Surfing, shopping, gaming, and emailing are just some of the ways
creative employees have found to waste time at their employers’ expense. On the job, employees are finding their soul mates on matchmaker.com or just fantasizing on the millions of porn sites available. They are furiously instant messaging, much of it gossiping with and about coworkers, to the detriment of the team. This problem not only hurts productivity but has cost companies millions as a result of lawsuits for everything from sexual harassment to violation of civil rights.
If you think that employee misuse of the Internet on company time is not a serious problem, consider these facts, reported by Stephanie Olsen and Lisa M. Bowman in “Office Surfers May Face Wipeout” from CNET News.com:
• Loss of productivity resulting from employees’ using the Internet for
personal reasons costs employers over $80 billion annually—at a conservative estimate.
• Most studies estimate that workers use the Internet for personal use approximately 2 hours per day. An estimated 10 to 40 percent of all network traffic between 9 and 5 is non-work-related. If your IT budget is $82 million and even 10 percent of it is paying for employees’ personal use, you have lost over $8 million.
It is estimated that 67 to 76 percent of workers access the Internet at work for personal uses. What exactly are they doing?
• 41 percent of employees surveyed shop online at work—and some
shop every day.
• 39 percent send personal emails.
• 34 percent play computer games, either alone or with other workers
who are avoiding work.
• 17 percent are conducting job searches under their employers’ noses.
• 9 percent are copying software for personal use.
As Robyn Greenspan of internetnews.com observes:
The high unemployment rate—6% for October 2003 in the United States— hasn’t deterred workers from goofing off on the job. Data from Websense Inc. indicates that Internet misuse costs American corporations more than $85 billion annually in lost productivity—an increase since the year prior.
Taken From: 201 Ways to Turn Any Employee Into a STAR Performer
