa 3y agoUpvoted for the "Dance monkey dance" part.
- yen223 3y ago> Performative work includes “spending a lot of time in meetings where ‘teams present achievements’ rather than making decisions or addressing issues,” said Derek Laney, Slack’s “technology evangelist” for Asia-Pacific. This...does not feel performative to me?
- version_five 3y agoCertainly feels like a better use of time than a lot of meetings we have in western companies.
- lisper 3y agoThink of "performative" as "putting on a performance". Then it makes sense. (Interesting that English has no words to distinguish the meaning of "stage performance" from "performance metric".)
- zingababba 3y agoI don't think it is either. Performative work to me is the compulsive self-debasing activity I engage in when there is line of sight to a superior member of the business hierarchy.
- _8j50 3y agoYou can say it is neccesary, but presenting achievements is performance, therefore performative. Powerpoint theatrics are not a bad thing, unless you spend most if your time on it.
- version_five 3y agoNo. Performative work means pretending to work so others can see. If your work involves an actual performance (even for a liberal definition that includes presenting something) it's not performative work, except maybe under some silly English language loophole.
- zingababba 3y agoSomeone should poll WFH employees.
- gustavus 3y ago"The average employee has enough resources to do one of two things. 1. Be productive 2. Lie about how much is being accomplished. All smart employees will direct all effort away from number 1 and towards number 2." - Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle
- _8j50 3y agoBut the best and most successful do #1 well and use the results from it to exaggerate or emphasise their work. Spend the first 60-70% of your day on the latter and the rest+afterwork doing work. I hate homework with passion and never understood that paradoxical word where work should be at work and not at home. But it's starting to make sense that using some of your "free" time on work is not optional in many jobs that don't pay by the hour.
- lacrimacida 3y agoIs it just Asia though?
- GenerocUsername 3y agoAll metrics have a low and a high. Heck, if you break down 'Asia' by country, you will have a spread with a most/least country
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y agoBullshit Jobs was a good read on this subject, covering all things work theater-related and more.
- lisper 3y agoWhat is really going on under the hood is this: in large companies, the vast majority of employees are unnecessary. They are kept on because having a lot of people underneath you in the org chart is a status symbol. The more people report to you, directly or indirectly (the latter being preferable because managing direct reports requires actual work) the more power and influence you have, and so people with a lot of people reporting to them tend to command the resources to allow them to accumulate more people who report to them. Actual productivity is a secondary consideration. Being docile and obedient are the primary qualifying factors because most employees are essentially pets for the powerful few, not much different from maintaining a ranch or an aviary or a stable of race horses.
- barbariangrunge 3y agoBased on querying theory alone, there’s no way the nodes (people) in your organization are going to be fully utilized at all times without introducing other issues like making all the work factory like and repetitive and inflexible, or increasing latency (I forget the term, average time from a job entering the system to when it’s done) to ridiculous degrees
- rednerrus 3y agoThe other part of this is ensuring that people have work to work on. This requires planning that most companies don't have.
- techvada 3y ago[dead]
- BurningFrog 3y agoTo the extent this is true, the only counterforce I can think of is competition. Companies like this can be outcompeted by others that manage to be less bloated, at least for the moment.
- mach1ne 3y agoIn theory, but in practice things aren’t that neat; anti-competitive practices and credibility are some items which enable bloat
- kefabean 3y agoSurely it's beneficial to get employees out of all these unproductive meetings so they can engage more on the Slack platform.
- trextrex 3y agoIt's a bit clickbaity and disingenuous to say "employees in Asia", when South Korea comes in at the bottom, and the difference between Singapore and France/UK and the rest is just a few percentage points on a small sample (What's the error on the sampling?)
- hervem 3y agoI am sad not seeing other countries like Vietnam (with high presence of consulting companies), Thailand etc..
- vasco 3y agoThe report gives the same main topic for France and Germany for example, weird to make the article about Asia. See slide 29.
- AmVess 3y agoI did performative work for a while. The company I worked for was purchased by another company, a huge national company. The new managers had us submit paperwork detailing what our job duties were. I saw what was coming and simply didn't turn anything in. I slipped right through the cracks. I ended up assigning myself tasks and variously worked with IT and engineering. Each group thought I was attached to the other group. I kept myself busy most days, but some days I'd surf the internet and essentially do nothing but keep my seat warm. Most fun were two projects I started. I convinced management that our UPS was insufficient and that our SAN was trash. At my behest, what we ended up with was gigglingly massively overspecced and overpriced. The UPS got its own room and was stunning when it was finished. The president of the company even commented on how amazing it was. He looked at the new LCD screens on my desk and I told him they save piles of electricity over CRT's. Very shortly afterwards, every desk had brand new LCD's. Not bad for a guy with no boss and no job title.
- optimalsolver 3y agoWere you also asked to print out all the code you'd written recently?
- chimpanzee 3y ago> Not bad for a guy with no boss and no job title. This is the way. Anarchists wouldn’t be at all surprised.
- hbarka 3y agoAre you proud of this?
- ornornor 3y agoI would be.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SettembreNero 3y agoSeems like the world can go on without people working 40 hours a week?
- queuebert 3y agoOne of the scary realizations of adulthood was how little work most white collar workers do and consequently how much they get paid to contribute nothing. After earning a PhD and being a "professional" for a while, I developed a deep respect for blue collar workers.
- rednerrus 3y agoWhat we do is not use our intelligence and education to overthrow the system. Seems like a pretty good tradeoff.
- reducesuffering 3y agoYes, I wish there was a way to make it a social norm of everyone going through some month long ringer in a variety of positions like military, restaurant staff, and body-aching manual labor.
- dragonwriter 3y agoUniversal conscription? (Okay, that's usually more than a month and technically only military, but its pretty easy to ibcorporate food service and body-aching manual labor, along with other stuff, under the umbrella of military service.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]