We’ve explored many facets of productivity lately—tips for middle-market business owners, ways to boost productivity in the home office, what bosses do to bring down productivity, how a work-life balance increases it—but we haven’t explored what employees actually do when they are being unproductive.
I ran across an infographic packed with interesting statistics about just that—what employees do when they’re wasting company time. For instance, the infographic says 40 percent of estimated productivity loss is from nonwork-related Internet surfing, and 31.2 percent of workers feel that it is appropriate to surf nonwork-related sites at the office.
So what do employees do when they don’t feel like working? According the graphic, 48 percent surf the web, 33 percent socialize with co-workers and 30 percent reported conducting personal business.
Since so much of lost time is attributed to the Internet, the infographic also provides information about personal email and social media usage. Not surprising, the number one blacklisted website among businesses is Facebook, according to OpenDNS, followed by MySpace and YouTube.
Besides revoking access to certain sites, 45 percent of employers track content using network level software to monitor employees’ Internet usage, and 43 percent also monitor company emails. Interestingly, the infographic cites that 40 percent of companies actually assign someone to manually read and review emails sent on company time.
Even though Facebook is the most blacklisted website, still only 25 percent of companies surveyed wrote and implemented a social media policy, and then 36 percent acknowledged that a social media policy was needed but was not yet planned, showing that a good number of companies are slow to adapt to the online world.
Those stats that I just shared are only scratching the surface. Check out the graphic below for more. And let us know what techniques you are using to keep wasted work hours at a minimum. How does a small business effectively monitor its employees’ Internet usage on a limited budget?
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