Lost productivity due to the internet

lionking

In the Peanut Gallery
lionking
Joined
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My company, which employs about 1,000 people, has strict Internet filters. No Facebook (I'm fighting this with other senior managers), no you tube and so on. I can't access this forum because it's blocked by our net nanny (amazingly I can access Skeptical Community).

Even so, we know that around 25% of Internet access in our business is non-work related. What is the experience of others?

Yes, we can't do business without the web, but how much productivity is lost through misuse of the Internet? I know a lot of you guys post from work. What's the cost?
 
In my case, I spend a lot of time that I can't spend on other things watching code or reports run. Literally staring at logs being created. There is enough time during a compilation to check a thread for new responses, or making a short response to something. (I blame that for not posting long, thought out posts. Yeah. Tha'ts why. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

In terms of productive time, it doesn't really cost anything. As for net usage, we have a fixed fee. It also keeps me from going mental.

ETA: Would not do chat, FB or similar, though. It's not blocked, but it tends to be more time consuming than reading a post, getting pissed and going back to checking logs.
 
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lionking said:
My company, which employs about 1,000 people, has strict Internet filters. No Facebook (I'm fighting this with other senior managers), no you tube and so on. I can't access this forum because it's blocked by our net nanny (amazingly I can access Skeptical Community).

Even so, we know that around 25% of Internet access in our business is non-work related. What is the experience of others?

Yes, we can't do business without the web, but how much productivity is lost through misuse of the Internet? I know a lot of you guys post from work. What's the cost?
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I have no idea, but I do everything they tell me to do each day before leaving, and I am willing to work overtime (without extra pay) if necessary to handle urgent work.

So, I am willing to be flexible if my employer is too. Although non-work-related internet use is technically against the rules, there seems to be a tolerance for it. If they were to be less flexible, it would hurt my morale and motivation.
 
I have two computers at work a staff one and tutor's one. On the staff machine I have a 100 meg download limit and most social and video sites are blocked, though the forum and others aren't. On the tutor machine I have full control of the firewall and proxy.
 
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The smokers who take a 10 minute fag-break every hour shouldn't be allowed to access porn. The non-smokers should. And be allowed to wank on Friday afternoons.
 
lionking said:
My company, which employs about 1,000 people, has strict Internet filters. No Facebook (I'm fighting this with other senior managers), no you tube and so on. I can't access this forum because it's blocked by our net nanny (amazingly I can access Skeptical Community).

Even so, we know that around 25% of Internet access in our business is non-work related. What is the experience of others?

Yes, we can't do business without the web, but how much productivity is lost through misuse of the Internet? I know a lot of you guys post from work. What's the cost?
Click to expand...

According to this article, Facebook alone may cost Australian companies up to $5 billion a year.

While this article indicates social networking sites in the UK might be costing 130 million pounds a day in lost productivity. That's a whopping 2.6 billion pounds a month.
 
The cost is huge actually.

Easily into the thousands per annum for the average small company that has a few or more employee operated workstations in its office.

For a company that has 1000 employees and workstations ??!
I feel their pain !

But it's next to impossible to calculate the manhours wasted in an office setting. Add to that the manhours wasted troubleshooting workstations constantly because an employee surfed a viral website, or downloaded a nasty file, malware, etc etc.

Then there's the cost of constantly needing to upgrade anti-virus software for the entire network and individual workstations, maintaining nanny software, firewalls, backup systems...

And let's not forget the interoffice chatting/messaging, joke e-mails, playing computer games like solitaire, and so on.

Make no mistake, internet/computer abuse in the workplace is rampant.

The way I see it, if an employee has the time to play on the computer, then they have the time to take on more of a workload because apparently their 8 hour day isn't being filled with enough of it.

During their breaktime is one thing, but on company time is a whole different ballgame.
 
Don't these numbers assume that with facebook and youtube turned off, people would suddenly do nothing but work? I think that is highly unlikely.
 
Rasmus said:
Don't these numbers assume that with facebook and youtube turned off, people would suddenly do nothing but work? I think that is highly unlikely.
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Exactly, as some of us access the Internet during work hours through their phones...
 
I don't have time during the day to take a crap, never mind spend hours goofing off. Who the hell can afford to fart around during work hours?
 
The nature of my work is that I process incoming requests. If nobody needs anything from me, I have nothing to do. Except for the third through seventh business days of the month, and on Monday mornings, when I have regularly scheduled work. All the rest of the time I am completely free, but I figure I'd best look busy. Hence the internet. "Oh, look at that TragicMonkey, typing away on his computer. Poor boy has so much work!"
 
Rasmus said:
Don't these numbers assume that with facebook and youtube turned off, people would suddenly do nothing but work? I think that is highly unlikely.
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Exactly. Before there was internet, people would hang out by the water cooler, chat over their cubicles, read newspapers in the bathroom, stare at the clock and a thousand other unproductive things. In offices without internet for everyone, they still do. Wasting time is an universal human behaviour - the internet just makes it easier to notice.

It is a real issue, of course, but I doubt net filters will do much to solve it. Theoretically, if people have time to surf, they've too litter work, so having stricter requirements for work progress could, theoretically, help. It's not easily applicable to many office jobs, however, and people do need the occasional break as well, or they'll soon stop being at all productive.
 
Well, I don't know what others do for a living. Some jobs do have down time. Mine does not. I could work twenty-four hours a day if I wanted to.

Meh, I just feel crappy this morning. I've got a headache and I can't stay home because there will be almost nobody else at work today. We're severely understaffed even if everybody shows up, and at least two people are taking today off.
 
Sir Robin Goodfellow said:
I don't have time during the day to take a crap, never mind spend hours goofing off. Who the hell can afford to fart around during work hours?
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Some of the jobs I've done have had times like that, and other times when I was pretty much just on standby. It's not unheard of for a whole night to pass with no work happening. Forbidding the use of internet at such a time would be pointless, and probably make me more likely to fall asleep on the job.
 
These studies assume that every minute you spend not doing work related tasks is wasted. This is true of production line jobs and certain other. However, on the vast majority of those jobs, you aren't going to have access to the internet anyway.

In my, pre-retirement, days as a consultant, time away from the immediate task at hand usually cleared my head and made me more productive.
 
Today's xkcd fits the issue.

Read the mouse-over... That seems to be clever idea. Don't block anything, but put everything that's not whitelisted for work on a delay.
 
Xephyr said:
The way I see it, if an employee has the time to play on the computer, then they have the time to take on more of a workload because apparently their 8 hour day isn't being filled with enough of it.
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Really? I doubt it. The obvious truth is that since they can do their jobs and find time to goof around on the net, they are spending too much time at work.

If we want to see if the internet is really causing a loss of productivity, we need to compare productivity data from before the internet became widely used against productivity data today. Anything else is speculation.
 
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