10 things your employees won’t say

The 90’s classic “Office Space” follows a group of disgruntled employees as they deal with the day-to-day bureaucracy and management issues of a software development company. A key aspect of the film was the covert deviance some of the employees engaged in, from destroying office equipment (sabotage) to outright stealing. These covert thoughts (and subsequently, negative actions) can be quite costly to organizations—with some estimates being as high as several billion annually¹.

SmartMoney recently highlighted 10 things your employees won’t say, including some of these counter productive thoughts and behaviors.

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“My bad mood is costing you money”

People who come into work in a bad mood suffer a 10% decline in their productivity, according to research by Nancy Rothbard, an associate professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Say a worker is running five minutes late, something went wrong while he was getting the kids ready for school or traffic was bad. When he walks in the door, the boss yells at him for being late. That can set the tone for the whole day, says Rothbard. That worker may never quite recover and fail to do his best work.

“I’m very busy…updating my Facebook profile”

…the majority of workers admit to goofing off. For most, it’s a fairly minor problem — 39% of workers said they spent an hour or less on personal browsing each week, and 29% said they spent up to two hours a week. But some are more seriously distracted: 21% of workers said they wasted up to 5 hours a week. The most likely time-wasters, according to Salary.com’s survey, are highly educated men between the ages of 26 and 35. And yes, among lollygaggers, Facebook was the most popular online destination.

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Read more about things your employees may not say at SmartMoney.

¹DeLonzor, D. (2006). Cope creatively with the punctually challenged. HR Update.