If I were to categorize office workers in order of best to worst (from an efficiency standpoint) it would go something like this -
1. People who are working, and who are relatively non-invasive when it comes to bothering other people trying to do their work.
2. People who are not working and who spend large parts of the day surfing the web, texting, or wandering around but not interfering with other people's ability to work.
3. People who spend an inordinate amount of time talking loudly about non-work related things and interfere with the people within hearing distance ability to work. Additional points deducted for highly personal/icky, boring, or whiny conversations/monologues.
4. People who send work-related emails to groups of people with information they don't need or worse - unclear requests for action, that interfere with many peoples ability to do their work. I made the distinction that these are "work-related" emails since employees have an obligation to examine/read/decipher work-related emails. A non-work related email - joke/personal message etc. is not nearly so time consuming.
5. People who schedule meetings with no clear agenda or no purpose or no redeeming value (from a profit standpoint, or mission standpoint for non-profit organizations) and the people who attend these types of meetings. No extra credit for using buzzwords, Powerpoints or a group-think agreement that the meeting is of value.
My sympathy to those who have no other choice, but I don't have much sympathy for people who make a career out of doing things that can't be proven by independent analysis to provide a tangible (or even intangible) benefit for paying customers in for-profit enterprises, or clients of non-profit organizations.
Daily time wasting on a large scale is only possible in an organization big enough, and with sufficient funds, that some people can be non-accountable when it comes to contributing to making the product or providing the services that customers, or donors in the case of non-profits, pay for.
