How much is cyberslacking impacting your business and what should you do about it?
One employer tracked his 30 employees to determine how much time they spent on the Internet for personal reasons during the work day. He found they were spending an average of 45 minutes a day.
This employer’s problem is a common one. In fact, at www.getsafeonline.org it states that a third of companies have had to discipline staff for misuse of the internet. How a business responds to controlling the problem is where the variance is.
The Wall Street Journal article A Facebook-Free Workplace? Curbing Cyberslacking on May 20, 2010 talks about the various ways companies approach this new challenge.
Some companies do not want to be too harsh and try the self-policing approach. They say walk the talk and explain to the employees how damaging cyberslacking is to the bottom line. They can couple that with a policy that lists what sites are acceptable to visit during work hours and for how long.
Another company put monitoring software on all computers except one in a spare office. Employees can use their breaks and lunch hour to do such things as personal banking or emailing.
Our BBB bans playing internet games except during breaks and lunch hour. Personal emails are allowed. Why not? We always have allowed employees to have personal phone calls as long as they are short and not too often. And if the employee is getting his job done, occasional shopping on the internet is acceptable. This can be a slippery slope since International Data Corp says 60 percent of all online purchases are made during working hours.
Some companies are unsure of how much their employees are cyberslacking. Hire a company to help you track this activity. You can track and document employee computer use of websites visited, online searches, email sent and received, Facebook, other social networks and more. Some companies have done the tracking and found they needed to fire employees immediately.
You can also hire companies to block specific types of sites like: adult and mature content, gambling, violence, hate and racism, etc.
Get your human resource person involved and decide what approach is best for controlling the inevitable cyberslacking. There is not one best answer for all companies.
What has your company done?
Interesting article, but I think there needs to be more thought added to whether or not this type of restrictive policy is a practice a business even wants to engage in, and whether “cyberslacking” is really a net negative on an organization’s bottom line.
Both this article and the WSJ article assume that the stated average of 45 minutes would otherwise be spent on a productive task, but I highly doubt it. More than likely, that employee would simply replace the time that they can no longer relax reading a favorite site with another common work standby. . . Talking with co-workers. So now, instead of one distracted worker, you have two.
No individual gives 100% of their attention to work, all day. Studies have shown that taking a break from work tasks can actually increase productivity, and certain personality types actually feel more “refreshed” after some time on the internet than they do with other forms of “slacking”.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mr-personality/201103/can-cyber-slacking-be-good
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19619038
Additionally, keeping up to date with market trends and new technologies can positively impact the bottom line if these fresh ideas are applied to your business practice. Who knows, that employee reading a blog in their RSS reader may have a eureka moment that sets the stage more revenue growth. That may be overly optimistic for each employee, but I know that’s how I came up with my business idea. . .
I believe in a “big-boy” system of internet usage. . . While I certainly would certainly filter out extremist/ obscene material, I wouldn’t restrict employee access to the internet. Your local manager should have the ability to assess employees that are not accomplishing their tasks, and determine what the issue is. If internet usage is getting in the way of an individual contributors productivity, discipline, or terminate their employment.
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