How some employees get away with doing little at work

If you are a job holder, you might know this guy. Let's say his name is Rehman. Rehman spends most of his office hours in the cafeteria, smoking zone or by the water cooler chatting with others.

You would see him, smiling and exchanging a few words with the manager, when you are hunched over your desk trying to disentangle a difficult task of a group project (of which he is a participant).

Moreover, he is extremely friendly and sociable. He knows everyone in the office well and catches up with their personal affairs. His people skills are tremendous. So much so, that observing him from afar working the department (that is catching up with everyone), one cannot help but wonder where he picks up his social skills and fine-tunes them to perfection.  

And, on the flip side, whenever he is at his desk, he is seen browsing social media. And other times, he is likely to be engrossed in his smartphone. This is a visible pattern that you can pick up on, day in and day out during office hours.  

Lastly, at whichever point Rehman actually does work, he makes sure to create a fuss over every tiny detail pertaining to the respective task. It seems like he is the sole hardworking employee, profusely asking other colleagues for "help." And in the process, he dumps the task on whoever else is willing to listen and "help out." 

Md Sifat, who works in the marketing department for a multinational company, is disgruntled with his colleague Rehman. Sifat wonders how this guy gets away with doing almost nothing at work.

And it's not just Sifat, other members of the team wonder exactly the same thing about Rehman. 

Work avoiders

Sajjadul Islam, general manager and head of HR at the Bangladesh Youth Initiative calls them "work avoiders." 

In every workplace, if you ask a few employees about who are the "work avoiders" in their department, in nearly all cases, they can point to one or more. 

Sajjadaul says that in most large companies, it's a part and parcel. Even in the case of a highly-efficient workplace, there exists a few such people. 

However, some instances are unintentional and the situations don't last indefinitely. "These might be the products of project structures, rearrangements, cavities in planning, etc."

On the flip side, interesting are the figures who avoid work intentionally. And many of them become deeply habituated to evading their due tasks. 

So how do they do it? Day after day, year after year?

"I would say that the employees who manage to do little to survive a job – and even in many cases raking up promotions – have certain interpersonal skills in keeping the management happy. In most cases, management only sees the final outcome, not the inner details of group work."

Akin to the university group projects, you probably can draw parallels for a fair comparison. In every group project, probably two dedicated 'geeks' do most of the hard work seriously, and the rest automatically pass by doing little to nothing. 

"It's not exactly the same in a workplace, because the people you work with are not your friends, unlike your university classmates. But you will still get the essence from this scenario," explained Sajjadaul. 

"Cunning work avoidance not only creates resentment among teammates but also wastes resources. So, the upper management, if serious enough, should maintain fairness and ensure productivity"  ...  Shakhawat Hossain, HR official at Innovision, an NGO

Smart enough to survive

Do work avoiders face any consequences for their inherent habit? And if they are not productive enough, how do they keep their jobs or rack up promotions?

"I think they are smart enough to stay idle for the most part or do the bare minimum. They do specifically the things that would attract the attention of the management," says Mashriq Farhan, who works for a leading NGO in Bangladesh. "Even when you understand this behaviour of your colleague, you cannot really rat him out. I mean, literally, you can, but should not. It might eventually affect you negatively."

"At the end of the day, don't we all want to be this guy?" he quipped.

Farhan also cited one common ploy, "So, this guy I know has killed his grandparents multiple times to take vacations from the office in the past two years. A mutual colleague of mine who worked with him in his former workplace told me that he played this same tactic in his previous job."

"You cannot really report this to HR, right?"

Showing busyness is another smart move to not being assigned to new projects.

"An artful tactic is to appear busy and overworked. 'I'm swamped,' is the ready answer of a work-avoider," said Sajjadul Islam. 

There are many ways to slack off at work. Remote or hybrid work is also one strategy.

"Taking credit for a project you have barely touched is a rather common scheme of an astute coworker," further added Sajjadul.

Another way of avoiding work by showing too much busyness is "cyberloafing" – instances involve sending emails at an ungodly hour, such as 1.30 am in the morning. Always keep a tab of intricate Excel sheets open on your computer, so that whenever someone is nearby your desk, you can just press a button to showcase that tab.

Nepotism and favoritism

In workplaces, certain cases of nepotism can be seen and heard. If it's a privately owned and run company, it's not a very uncommon phenomenon to observe.

Anamika Ahsan spoke about this scourge which she experienced at her former workplace, a company where the owner's family, including the owner's wife and son, controls each and every aspect of the business. 

Joining there, Anamika found the owner's niece – about the same age as hers – to be her team member. "Sometimes, she acted like she owned the business. Often, she would take tons of casual leaves which we could not afford. Because we had to go through a scrutinising process," Anamika said.

"In almost every case, she would delay in doing her designated tasks, which would result in the overall delay of the project. For her, other members of the team had to take the bullet."

Anamika further added, "Initially a few times, we informed our line manager. But he would say to take care of it. But ultimately, nothing changed. Over time, we understood that the line manager didn't really bring up the issue with the upper management." 

Perhaps, he had his own self-interested reasons not to bother. 

In a similarly comparable case, there could be found one or two "darling children" in any office – they are the favourites of the boss – not necessarily the bad workers or committed "work avoiders" though.

But in any office, there are some "bullshit tasks" – involving hard labour rather than brain power, such as filing up an Excel sheet with data entry. These are not your core work but some additional roles that arise circumstantially.

And nobody really wants to do these kinds of tasks.

And if you are not the "darling child," you have to do some tedious groundwork – as has been the case with Mashriq Farhan. 

Not much to do

Now let me show you an example of  "doing little" by design. 

Gourab is an IT specialist at a large startup. He maintains the startup's server, storage and database. He alone does all the work. But according to him, it's not much of a "full-time job." 

While in theory, he works 40 hours a week, in many weeks, he says, it amounts to mere 10-15 hours of workload.

"I am in a one-man department. I've to be always active in any case of urgency. Even when I'm on vacation, I take my Macbook so that I can fix it if issues arise. But overall, there is not much work."

He goes to the office five days a week and spends 40 hours in the workplace. 

Nobody in the office understands his work, not even the CEO, or his direct line manager. As a result, his work is not really scrutinised. 

But this cannot be really pinned on the employees, the nature of the work requires them to do little. However, this does not mean that Gourab avoids work, he is just one of the specimens of "unintentional slacking off."

Who is to blame?

If it's not broken, nobody cares enough to fix it. In a profit-making business or a well-performing group, managers may care less about managing their staff well – until the system breaks, perhaps from pent-up dissatisfaction among work doers with the work avoiders. 

According to Shakhawat Hossain, an HR official at Innovision, an NGO, "The responsibility falls on the management on the whole. Sometimes, the direct line manager/boss is responsible. But, human beings are fallible, [and] so is an individual manager."

"Cunning work avoidance not only creates resentment among teammates but also wastes resources. So, the upper management, if serious enough, should maintain fairness and ensure productivity," suggested Shakhawat.