Slackers hurting net result

The private lives of employees are encroaching on work time. Photo / Claire De Barr

Staff wasting time at work surfing the net and sending emails to friends are costing Kiwi businesses millions of dollars a year in lost productivity.

Doing the maths on how badly firms can suffer as a result of staff surfing the day away is pretty easy. In New Zealand for example, Trade Me attracts 460,000 unique visitors a day and each spends around 18 minutes listing, browsing and bidding on the website. Over 12 months that adds up to more than 15 years of surfing this auction site alone.

If all those 460,000 people access Trade Me during work time, and each earns a conservative $20 an hour, then the cost to businesses is $2.7 million a day.

In addition, plenty of people use the net to catch up with friends on social networking sites, watch video, chance their arm at online gambling, do internet banking and book holidays and cinema tickets. So these figures on non-work related net use may be just the tip of the iceberg.

It seems for many people the distraction and ease of access to the internet is just too hard to resist. For this reason some firms are starting to block certain sites during normal working hours - opening up blocked sites during the lunchtime.

Bandwidth theft is another issue affecting employers. One of the ways this happens is when staff use a company computer to download files to portable music players such as iPods or download software to a USB memory card for use at home. It all adds up to a drain on company resources and contributes to clogging up the company computer network. Which is probably why the staff usage predictions of IT managers can go out the window.

A study by staff at Monash University in Australia has found that workers are spending more than a quarter of their work time doing non-work related activities. The study, Internet Use and Misuse in the Workplace, looked at the prevalence of cyber-slacking, a term that refers to both surfing and emailing for personal correspondence.

Dr James Phillips and Kerryann Wyatt, from Monash's School of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine in Victoria, assessed the internet use of 83 volunteers that took part in a survey in 2006.

The questionnaire broke internet use into the following applications: email use, searches, e-commerce, games and downloading. Those surveyed were asked how often or for how long they spent each week using the internet for these purposes at work.

Phillips says the survey has identified not only how much time is wasted by workers using computers, but the personality traits bosses can watch out for - neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness.