Slashdot Mirror
Quarter of Workers' Time Online Is Personal
sloit writes "Most people spend more than 25 per cent of their time online at work on personal activities.
And 80 per cent of emails sent by volume in the workplace are personal.
Bosses often have no way of tracking Internet activity or policies to define what staff can and cannot do.
Paul Hortop, who reviews company network security for consultancy Voco, said the most common websites visited by personal web surfers were online trading sites, instant messaging/chat services and peer-to-peer sharing sites (allowing movie, music and software sharing)."
the most common websites visited by personal web surfers were online trading sites, instant messaging/chat services and peer-to-peer sharing sites
Cue the collective "You left out slashdot!"
And GBTW!
It's about 100% for me, e.g. I'm at work now
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
Everyone reading this article started doing their job?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
People have always found ways to waste time at work, and that's not going to change any time soon. Trying to make it stop will only breed resentment, lower employee morale, and reduce productivity. I frequently take short work breaks to work on personal stuff, especially when I am trying to think through a problem.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
who cares.
If not, fire them.
Chime the horde of corporate apologists and micromanagers pissing in the wind.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Since when spam considered personal ?
Bosses often have no way of tracking Internet activity
Bosses have no way of tracking Internet activity? Maybe they should read the rest of the article...
Paul Hortop, who reviews company network security for consultancy Voco, said the most common websites visited by personal web surfers were online trading sites, instant messaging/chat services and peer-to-peer sharing sites (allowing movie, music and software sharing)."
Seems like they can track Internet activity pretty well?
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I come to work at nine, work straight till 5, and bring lunch in. About 5-10 minutes of every hour are spent checking personal emails, calling my home internet service, calling back the health insurance compan, etc. A lot of stuff can only get done during the day. Plus, a lot of other employees spend 10 minutes every hour outside smoking. Big deal.. my boss knows I don't spend every minute staring at my code, but he also knows that it's important to renew the mind regularly in order to maintain quality.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Who Cares?
My company gives me access to the fax machine for "personal" stuff now and then if I need, why should internet access be any different?
If they cannot afford the bandwidth or cannot afford to "pay me to surf slashdot" for 20 mins/day, then they deserve to go under and I'm better off elsewhere.
... why would anybody care about this? Just make sure the online activities are legal and according to company policies (no porn or hate sites, for example). There is absolutely no need to go beyond that. Let the employees have some downtime.
*looks at the fellow posters*
/. is because I bring in my personal laptop. And anything that would look bad for the company is done via remote desktop to my home machine. Isn't that what win-win is all about?
But seriously, I don't see anyone in my company using a P2P app on their work machine. Hell, the only reason I post on
~t
If you do the work you're supposed to be doing then so far as I can see you're free to do whatever you like with the rest of the time you spend at work.
Slashdot readers spend 80% to 90% of their Internet time at slashdot.org.
slashdot rocks
morale.
"People have always found ways to waste time at work, and that's not going to change any time soon."
I'd be more worried about the security implications. Besides what does goofing off say about job satisfaction? Or lack of resources to do this at home?
How about this ... don't pay people for their time anymore. Pay them for what they know or for what they do. Performance based incentive is better than straight salary. Get rid of the attitude that I Mr. big shot employer am your boss as long as you are on the clock. Get a new attitude that you can't control peoples lives by the second. This has most likely gone on from the dawn of employment - now thanks to the internet we can track it by the second. PEACE!
Never Compromise
on my time sheet I record time spent on /. as Job Responsibility Training.
I don't code *without* having a browser window open. Sometimes for looking things up that are concerned with work, but more often because I like to take a quick random browse now and then while I ponder something (why are there no easy programming problems when you get decent pay?).
My boss knows, and doesn't care. All that matters is the code required is delivered in a reasonable time.
Sure, not browsing the web for 'personal use' would speed things up, but then I'd be less happy, which would impact work quality.
By my calculation I've been paid £5.30 to read slashdot today.
[turns round to tell boss]
Yup, no problem.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Everyone where I work (for state government) must go through our proxy except for a select few circumstances. All the sites listed above are blocked and a nice warning message comes up if you try to get to one of them.
How bosses can't know where their employees are going on the intertubes is beyond me as we have people checking the log files and see the people trying to get to boobsgonewild.com, donkeylove.com and giganticasses.com for 20 minutes at a time. If bosses don't know where their people are going, then the people in charge of the network aren't doing their jobs (or the bosses don't care).
And yes, I am at work right now as I type this, abusing the taxpayer dollars by doing something personal. Working in IT and being the go-to guy does have its perks. Not that being good at what I do will get me anywhere, but that's another story.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I am surprised that the number is a low as 25%.
This is a boring sig
I'm paid to perform a job of work. Not to watch the clock. If something has to be ready for, say, Friday then assuming it's possible I'll get it ready for Friday. In the meantime I might talk to some colleagues, surf the 'net etc. etc. Guess what ? the work gets done.
Managers who think you should be spending every second of the working day "working" are idiots. If that's what you want employ a robot.
Employers who are stuck with this Victorian "factory clock punch" mentality rarely do well as working for them sucks and anyone with half a brain leaves at the earliest opportunity (been there, done that). The ones left usually spend most of their time in a fug of resentment and when forced to perform do so with minimum effort.
Ho hum, another silly management study.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Maybe that says more about the American work environment. Are Europeans goofing off more?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
FTFA:
I'd be inclined to say Hellboy fits into that geek community where people are technology-literate and using peer-to-peer file sharing.
Often the people abusing resources will be more technology-literate than the people responsible for the security of the network. CIOs and CEOs are often a little distant from the technologies they're responsible for.
The CEOs are not expected to be sysadmins. The CIOs are expected to know the big picture of systems administration, not the latest 0-days, brand new intrusion detection prevention system or other details.
But if the users outhack the on-the-floor sysadmins who do the work (not the ones who decide that it must be done), why aren't they put to use in the IT department? On the face of it, this looks like horrible mismanagement: "our non-IT staff are better at IT than our IT staff". Utilize the staff where they show their competence.
To become king of the Goblins, one must assassinate the previous king. Thus, only the most foolish seek positions of leadership.
Not sure why I quote that, but it sounds cool ;)
I just finished reading Adaptive Software Development. While the method isn't for everyone one interesting point he makes is that employees are not human resources, e.g. cogs in a giant machine to turn out some desired productivity level at least not in technical work. To ignore the productivity impacts of forcing a team or individual to nose to the grindstone every hour of every day is a sure shot at turnover, which means a loss of productivity because of a steep learning curve to the next employee at the wheel.
How about listing the percentage of time on the phone AFTER work that is for work?
Or how about listing the percent of people's free time that is taken by 'overtime'. Or emails from work received in my personal email box.
Or at the VERY least they need to see how much of that 'time spent on line' was done during 9-5 and how much of that 'time spent on line' was during overtime hours.
For many people, it could be 25% spent of online time at work is 'personal', but 90% of that is done in their 9th hour at work. I.E. I really need to be shopping for a birthday present for my wife but the boss needs me here at work, so I'll log on and get something from Amazon while I'm waiting for Joe to call me back with the answer to my question.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I work for a rather large computer company - you've seen our ads. If we don't want our users to get out on the internet, our firewall will block them.
nothing more to see here - unless I can throw some common sense in your general direction.
Ever since being informed my services were no longer required (but for some reason I am required to work out my notice period), I'd say about 100% of my browsing time has become personal. Scratch that, 100% of my office face-time, period.
£ong £ive the new Bu$h conomy.
Most of my coworkers spend fifteen minutes out of every hour outside smoking. I don't smoke, so why should I work harder than the smokers when I get paid less than they do?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Am the only person who thinks that it's amazing that many workers spend 75% of their on-line time doing work for their company? How much work can you do for your company on the web? I know there are specific jobs which require it, but most workers?
We provide web access for all workers because there's that 10% or 5% of the time they use it where it's actually necessary for the company. We also provide it, sometimes, to improve their quality of life, and reduce the amount of time they spend away from the job on personal stuff.
Doesn't the 25% number seem absurdly low?
I wonder what we'll talk about when he sees me reading this sla...oh shit Ctrl+F4
Bob Slydell: You see, what we're actually trying to do here is, we're trying to get a feel for how people spend their day at work... so, if you would, would you walk us through a typical day, for you?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
Bob Slydell: Great.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
If you do the work you're supposed to be doing then so far as I can see you're free to do whatever you like with the rest of the time you spend at work.
I agree with you. As long as I'm making my deadlines and writing acceptable code, I don't see why management should get pissy about me slacking off from time to time. They never bitch about the smokers taking fifteen minute breaks five times a day.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
"Managers who think you should be spending every second of the working day "working" are idiots. If that's what you want employ a robot."
*surveys the landscape*
Looks like they are. Just because some professions don't lend themselves to complete automation presently doesn't mean we should be complacent.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I guess this makes up for a lot of personal time away from the office spent checking email, blackberry, and phone calls.
lol: You see no door there!
The only real response required to this is that it's systemic - everybody does it. Sure, you may be able to fire the very worst offenders and replace them with more productive employees, but when it's systemic, who are you going to replace them with?
That's right, more workers who will use the Internet for personal time.
There's no solution, period. Everybody looks at it from the simple perspective of "should this person be punished / fired", but human resources also has to consider the hiring side of any employee termination, and really ask themselves if they can find a better candidate for that position.
I think in this case, the answer is most likely no.
"How bosses can't know where their employees are going on the intertubes is beyond me as we have people checking the log files and see the people trying to get to boobsgonewild.com, donkeylove.com and giganticasses.com for 20 minutes at"
I noticed you didn't turn those into clickable links. :)
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
With the advent of Blackberries, etc more time outside of work hours is given up to work. Therefore during work hours that missing personal time is being made up because there is no other time to do it. I'm not sure why employer's don't get this. You can't magically add more hours to someone's workday
I just bought an iPrism to block P2P protocols at work. The reason is that it is a potential legal liability for the company if employees are downloading movies at work and the company does nothing to stop it. I also blocked most video websites to save on bandwidth.
However this filtering is not about productivity. I actually explicitly allowed sports websites among other things. People need to give their brain a rest sometimes as long as they know how to balance that then everything is fine.
That's a good point, this study didn't say that 25% of the employee's time was personal, but 25% of their online activity was personal.
The fact is that 40+ hours a week plus time spent commuting either way does not leave much time for a life. There are a lot of things which can only be done during working hours - for instance dealing with businesses which are only open during working hours, at the times when you are notionally at your job.
Employers need to recognise that employees need a certain amount of "personal" time during working hours. If it's 25%, so be it. If they wish to enforce absolutely 100% company-focused effort during work hours then probably most people couldn't do it, and if they could then they should be working a 30-hour week and perform the personal tasks (like bidding on ebay and checking the stock market) on personal time.
compiling
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
I have started a new foundation, "1% for Slashdot"
;)
The campaign is basically to spread awareness and understanding that 1% of my surfing time is wasted right here!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
How much does unpaid overtime save companies?
In the UK, IIRC, a couple of weeks after "Internet abuse costs UK companies £3Bn!!!" there was "Unpaid overtime saves UK companies £30Bn!".
So you can take your choice: paid overtime or some slacking.
This is why we should be moving towards the Results Only Work Environment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE). Stories like this are based on the workplace as it was 50 years ago, it's a lot different today. Performance should be based on what you get done; Employees shouldn't have to worry if they are 'appearing' busy.
These studies are useless media exercises to sell some particular services the survey exposes.
Let's see 50% sysadmins don't shower and why clean sysadmins are critical for your network security - a survey by Enterprise Dettol solutions.
Very convenient and standard media manipulation. Its called FUD, and its high time Slashdot stopped entertaining these thinly disguised marketing efforts.
Anyway, this is a stupid article. It starts out talking about employees spending working hours on personal activities, then immediately somehow ties that to illegal file sharing and raises the boogeyman of companies becoming legally responsible for such unauthorised activities.
Methinks the author has a hidden agenda.
For some, working 4-8 hours straight (depending on when your lunch break is) on an intellectually demanding job is mentally exhausting to the point of being unrealistic. Some people need "personal time" so they don't get burned out, and are much more efficient if they have breaks more often.
Member of the 7 Digit UID Club
If the admin isn't setup to track usage, and able to block inappropriate activities, then the admin needs to be replaced.
Now there would be the exception of the mom-n-pop shops using a Linksys dsl router...but that is a completely different critter to deal with...
