Slowly but surely, the reality of office life is starting to emerge. Far from everyone being stressed out and overworked, as has been the received wisdom for some time, a significant segment of the workforce is actually suffering from underwork, lack of challenge and outright boredom. As the truth drips out, two questions arise. Why has it taken so long to see the light of day, and why is it coming out now?

In Germany, a country known for its accent on business efficiency, a new management book is causing waves. Diagnosis Boreout, by Philippe Rothlin and Peter Werder, concludes from survey evidence that around 15 per cent of office staff do extremely little. This approximately tallies with an extensive international Gallup survey published in 2004 showing that one in five workers is “actively disengaged”, accomplishing next to nothing and undermining the efforts of others.

It would be easy to focus exclusively on that 15 per cent, have a little chuckle about life’s lazy slackers, vow to root them out, and console ourselves that we have 85 per cent, thank the Lord, who are committed and hard-working. It would be lovely if it worked like that, but it doesn’t.

According to Gallup, three in five of us are “not engaged” – dutifully turning up to our place of work but lacking any energy or enthusiasm. If 15 per cent do nothing, then an additional 60 per cent probably do a lot less than they like to let on.

Damning statistics on non-work-related internet use and personal e-mail use bear this out. The next time you meet somebody who huffs and puffs and drones on about how busy they are at work, the chances are that person is an outright liar.

So much for the cutting-edge, pressure-cooker, streamlined organisations of corporate mythology. The various constituencies who have combined to suppress the truth are guilty of nothing less than retarding the development of the capitalist world. As any amateur psychologist knows, it is only by confronting the reality that you can hope to progress, no matter how uncomfortable that reality is.

These constituencies are many and varied, and have all had a vested interest in preserving The Big Lie. First we have the leaders at the top of large organisations. They have little incentive to allow the reality of often shambolic inefficiency out of the bag. It damages the brand, and detracts from their own painstakingly constructed image as a prudent captain running a tight ship. Anyway, no matter how gifted they are, no chief executive can possibly have the foggiest notion what is going on at the grass roots of a company with tens of thousands of employees worldwide.

Their legion of middle managers is certainly not going to knock on the boardroom door bringing news of pervasive inactivity and ennui. For a start, that would reflect badly on them, as they are nominally responsible for people management. But despite this formal role, they are often still judged and remunerated for their own individual performance, not for that of their team. Too much effort spent trying to organise and motivate their charges therefore serves little purpose.

Then we have the masses of bored employees themselves. There is nothing in it for them to publicise the truth. They don’t want to be sacked for not contributing. And they have in the past generally sought to convey, even to their friends and family, a perception of themselves as indispensable and go-getting, not apathetic and do-nothing.

Outside the organisation, others happily avert their eyes from the troublesome truth. Political prejudice is a major culprit. The Right preoccupies itself with waste in the public sector, while maintaining a naively idealised vision of an ultra-competitive, super-efficient private sector. The Left was delighted with the narrative that emphasised overwork, affirming their worldview of ruthless capitalists exploiting the downtrodden workers.

The print and broadcast media operate in a highly competitive environment and are subject to persistently tight deadlines. Most of their journalists have little or no experience of working in industries where performance is often much less measurable and where the everyday tasks are more drawn-out and less pressurised. Supported by the plentiful rent-a-quote workplace stress specialists supplied by academia and firms of organisational psychologists, they are naturally more attracted to stories of excessive workload than to tales of millions of workers idling away the day getting paid doing nothing.

Next come the management consultancies. It is not in their interests to pose fundamental questions about how companies are organised or led, because they are in thrall to the senior managers who pay them. That is not to say that all consultants tell their clients only what they want to hear, but simply to note that the powerful temptation to do so is always there. At the very least, you have to ask this question: why has the large number of high-powered consultancies that have been in business for decades not had more of an effect on the way companies manage their staff?

Business schools, as academic institutions, have a responsibility to pursue the truth. But as Charles Handy, the eminent management writer, put it last year: “They don’t challenge or speculate, they are not places of great inquiry . . . they are antiintellectual.” Like the management consultancies, they are preoccupied with avoiding offence to their corporate clients, thus serving to uphold a status quo that requires radical change.

The good news is that all these participants in the denial are up against a powerful Zeitgeist. Whereas the 1980s was a time when people sought to emphasise their own individual status, either through owning fast cars or designer clothes, or by informing everyone how madly busy they were, now honesty and openness are in fashion. The proliferation of personal blogging, life coaches and therapists are all testaments to this changing mood. The truth will hurt countless sensitivities, but the ridiculous farce of millions travelling hours on a train every day to do nothing may be finally coming to an end.

David Bolchover is the author of The Living Dead: Switched Off, Zoned Out – the Shocking Truth about Office Life

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