Workers waste 2 hours a day at work, much of it on the web, survey finds
Americans admit to frittering away an average of 2.09 hours while on the job, not including time for lunch, and surfing the web is their most frequently-reported form of slacking off, according to a new survey by America Online and Salary.com.
A total of 44.7% of more than 10,044 survey respondents reported using the web for personal use while at work, almost twice the percentage who said they spend time socializing with co-workers, which, at 23.4%, was the second most popular goof-off workplace activity reported. Over the course of a year and even after accounting for time employers expect to be wasted, non-productive activity including web surfing adds up to $759 billion in salaries for which companies receive no apparent benefit, say the survey sponsors.
Some employers have turned a blind eye toward personal web use at work, but for others, such data could help fuel steps to limit workplace online activities such as shopping, according to John Challenger, CEO of outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “There are many companies that will and that already have put in controls that prohibit certain kind of Internet usage, whether shopping, games or blogging,” he says. “Where there are clear-cut job objectives, companies give more freedom to employees, but there are a lot of jobs where they can’t measure performance that closely.”
Bill Coleman, senior vice president of Salary.com, says that when setting employee salaries, corporate human resource managers assume that employees will waste about an hour per day. “A certain amount of slacking off is already built into the salary structure. Our survey results show that workers on average are wasting a little more than twice what their employers expect,” he says.
“A lot of companies are looking at ways to limit access to certain kinds of Internet sites at work. If it’s less available, it funnels people back to what they should be doing. That doesn`t mean that companies don’t want their employees to have any time away,” Challenger adds. To set parameters on personal Internet use at work, companies may set certain hours when it’s allowed, post guidelines in personal use, or make a technological adaptation such as filters. “Some might just monitor use more closely and address it with the people that are really abusing it, individually, rather than making an organizational issue out of it,” he says.
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