It’s been reported on the web, but in case you missed it, Indiana has come in second in a recent national survey. But that’s not necessarily a good thing.

The survey, done by America Online and Salary.com,* reported that the average American worker admits to wasting 2.09 hours a day, not including lunch and breaks. Indiana employees, along with those in Wisconsin and Kentucky, waste 2.8 hours a day according to the survey, second only to Missouri, where the figure is 3.2 hours.

Among the reasons survey respondents gave as to why they are not working, the biggest one is not having work to do (33.2%). Other excuses included being underpaid for the amount of work they do (23.4%); being distracted by co-workers (14.7%); not having enough time after work (12.0%) and all other excuses (16.7%).

And what are employees doing instead of working? If you guessed surfing the Internet, you were right. Of the more than 10,000 people surveyed, 44.7% said web surfing was their biggest distraction at work. Others included socializing with co-workers (23.4%); conducting personal business (6.8%); spacing out (3.9%); running errands off premises (3.1%); applying for other jobs (1.3%); planning personal events (1.0%); and arriving late and leaving early (1.0%).

The time wasted by workers is not only more than employers assume they will waste, but it is more than most suspected they waste. Human resource managers surveyed said that while companies figure into their compensation planning that people will waste 0.94 hours a day, employers suspect they actually average 1.6 hours wasted, still short of the 2.09 hours that employees admit to wasting.

The survey, conducted in May and June of this year, took into account the 0.94 hours per day each employee is expected to waste, and calculated the value of the time wasted to be $759 billion annually on a national basis.

So is there an up-side to the survey results? Salary.com’s senior vice president Bill Coleman is quoted as saying that some employers view extra time wasted as “creative waste,” which might have “a positive impact on the company’s culture, work environment, and even business results.”

You might want to stop working for a minute and give that some thought.

"Wasted time at work costing companies billions," Don Malachowski, Salary.com.

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