Principle of least privilege should apply, and full support from the "masters" has to be there or you might as well let users have full control of the pc's
Draconian? YES! but isn't that part of the fun of being a BAFA (big cheesy grin).
NOW GET TO WORK!
Amateurs.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
..can't respond to this now. I'm at work.
Just because it's not directly work related, doesn't mean it won't help your job or company. Besides making employees happier by not cracking down on 'personal' browsing directly, there are other benefits. For one, there have been countless times at my (second) job where I've come across articles I've spent during 'personal' browsing and later told my boss about, which he would find interesting. He's come back to me many times thanking me for that read since it could actually help out the company as a whole. When there is a project to be done, I do it in bursts and my manager knows that. He's even mentioned he doesn't mind as long as the task at hand is being done in a reasonable time.
In my other job, however, they micromanage nearly everything. You're on the clock 24/7 (it's a type of call center), all your breaks are accounted for, you get stats posted vs. other employees, yada yada. I come in every day to that job, wanting to slack more, calling in sick instead of asking for time off (because it's damn near impossible taking ANY vacation days), and doing more and more personal activities which doesn't benefit the company AT ALL..
Just shows how beneficial 'personal' browsing time can be.
I say this as both a manager and an employee:
The minor loss of potentially productive time described here (25% of some undefined (didn't RTFA) percentage of the user's overall work time) is blown on personal tasks and unofficial communication not explicitly related to work..... and? This doesn't seem even remotely unusual, regardless of the availability of an Internet connection. Aside from those few jobs where contractors and the like bust their ass 12-14 weeks a quarter like in construction work, having an adequate amount of time off in between tasks, I'd say the distraction of socializing with your colleagues and dealing with certain personal matters is often a positive thing. If you're working 9-5 and you present the choice to your boss that you've either got to take an afternoon of leave to deal with your financial matters outside of the office or that you could accomplish two hours from the office via electronic means if he/she wants you to stick around, I'd expect most bosses to just roll with it. If you're working nights under my supervision and you pull up a flash game of Tetris after remedying a server outage that dominated your time and energy so much that you obviously need time to switch gears, you've earned your rewards. If you're working under me and you've got 40 tasks assigned to you and, after working each of them to the point where you want to hit Slashdot, more power to you.
Chew 'em out when it starts to prevent them from getting their tasks completed. Reward those who goof off less, but you must accept a reasonable minimum if you want your employees to be productive, sane, and present. Most people in adequately staffed organizations wouldn't think twice about a person who takes two or three short "coffee breaks" per day or a lawyer/congressman's intern/city councilman's assistant that chews through each days newspaper during work hours. Why should you care if someone CTRL-TABs into Google News or the Wikipedia for an hour a day? Judge your employees by specific goals set ahead of time, in a fair and equitable manner. Don't jerk them around for "misusing" company resources at no cost to the company and for being human enough to need to think about something other than work a couple of times per shift. You'll get more done and have a level of morale that you can't possibly build up by micromanaging people to the extent that the summary implies that you should.
I recently read about a concept called Results-Only Work Environment (or ROWE for short) in a book called Why Work Sucks by Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson. The book is about a programme they implemented at Best Buy's corporate headquarters which lets people only be judged on results, not time.
They did away with schedules, compulsory meetings etc. and it let them weed out people who accomplished nothing, whilst allowing everyone else take control of their own time. In other words, to bring it back to the article, they suggest that ALL time is personal - it doesn't matter how you do it, provided you get what you need to done on time. Staff retention, motivation and productivity went through the roof because of it. Unfortunately most workplaces aren't willing to treat their employees like adults so the idea is not exactly widespread (yet).
watching the boss?
I know for a fact where I work that many of the user's browse the internet for personal use and this includes the higher ups. Now the main issue should be with those who stream video/audio and download music from itunes.
Who cares if people browse the internet as long as the work assigned actually gets done. If people are content at work and do their work there shouldn't be an issue with the reason someone is browsing online. Assuming its not pr0n or even Wookie pr0n.
As long as a worker is not filesharing,etc on the work connection web browsing should be a non-issue. Just my 0.02.
"And 80 per cent of emails sent by volume in the workplace are personal."
What does this work out to? Maybe 20 work-related emails consisting of a couple of paragraphs each, and then forward one email with jokes and pictures to friends?
Or did they really mean to say "by number" instead of "by volume"?
