According to a new study, they are Facebook, Snapchat and Candy Crush, as idle workers struggle to get through their day, according to a new study.
Idle time in fact occurs frequently across all occupational categories in the US, and is costing employers roughly $100 billion each year, according to a draft paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.
While much has been written in the media and explored in academic research about the dilemma facing overstressed workers with too much to do and too little time in which to do it, the reverse is also true.
Idle time is not due to laziness on the part of workers, but rather a variety of causes, including the tendency of companies to carry more employees than they need as an insurance against busy times. After all, nobody likes waiting on hold for a customer service representative.
“The financial implications of this idle time are substantial,” says Brodsky, who calls the $100 billion estimate a “conservative” one, based on the assumption that workers earned the median annual US pay rate of $17.09 per hour rather than the higher $22.71 based on the mean wage cited by the 2014 Census Bureau survey.