The cost of worktime surfing

The internet is a constant source of fascinating information, and surveys are a particular favourite of mine - I find them endlessly interesting.

But I have a column to write, so I'd better get on with it. However, I can't leave the internet without sharing some revealing information about how much use workers make of the web for personal matters during work time.

If you're an employer, check out the Websense site at www.websense.com. This US vendor of web monitoring software has some absorbing statistics on internet usage. It found that, during the nine-to-five work day, 70 per cent of all web porn traffic occurs, 30 to 40 per cent of web surfing is not business-related, and more than 60 per cent of online purchases are made.

"Haven't these workers got something better to do, like, er, work?" I hear you say. Well to be fair, the same source revealed that about a third of US companies had disciplined staff for internet misuse in the past year, with most incidents related to porn surfing.

Pulling a FAST one

Meanwhile, yet another survey, this time from FAST Corporate Services, estimated that "recreational use" of the internet at work costs UK industry around £350m in lost productivity per year.

Every day, UK workers send about 4.5 million emails which are not all strictly work related, and roughly half of all workers say they receive pornographic, racist, sexist or other inappropriate email at work.

This sounds pretty serious, but it seems that most email is a waste of bandwidth. A recent survey from Gartner classified no less than 34 per cent of internal business mail as "useless".

But I haven't quite finished with my survey of surveys of workers' online habits. Even more hair-raising stuff is to be found at the Vault website, www.vault.com/surveys/internetuse2000/index2000.jsp. Its survey reveals that 15 per cent confess to surfing constantly, 22 per cent spend an hour a day surfing, and half send or receive up to five non-work related emails daily.

Almost three-quarters looked at news sites, just under half planned their holidays, and about a third looked for jobs. Curiously, only four per cent owned up to looking at porn sites, which sounds a few orders of magnitude light to me.

But at least the staff realised the errors of their ways - over a third admitted that web surfing and sending private emails reduced productivity.

Unsurprisingly, employers took a less liberal attitude to private web surfing - 15 per cent thought that staff shouldn't be allowed any web access, but 25 per cent would tolerate half an hour to an hour per day.

They were split on the issue of reduced productivity. A US Treasury Department report revealed that more than half the time that Internal Revenue Service employees spend on the internet is for personal purposes.

The report went on to say that one individual attempted to access more than 172,000 internet web objects, with more than 120 hours of access transmission time during a 21-day period.

Sounds pretty depressing, doesn't it? On the basis of figures like these, I reckon there's a pretty good case to be made for removing web access from the vast majority of workstations - it could seriously impact productivity for the better. After all, we don't let staff watch TV while they're at work, so why should we put entertainment channels on their desktops?

Unpaid overtime

But there's another side to this coin. As well as paying a visit to the Websense site, employers should visit the TUC presence at www.tuc.org.uk.

Last summer, it conducted its Labour Force Survey on unpaid overtime and concluded that employers save some £23bn in respect of unpaid overtime, equivalent to £4000 for the average long-hours worker. In fact, further research conducted by the TUC reveals that these figures might actually be an underestimate.

UK employees work longer hours than any of their European Union counterparts and this has resulted in an epidemic of workplace stress. Curiously, a staggering 85 per cent said that they found their work enjoyable and fulfilling, yet slightly more than half said they also found it hard to cope with the pressure.

As you'd expect, the amount of unpaid overtime varies with position, with managers working the most. But even clerical staff work, on average, an extra 3.8 hours every week.

I reckon there's a quid pro quo here - maybe it's not unreasonable for staff to use the web for things they'd normally do in their own time, in return for a bit of unpaid overtime. I mean, £350m in lost productivity in return for £23bn knocked off the wages bill sounds like a good deal for employers, no?

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