I challenge the accuracy of this information, and its relevance. I work in technology, and I can say first hand that at the places where I have worked the majority of the "non-work" sites visited are NOT file sharing sites. Usually, its sports, news, shopping and free email services (GMail, Yahoo, etc). And for the number of emails, most of that is done through the free email services and not the corporate email system. I do agree that a portion of time is spent on personal things, but in these days of multi-tasking, how much has that really affected productivity? I would say that it has INCREASED productivity by allowing the employees some breathing room, rather than hovering over them like a slave driver. Corporate America needs to chill, and treat their employees like humans, not robots.
so if an average worker spends an hour doing work online per day, and then spends 15 minutes of that time reading the news or ordering something from amazon, you'd get this same alarmist headline.
Apart from the slightly dodgy math, yes, that's the point.
The 50's through the 80's smoke breaks have been replaced with personal online time.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
I think these statistic don't really mean anything. Many good points have already been mentioned. There are so many variables in a person's work day, the type of worker they are. I'm sure there are plenty of people that waste time when they DO have something to do. For me, total I'll probably have maybe 4 to 5 hours of work to do a day. I can't code or research for 5 straight hours, my brain would explode. I'll work for 2 hours, take 30 minutes to read / or an interesting article on yahoo. Go back for another 45 minutes to an hour, then take 10 minutes to check email, make a phone call. Afterwards I'll code again for another 2 hours etc... All in all I end up filling out an 8 hour work day.
The type of work depends also. Managers will have meetings scheduled all day, you think they don't take a break in between? If my manager was looking over my shoulder all day, I would quit. I get my work done as scheduled, it doesn't matter how I do it. I work with people that come in at noon and work til 8 at night because they are useless in the morning. Again, too many variables to make this statistic (if you can even call it that) usefull.
so we are even bitches
how a worker's profession impacts this figure. I'm a web developer for my company, and as such spend ALL my time online. I'm the type of coder who can do in an hour (sometimes even less) what takes others a day, or in a day what takes others a week.
.have some personal time with my friends and family, or even go work another 2 hour shift and get paid just as much. Great way to pretty much set your own hours too, or great incentive to work hard instead of putting in the bare minimum.
.)
My tendency is to code for a couple hours, and then spend the other 7 hours surfing the web (9 hour work days; 8-5) since I'm out of work early in the day.
I agree that workers should be paid on how much they do rather than their hours. I could come in, do my job, get paid, and leave. .
The only downsides I could see are these:
1. You're not there for the entire time, so if a client has a problem at 4 pm and you're gone already, they would have to have your cell number to reach you. Being on call constantly would suck, especially if I chose to take another job with the extra time I had. (I guess being on call is why they pay me those other 6 hours. .
2. Boss loses money. Think about it: if a client agrees to pay for a 5 hour block of time for me to create a web survey with validation and all that, and I do it in 30 minutes, that's 4.5 hours my boss sold that he's making extra. Of course, I don't see a dime of it.
This is definitely a topic I can comment on. I'm one of the folks in charge of our client-side computing platforms where I work. So far, we've only limited our web browsing by blocking porn and gambling sites. Doing anything more than that is extremely difficult to explain to people. You can hit them over the head with it and tell them "no personal stuff at work" but they won't understand why.
All the pretty bandwidth piecharts showing MySpace as the #4 or #5 site by traffic volume don't mean a thing to newer, younger workers. They expect the ability to multitask, check 9 things at once, and keep their social networking profiles updated when worktime is slow. If you disallow it on your corporate network, they'll just goof off using their iPhones. Everyone who's graduated from school recently is a member of the "perceived infinite bandwidth" generation, has no idea how much a network connection costs ($49 a month like my DSL, right?) and isn't going to stay very long at a place with strict 1960s-style work rules.
That being said, there's definitely a dark side. It looks especially bad when your employees are in a public-facing area goofing off on YouTube when there's a line of customers forming in front of them. We're actually working on blocking access to social network from just customer service positions, but even that's a tough fight.
Especially if you have a lot of people working long hours, you just need to expect that people will get their personal stuff done during business hours. The nature of work is a little different now. You're not sitting for a nonstop 8-hour day processing a stack of papers, especially if you're in IT.
