Thursday, July 26, 2007

Do You Really Work 8 Hours a Day?

Recently there was an Internet outage in my building. This outage went on for a week. Made everyone restless in the office. Which made me think - how many of us really work the required 8-hours a day? Do you?

I know I don't. I work as a finite element analyst, which requires me to concentrate on building my finite element model as correctly as possible. This requires some concentration as I do not want to have to re-do the whole modeling all because of a silly error. But I surf the Net every half an hour for about a couple of minutes, 5 minutes of less. I also have my IM on, usually have someone to chat to daily.

Do other companies allow these type of freedom to their staff? Since I am in Malaysia, I would like a comparison between Malaysian employers, ASEAN employers and global employers.

Last week, when there was no Internet access, I actually did more work daily. It was amusing looking at colleagues who were utterly bored and some who couldn't work at all without some sort of avenue for relaxation and since we all sit in an office, the Internet is our only outlet.

I forgot to mention that 50 people share a 1MB ADSL line, so our Internet isn't blazing fast either. It crawls but its better than nothing.

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