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

Re:only a quarter?

[tompaulco]

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.

Re:Unlikely To Change

[jcnnghm]

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.