You can't win. If you block it, you're an evil slave driving old-school organization. If you don't, you either have to buy huge amounts of bandwidth or deal with slow performance of business applications. Even with QoS, sometimes you just can't get good network connections in some places to begin with.
Bah. This all comes down to some micromanaging synergist having no clue as to what the meaning of "work" is.
Teachers get this same crap all the time, too. Not too long ago in Ontario, there was a huge, government-sponsored push to get teachers to "work" more. They went through a teacher's day, and started redefining what they counted as "real work"-- to the point where pretty much anything that wasn't standing by a blackboard and lecturing wasn't "work"
Fortunately that regime was voted out before they did too much damage, but the sentiment of "teachers spend half their day not working" lingered. Whenever someone brings it up, my fiance (a high school science teacher) fires back with an analogy. I think it's pretty applicable here, too.
Imagine you're a line worker at an automobile plant. You're paid to do 8 hours of work a day. Your job is to pick up a bunch of parts from a distribution bin, and then move down the line, applying those parts to the cars being built. Once you reach the end of the line and your parts are all used, you walk back to the start of the line to get more. Repeat.
Now imagine someone follows you around work for a day. At the end of it, they tell you "Well, we noticed that you take 10 minutes picking and sorting the part. Then we noticed that once you are done at the end of the line, it takes you 5 minutes to walk back to the parts bin. That's 15 minutes a round that you are spending NOT WORKING, because your job is to assemble parts. Well, you do 10 of these rounds a day. That's 150 minutes a day you aren't working. As such, we refuse to pay you for those 150 minutes every day.
I think you can imagine how well that assessment would be received.
For a teacher, there's a lot more "actual work" than teaching. Even putting aside the HOURS a day a teacher puts in during their own time, there's prep work, binder organization, classroom cleaning, lab setup-- all of which aren't necessarily "teaching", but they're work
So whenever an article like this comes out that criticizes a profession for not doing enough 'actual work'-- gah. If you have a boss like that, do yourself and your future ulcers a favor and update your resume.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
When I submit an estimate for a task given by my manager, I take a conservative estimate of how long I think it will actually take and triple it. Then, my manager inevitably doubles or triples that and submits the resulting estimate to the client. Many times, the client says "wow, that's so fast!"
In almost all cases, I would finish the job in the amount of time I estimated to my manager, but he says something like "the client expects it to happen slower than you can get it done, so take your time." I typically refer to this as institutionalized waste. If I get something done in the time I actually estimated, then I'm usually left waiting for another person from another team to finish their work, so we can integrate our components together. In the end, if the management isn't keenly aware of the differences between the teams' timelines, there's always someone sitting around getting paid to do nothing.
This is a fight that cannot be won. There's no way businesses can successfully wage war on personal activity at work. What they can do is clearly define what is expected out of each employee, and have a process to handle situations where employees are not meeting expectations.
Sure, 25% of my official 40 hours per week on personal stuff? Easily, during the slow weeks. Not even close during the busy ones. While it may not be the case for every worker in every field, I know that I'm at work many evenings and weekends, performing system updates or making changes when there are no users on the network, while my fellow employees are at home with their families. While they go to lunch, I fix the problems on their PCs. While they sleep, I remain on call 24x7.
So, yeah, I surf at work, but the job gets done and the customer is happy. I'm doing the job I was hired to do (and more, whenever I can), and I'm keeping myself sane the rest of the time.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Don't forget TFA stated 80% of email by volume. That 300KB JPG floating around of Bob's head on Britney's body makes up for a lot of plaintext work emails, esp. when you consider all the joking Reply All's those tend to generate.
Sure some large work assets get transferred over email, but more often than not (at least in my experience) they're shared via network drives.
What about all the nerd porn and Windows hate on /. ?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
How much of it is done on dead / down time while you are waiting for someone / the job / the paper work / and so to get back to you. Even the 5 - 10 min at the end of the day where you don't have the time to start the next thing and you are just killing time can add up.
I remember a story... can't remember whether it was /. or some other outlet. The premise of the story was that some employers were being more flexible with time on and off the job. This is just one more aspect of it.
Employers believe they can invade your private time and call you at nearly any hour with a problem (especially in IT). On the flip side they can expect that you will invade their business time with your own personal stuff on the web.
I spend more than 25% of my personal time on work related activities ;0