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)."

Comments

gbtw...

[jonaskoelker]

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!

Re:gbtw...

[electrictroy]

>>>25 per cent of their time online at work on personal activities.

Shocking.

And before computers existed, they spent 25 percent of their time standing-around the water cooler, or sitting at their desks daydreaming.

Re:gbtw...

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The best milk comes from the happiest cows.

If you want to squeeze every last penny of time out of your workers, then you had better be prepared for the drop in productivity and quality that follows. This isn't to say that you should be providing lazer tag sets and two hour lunches to use them in. But it does mean that if you create a work environment with the rules of a gulag, then can expect good workers to leave, middling workers to become poor, and poor workers to either bomb, revolt or take advantage of the situation. In effect you will be spelling the end of your business.

Just like cows, it doesn't take a lot to keep workers happy either. Friendly environment, free food, good furniture, understanding they have outside lives. These things cost you little, but deliver far more. If people like where they work and who they work with, they won't want to leave. Balance in all things of course, but at the end of the day, allowing geeks to browse Slashdot, or people to call back home will cost you far less than insisting you get back every nanosecond of the time you pay for. After all, what is it that you do at work all day?

If you want the best milk, you need the best cows, but also the best fields.

Re:gbtw...

[philspear]

Unfettered web access leads to ridiculous losses of productivity.

That's a hypothesis. Is there proof one way or the other? If my job boss tried to increase productivity by a few percentage points by micromanaging, blocking all non-strictly work related websites, and tried to put blinders on me, I personally would spend more time trying to get around them and THEN goofing off than I would if they just left it up to my best judgement. Plus I'd think less of my job and would be less motivated.

That's just me though, I suppose other people might welcome the fetters, and possibly on average your approach would increase productivity. So lets see a study.

Re:gbtw...

[ottothecow]

of course, if you are one of the workers who *can* get it done in less time, in many situations you are probably still expected to be there.

If everyone in your company is working the 10 hour day, even if you *can* do it in 8, you may not be able to leave so it seems reasonable that people would insert more interspersed downtime into their work to stretch the work out to fill the day...

Re:gbtw...

[Count Fenring]

Yeeeeeeah.... I call shenanigans, sir!

Humans just aren't built for eight hours of straight focus. It's just not effective. And the kind of companies that try to shoehorn you into "Maximum productivity" tend to just stifle you into mindless drudgery.

This is why Google's "Work 25% of your time on a project you choose" is so genius. It sets up an outlet for this that's also productive.

Either way, we need to get rid of the idea that employment means OHMYGODMYEMPLOYEROWNSMEIMUSTMACHSCHNELLALLTHETIME!!! I've been at more places that fight with me over federally mandated break and lunch times (an especially sticky issue for a hypoglycemic) than not.

Also: Your example is diarrheal crap. The bankers weren't lazy, they were criminally fraudulent. Their motivations: not lack of a desire to do work, but ACTIVE DESIRE TO MAXIMIZE PROFITS PAST A REASONABLE AND SENSIBLE POINT. It's not that they didn't want to risk check, it's that they deliberately shuffled the risk around paper accounts so they could present the portfolios as better than they were. And given that many of those mortgages were sold under basically fraudulent terms, given hard sells to people who couldn't afford them, and jacked up to ruinous interest rates without warning, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that's not primarily an entitlement problem either.

Re:gbtw...

[cayenne8]

Hey..as long as you are getting your work done on time, who cares?

I mean, most of you out there are on salary, right? That is supposed to pay you to get your work done , no matter if it takes longer, or less than 40 hours a week, right?

Unlikely To Change

[jcnnghm]

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.

Re:Unlikely To Change

[rtb61]

You have no idea how untrue that is. Have you ever worked on a factory production line, have you worked on a building site for a subcontrator, have you ever worked any where that you are in fact supervised for the entire eight hours shift plus overtime.

All places where middle management spend their whole day squeezing every bit of labour of the workers they can. Not to belabour the point, but the strangest thing of all is the more you get paid the less you work and the less you are supervised but work on minimum wage, the very worst pay, and you are supervised constantly and you will get fired for slacking off.

You also get absolutely no internet access, no email, personal phone calls are restricted and even toilet breaks are monitored. People who get it easy should always think of those that get it much worse, not that you should join the as slave labour for minimum wage but, you should always consider ways that their work conditions should be improved (man those people really are underpaid for their miserable work conditions).

When it comes to professionals of course I forecast that the biggest time waster in the future will be UMPC's and unmonitored cellular internet access.

If they were getting their work done...

[earnest murderer]

who cares.

If not, fire them.

Chime the horde of corporate apologists and micromanagers pissing in the wind.

Re:If they were getting their work done...

[Lumpy]

If an employee manages to work only 2 hours a day but accomplishes more work than his 8-hour/day peers, why would an employer complain?

greed?

stupidity?

Many managers out there are way too stupid to understand a guy that can work in very intense bursts and then assume they can operate that way 24/7

So what?

[GreyWolf3000]

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.

right person for the right job

[osopolar]

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!

Re:No way of tracking?

[digitalgiblet]

This article was no more than a press release for Mr. Hortop to drum up more business for his company Voco. If a microscopic fraction of the people who read the article contact him, then he had a successful zero-cost marketing campaign...

Idiots did the study one sided

[gurps_npc]

Without a comparison, that information is useless.

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.

Too bad.

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

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?

Re:Unlikely To Break in.

[Mr2cents]

People aren't machines. And if your job is creative, you *need* to turn the switch from time to time to force you to think about something completely different. Otherwise you keep thinking the same way about a problem (tunnel vision), instead of finding a new and better way to solve it. At least, that's what I think.

Now, back to work..