Social networking costs firms £130 million a day

Author: Phil Cogar
Published: 10th September 2007

Facebook is one of the major culprits behind productivity loss at firms with internet access.

Do you spend time visiting popular social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace when you're supposed to be working? Did you know that your leisure surfing is costing UK firms in upwards of £130 million a day? Well you are, at least according to a study of 3,500 UK companies done by employment law firm Peninsula.

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.