Larvatus Prodeo

I noticed yesterday that Griffith Uni has provided a plasma screen in the library window for students and staff to watch the Olympics, but when I questioned both my Griffith students and later on my ACU students, most said they were too busy with things like paid work, study and parental responsibilities to be following the Olympics closely. That’s obviously an unscientific sample, but it does (I think) go to show that not everyone immerses themselves in the Olympics coverage. I don’t necessarily object to a bit of it - I had some fun watching some of the Sydney Olympics on a trip to Melbourne (as you do!), but I’m too busy to pay any attention this time around - because of paid work and study (looming deadline for second draft of PhD thesis). I did notice that Stephanie Rice had won another gold medal, but I think only because she’d been the subject of discussion here around privacy issues.

But I imagine that consulting ratings figures would demonstrate that a lot of people do watch a lot of the Olympics, and that criticism of Yahoo!7’s online coverage probably implies that some people want to watch some from the office. In that vein, it was interesting to see an article in the Fin last week about various large organisations more or less agreeing with Bob Hawke and his comments on the Americas Cup - that “anyone who sacks an employee for checking results on the intertubes or for taking a sickie after staying up late during the Olympics is a mug”. Managers of various companies were quoted saying they didn’t have a problem with employees looking at online coverage provided they managed their own workload. That raises the broader question of policing internet access at work. My view on that is that if someone spends all day looking at websites, there’s probably either a problem with workflow or they’re not a terribly motivated employee after all. My feeling is that most employees exercise a fair degree of self-discipline in achieving work goals, and that’s backed up by a lot of studies of working from home. One anecdote I have is of the Queensland Public Service in 2000, when I was doing a consultancy in house for a few weeks. One day I was in the office was the American presidential election - and I suppose because a lot of public servants are political junkies, a whole open office was full of people hitting refresh on CNN. Most of these people were doing project or research work, and not required to do customer service as such, and I didn’t hear that any deadlines had been missed - folks were just making up the time later, or building that desire to obsess over election results into their work planning.

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