Expert answer:Homework Help in Sociology – 100 words minimum
Answer & Explanation:Carefully review transcript of the interview from NPR Radio. 3 shrinking.pdfHow does
the NPR story impact your perceptions on this topic? Should
employees really be doing this?
Then we can transition to some of the other topics identified in our
Discussion Board exercise. If we are an employer or are in management,
we hear stories about people shirking work, does that color our
impression of these other tools that some companies use,
like drug testing, email privacy and the like??
3_shrinking.pdf
Unformatted Attachment Preview
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NEAL CONAN, host:
This is TALK OF THE NATION.
I’m Neal Conan in Washington.
And here are some of the NPR News headlines today. In Baghdad, the US Civil
Administration again postponed plans to establish an interim Iraqi authority.
It will now be mid-July at the earliest before a temporary Iraqi government is
put in place.
Here in the United States, a Florida court has thrown out a $145 billion
finding in a class-action lawsuit against the nation’s five biggest cigarette
makers. NPR’s Christopher Joyce and Debbie Elliott will have more on those
stories later today on “All Things Considered” from NPR News.
Tomorrow on TALK OF THE NATION, a look at what’s next for the Environmental
Protection Agency in the wake of Christie Todd Whitman’s resignation today.
What’s the Bush administration’s environmental record so far and how might
environmental goals shift after the Whitman resignation? That’s tomorrow on
TALK OF THE NATION.
Now if you walk around any office these days, you don’t need to look into
people’s cubicles to know that they’re hard at work.
(Soundbite of person typing)
CONAN: Or maybe not. That sound clip is one of the ways you can pretend to be
busy at work while you’re really shopping online or downloading music or maybe
not even at your cubicle at all. According to a recent article in The Wall
Street Journal, technology is making it easier than ever for those who want to
fake it at work. The faux typing clip that we just heard can be found
alongside other slacking tricks at donsbosspage.com, a Web site dedicated to
aiding the office slacker. Don Pavlish designed the site. He’s a free-lance
media developer. He joins us by phone now from his home in Cleveland, Ohio.
And, Don, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
Mr. DON PAVLISH (Free-lance Media Developer): Thanks, Neal.
me on.
Thanks for having
CONAN: In the old days, if you wanted to get out of work, you had to call in
sick. Today I guess it’s easier than ever to be at work while not actually
working, right?
Mr. PAVLISH: That’s true. You don’t actually have to play hooky.
at your desk and zone out as long as you need to.
You can sit
CONAN: What are some of the techniques?
Mr. PAVLISH: Well, there’s a number of different techniques. Primarily for
people who are surfing the Web at work, that’s probably the most common way of
wasting time. You can–of course, donsbosspage has a number of different ways
you can get away with things. There’s a fake spreadsheet that pops up when you
go to it, and it looks like you’re hard at work crunching numbers if the boss
comes by. And there’s also some more tips that I have at donsbosspage. For
example, alt tab; if you’re on a Windows machine, keep your fingers near the
alt tab keys, and then if your boss comes by, that allows you to quickly switch
applications. You have to make sure you have some sort of plausible real work
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application up, you know, have a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet going so
you can quickly switch to that if you’re surfing the Web and are about to get
caught.
CONAN: It’s not always so easy if you’re playing Battleship, though.
Mr. PAVLISH: Well, you get practice with it. You should do some drills every
morning. You know, practice how quickly you can get your fingers back to the
alt tab keys.
CONAN: Now that’s an awful lot of work sometimes to look busy when you could
actually be busy.
Mr. PAVLISH: Well, it depends on your attitude towards things. I think, you
know, sometimes people may take it over the top and maybe they spend too many
hours slacking off at work. But, you know, I think everybody needs a break
sometime during the workday, so I don’t think these tips or tricks are
inherently bad.
CONAN: Now you also have tips for–I guess there are programs where you can
arrange to have e-mails sent at times to make it look like you’re really busy,
too.
Mr. PAVLISH: Yeah. In fact, the most common e-mail program is Microsoft
Outlook, and there’s an option–a checklist, if you will–when you’re sending a
message, and you can simply select an option to have your message sent out at a
later time. So, you know, perhaps you want it sent out five or 6:00. You want
to look like you’re staying a little bit late or maybe you want to look like a
hero, you’re staying till 2 in the morning, just, you know, set up Outlook to
do that and leave your computer running, and you’ll look good the next morning.
CONAN: Now, you know, I guess some of this–you know, a certain degree of it,
it’s funny, for one thing, and if you’re thinking about
AcmeWidgets-dot(ph)–you know, something like that, you know, hypothetically,
you know, we all know the Dilbert office, I suppose. But, you know, if you’re
being paid to work, isn’t it wrong to, you know, be stealing from your
employer?
