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)."
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'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 !
I'd call 25% below the radar. They obviously don't take into account multitasking because I spend most of my day doing at least two things. I have gmail and slashdot up almost 100% of my day, but that doesn't mean I spend 25% of my day doing them. I'm usually browsing slashdot while waiting for my query to run, or while sitting on a conference call. With overtime and multitasking, I'd say there are well over 300% in my day as it is, so 25% is less than the average smoker spends outside every day.
As far as 80% of e-mails being personal, my experience in the work environment is that this is probably off by at least an order of magnitude. On my work e-mail, I easily get 200 work related e-mails for every personal one, and even that is only if I consider non-work related snide comments in response to work related emails to be personal. Some of the guys at work like to send each other youtube links and forward each other urban legends, but there is no way it is 80% of their emails. Now if you consider that 90% of work related emails are unnecessary then yes I'd guess that you get about 4 personal e-mails for every useful work related e-mail.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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?
To take this a bit further, I was working with a financial services company, and for years the staff was allowed to listen to internet radio at their desks, which virtually everyone did. Recently, their partner company was taken over my a much larger organization, that filtered out the internet radio as well as many other "time wasters" with their web filtering.
Not only did this filtering interfere with getting actual work done (e.g. couldn't access some websites that could provide valuable information), they found that at the end of the quarter productivity had dropped a full 15%. The internet radio helped prevent the mental fatigue associated with performing mentally taxing tasks all day. Sometimes people need a context switch to stay productive.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
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.
And from a recent discussion about the differences between US and European work practices, it was generally agreed that the Europeans get the same amount of work done in 8 hours, that it takes the US 10 hours to do. Yet the US employees slack off while they're at work and then bitch about working long hours.
Not to mention the cost of paying for all the infrastructure while the employees are slacking off. Not just the net, but AC, maintenance, sewerage, lighting etc. Business exists to make money, not provide a social club with optional work.
You get lunch breaks, use them to buy your gifts online or browse slashdot. Don't expect the employer to pick up the tab.
Just another sign of the entitlement society.
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).
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
This is capitalism. You have one guy who can work for 45 years for you at 60% productivity. But you want 80%+ so you squeeze him until he breaks and then get another guy to do his job. You pay lower wages and keep some movement in your workforce that allows you to adjust headcount down easily (you just let a few workers drop off and don't hire more).
That guy you mention can probably operate at "burst rate" for 8 hours a day, just not for more than one day. The money chasers only care at the balance point between training new hires and burning out old ones. Human resources. If his job is one anyone can do and people are queueing up to get a job ...
The "context switch" you mention is incredibly important. I have pretty varied responsibility at work (the downside of working in an IT department with a total staff of 12 people). Sometimes I'll be doing almost nothing but coding for days on end - sometimes I'll have nothing at all to do. Sometimes I'll have email server issues. Right now I'm manually creating a conversion table to switch a land classification system in one old system to a better system that we're implementing. In short, sometimes my work gets monotonous.
I've found that if I stick to it straight for hours on end, not only do I get cranky and less productive, but I also feel so drained that I often don't even feel like doing anything when I get home. So, I take an approach of working diligently for 40-45 minutes, and then going off and doing something else (personal email, Slashdot, whatever) for 10-15 minutes. Doing that I generally get more done and feel much less drained when I get home at the end of the day. You just have to have something to break up the chores that you have to perform.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I think it would be interesting to see a system in which you were given specific responsibilities, instead of a schedule, and left to yourself when and how much time to finish them. You'd have an overall deadline, but more flexibility to set up your working times.
Of course, I'm talking about a humanely designed workload, not the current abuse of salaried employment to get loads of free overtime. I guess I've answered my own question here about where that would go in our current environment.
I don't know how long I spent circumventing the security on my work's Active Directory Windows PC just so I could actually do my job as a developer instead of being locked out of the registry, display settings, Add/Remove and everything I need to change to test with. On top of that, designing and implementing an application to make sure those settings are not blanket wiped by the occasional security sweep.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
One great book I've read http://www.amazon.com/Control-Your-Time-Life-Signet/dp/0451167724
Was from some anal-rentive time control freak.
What was initially counterintuitive in his book was that he said that he encouraged his employees to goof off. To bring a book, or whatever they wanted to work, and so long as they got all the stuff they had to do done, then they could goof oof.
Well, he actually got _more_ out of them this way. There is an axiom or some sort that says that a project will go to the deadline or beyond, regardless of how long it takes. He took away the deadline, and said, play whenever you are done. When he saw them playing, he would then say, "Hey, why don't you work on this other thing....".
Pretty slick in my eye.
An old professor of mine once said in a History of Technology course that, to paraphrase, "New technology is always used in the way old technology was." Always stuck with me, but I feel it's relevant.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.