KEY POINTS:
The surging popularity of the internet as a social networking tool and an entertainment medium creates a quandary for businesses.
Down in the cubicle farm, staff with internet access face the daily temptation of dropping what they're paid to do in favour of logging on to Facebook, checking
new listings on Trade Me or watching a few online video clips.
As this column reported in January, there is even a growing advertising industry based around cashing in on distracted office workers' predilection for snatching some entertainment during office hours.
In New Zealand, ventures such as Mintshot reward users for watching ads over the internet.
Because this country still has a relatively low percentage of broadband connections in the home, it's not surprising many Mintshot viewers, digital photo uploaders and web video aficionados choose to engage in their online pastimes via the boss's internet connection during work hours.
Frazzled employers are getting stung on two fronts. They are paying for the bandwidth these activities chew through and for the lost productivity of staff who should be working rather than browsing.
An Australian study last year by internet security company SurfControl suggested one employee wasting one hour a day of work time on sites such as Facebook could cost a business A$6200 ($7212) a year. Managers in New Zealand said the local figures would be about the same.
While an increasing number of businesses are resorting to blocking access to web addresses they deem to be non-work related, there is a compelling argument this is not an effective solution.
With the labour market being tight, and with a growing proportion of workers coming from the tech-savvy Generation Y demographic, imposing a censored web regime is not a clever way for a business to act if it wants to attract the best staff.
IT firm Unisys says its research suggests 60 per cent of organisations allow their technology to be used by staff for personal as well as business purposes.
"Organisations whose employees can set their own working parameters, like when and where they work and what technology they use, are likely to be more engaged, satisfied and productive as they create a personalised work-life balance," says Unisys New Zealand managing director Brett Hodgson.
There is also an argument that the social networking phenomenon and the Web 2.0 breed of interactive, online community-focused sites have a place in the workplace because they can be morphed into tools for encouraging collaboration between workers.
There is a booming software industry based on developing "Enterprise 2.0" technologies aimed at harnessing the enthusiasm workers have for personal-time social networking, and bringing it into a work context.
"Enterprise 2.0 is emerging as the most practical way of sharing and managing knowledge in a range of contexts," says Steve Hodgkinson of IT research firm Ovum. Networking is indeed a vital part for some jobs. No doubt corporate deals have been done as a result of Facebook connections.
One solution to the problem of how to stop staff wasting hours of work time on unproductive websites involves taking a very web 2.0/sharing kind of approach.
A web use monitoring product called Interscepter allows staff within an organisation to call up reports on their own browsing history, as well as giving managers real-time access to that same information.
"The transparent nature of the information breeds self-management of internet behaviour in a positive way, rather than forced management," says Neil Sherratt of Bizibox, the company that sells Interscepter in New Zealand.
Sherratt said he recently sold the product to a local government organisation which expected to recover the cost of its investment in just one month. The organisation previously kept logs of websites visited by staff and tasked its IT department with the job of going through a process of printing monthly reports for line managers.
"With Interscepter, line managers can see what their staff are doing in real time and are able to deal with any issues immediately," says Sherratt. "Employees can also see what they are doing, so it's not a Big Brother issue."