What do people do at work when they are not working?

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

The objective of this work is to understand what kind of activities people develop at the workplace when they are not working and which are their work-related effects. The study of this subject was conducted through twenty interviews with people from different areas - tourism, banking, consulting, telecommunications, informatics, ambient, pharmaceutical, psychological, financial, and advocacy – that were not occupying leading positions inside their companies. The observed outcomes of these research show that people engage in a lot of different non-work related practices everyday that have diverse causes and consequences in their work life. The results reveal that in most of the cases, interruptions and breaks have a very positive impact on the work process and progress, increasing productivity and efficiency, improving the work rhythm and the most important thing – contributing for the solutions for wok-related problems and issues that cannot be resolved without a pause in the work. This means that the solution for some problems related to working issues, comes from the break that was done, this is, the revenue obtained is higher when there has been a pause than when there was not any interruption, as it is going to be explained further in this work.