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Social networking costs firms £130 million a day
Author: Phil CogarPublished: 10th September 2007
Facebook is one of the major culprits behind productivity loss at firms with internet access.
A whopping 223 million hours are estimated to being lost every month by employees surfing the web.
"Why should employers allow their workers to waste two hours a day on Facebook when they are being paid to do a job?" said Mike Huss of Peninsula. "The figures that we have calculated are minimums and it's a problem that I foresee will escalate. Some companies are happy to let their workers use the internet for personal use, assuming that goals and targets are achieved.
Many companies today monitor their network traffic and ban sites that draw the most time away from productivity. Some of our own forum members have even had bit-tech banned at their workplace for spending time browsing through our project logs.
Instead of filtering out sites one by one, maybe IT departments will start banning the Internet as a whole and only allow access to a given set or work related sites in order to curtail a decline in worker productivity.
Do you spend lots of time at work reading our articles or browsing our tremendous project logs? If you're at work right now then sound out over in the forums. Don't worry, we won't tell your boss.
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Comments (29)Stats: 0.046 seconds
So now I just use a Proxy instead...
/sarcasm off
honestly...
i've never in my live been to facebook... i dont have a myspace or other such sites account... but i sure spend a lot of time on sites like bit-tech or xtremesystems...
Gimmie a break.
Don't tell my bo.... oh, bugger, I'm self-employed.
P
Seriously, a happy employee is a productive one. Many people hate their jobs, and if the internet is how the cope and not blow their brains out, then it's a good thing.
Aggies
Myspace isn't blocked, but probably because it's part of the Group I work for, not that I actually use it anyway.
*denyed access to facebook.com and myspace.com on router @ home.
Bit-tech, my love for you is pure :D
Emotive, apparently.
Edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emo_%28slang%29 I stand corrected. Not that I care..
That took about ten minutes of my work time that can be added into those figures.
I've seen it time and time again in all forms of workplace from schools to offices and workshops, even market stalls. People are going to find a way to doss on the job at some point, you may as well just accept it as a fact of life and move on. Promoting it obviously won't help, but being draconian and blocking everything you can won't help either because you'll end up with an unhappy workforce. (Stupidly, its companies that pay less, that are most often draconian about their internet access and suchlike. If they pay peanuts people are going to value their job less, if they try and force people to work they're eventually going to start looking for other jobs where the management arent total asshats.)
In my experience, the best system is the unspoken rule, as in, no-one says it, but if you asked you'd probably get 'Don't work yourself to death, you're allowed a little leisure, but remember you're on the clock and only do it if there's nothing important that has to be done. We're the management and we know you'll do it somehow and somewhen, so as long as you do it in a non disruptive way and get your work done, we're cool with it.'