Mr. PAVLISH: Well, yeah. I mean, I think there are certain jobs where, you
know, I wouldn’t recommend people do that. If you’re an air traffic
controller, for example, it’s probably a bad idea to be surfing the Web, but I
think workplaces these days, typical workplaces, are demanding more and more of
our time. They’re demanding that we work late. They’re demanding that we come
in on weekends. And, you know, with all this increase in our time spent at
work, there’s less and less time for personal things. So, you know, in the
past, maybe people would call in sick in order to get banking done in the
morning or in order to get holiday shopping done. You know, it’s very common,
`You know, I’ve got a horrible cold today. I’ve got the flu. I can’t come
in,’ and, of course, you’re really shopping for gifts. Well, now you can do
that online and it’s much more efficient. So I think, you know, a
forward-thinking employer might actually allow some sort of slack in this
direction.
CONAN: Do you have any employees and, if so, do you let them read your Web
site?
Mr. PAVLISH: I don’t.
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I free-lance, and I sometimes outsource work to other
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free-lancers, but that’s kind of the model that I like, where you’re being paid
to get the job done, and I think employers who have a problem with
donsbosspage–and I get some nasty e-mails–that’s my message back to them; is
as long as the work is getting done by your employees, you’re fine. If someone
needs to spend 20 minutes a day slacking off but they’re still doing the work
you need to get done, what’s the harm?
CONAN: Don Pavlish, thanks very much.
Mr. PAVLISH: Thank you.
CONAN: Don Pavlish is a free-lance media developer in Cleveland, Ohio. And, of
course, a lot of us would say such elaborate office slacking does present a
problem. Here to talk about that is Stuart Gilman, president of the Ethics
Resource Center here in Washington, and he’s with us here in Studio 3A.
Thanks for coming in.
Mr. STUART GILMAN (Ethics Resource Center): Pleasure being here with you.
CONAN: It seems like it’s getting easier, though a little more technically
complicated, to slack off at work. Is this a problem that’s on the rise?
Mr. GILMAN: I think that it is, and I think that Don actually adequately
identified some of the pressures on employees: work more, work longer. But I
think one of the pieces that we’re not paying attention to is, in fact, the
management skills that are necessary in the new office environment to
effectively manage that and make sure that the office is a place of integrity
and decency where people enjoy working and feel comfortable not–I hate to say
that the slacking off doesn’t bother me, it’s the deceit and lying that is
implied in all of this. I think that Don was right in identifying the
pressures, but it worries me to look at the solutions.
CONAN: When I first read that story in The Wall Street Journal, I couldn’t help
but be reminded of the great Herman Melville short story “Bartleby, the
Scrivener,” about sort of the soullessness of what was then the new and modern
office, pressure to conform and stringent work environments. `I prefer not
to.’ Everybody remembers that. Are people almost required to slack as a result
of their employers, you know, unrealis–you know, punch in, punch out?
Mr. GILMAN: Well, actually what you find is that organizations are really
dividing now between those who still use a punch clock and those who basically
are talking about performance in terms of the work product, and what you find
is that an organization that does the latter winds up being much more effective
in terms of discouraging the kinds of activities we’ve been talking about, but
we haven’t redesigned management systems or organizations, I think, effectively
to take account for it.
CONAN: Now how do you know where to draw the line? I mean, let’s say you’ve
got to get your banking done or, you know, find a present for your
mother-in-law’s birthday or something like that. Is taking a little time, you
know, when you’re supposed to be working for your employer–is that cheating?
Mr. GILMAN: I don’t think so. I think that one has to be realistic about this.
Even the federal government of the United States, which used to have huge
stringent rules, has modified that, because they realized that, you know,
having a person in a work environment now with commuting distances and other
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sorts of things, to call a baby-sitter, make sure your child’s OK, which used
to be, by the way, a violation of General Service Administration rules, those
have been bent because we look at the realities of the workplace. It seems to
me that the key difference here, at least from my point of view, is paying
attention to the difference between allowing flexibility in the workplace and
an organization or a culture that actively encourages people to lie, because
what worries me is the next step. If you can encourage people to deceive what
they’re doing in terms of the workplace, what’s to prevent them from taking
their BlackBerry with them, playing 18 holes of golf and pretending like
they’ve worked the day, and multiply that by 10,000 employees, and what do you
wind up having?
CONAN: At the same time, though, as you suggest, managers and companies ought
to be maybe a little bit more flexible, and remember that they’re often sending
those employees home with work.
Mr. GILMAN: Right, exactly. And
were supposed to get simpler and
are talking about 24/7, and that
as much for managers, executives
the work environment, ironically where things
better with computers and cell phones now, we
presents, I think, a problem for employees but
and the organizations they all work for.
CONAN: Now have you told the Ethics Resource Center where you are right now?
Mr. GILMAN: Absolutely.
And, in fact, I hope they’re listening.
CONAN: Stuart Gilman, thanks very much for being with us today.
Mr. GILMAN: It’s an absolute pleasure.
CONAN: Stuart Gilman is the president–I guess you don’t really have to report
to anybody too brutal about that–of the Ethics Resource Center here in
Washington, DC. And he was with us in Studio 3A.
And you’re listening to TALK OF THE NATION, which is coming to you from NPR
News.
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