The Top 10 Ways Your Employees Waste Time at Work

Yes–people do waste time at work. Here are some of the particularly creative and entertaining ways they’re doing it.


About a year ago, the Harris Poll and CareerBuilder conducted a survey of thousands of managers and workers, hoping to find out the biggest time-wasters at work, and, in cases where people are choosing to slack off, exactly what they’re doing to waste it. The results of the survey are both instructive and entertaining.


It’s perhaps no surprise that the survey revealed that, yes, people report a lot of wasted time at work. And the things they do or hold responsible are probably no big surprise either. Here are the top 10, along with the percentage of people who cited them as a cause of wasted time. As you can see from the numbers, many people listed more than one of these.



Cell phone/texting (50 percent)

Gossip (42 percent)

The internet (39 percent)

Social media (38 percent)

Snack or smoke breaks (27 percent)

Noisy co-workers (24 percent)

Meetings (23 percent)

Email (23 percent)

Co-workers dropping by (23 percent)

Co-workers putting calls on speaker phone (10 percent)


Even more interesting are some of the particularly novel ways that people have found to do anything they could at work besides work. Here are some of the best examples:



Blowing bubbles in sub-zero weather to see if the bubbles would freeze and break

Married employee looking at a dating website

Caring for pet bird that employee smuggled into work

Shaving legs in the women’s restroom

Lying under boxes to scare people

Having a wrestling match

Sleeping, but claimed he was praying

Taking selfies in the bathroom

Changing clothes in a cubicle

Printing off a book from the internet

Warming her bare feet under the bathroom hand dryer


The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.