Nearly a half of British employees shop or read news online during work, a third spends time on social media, but generally women waste less time than men, according to new research. The newest study by Safetica about employees’ online behaviour reveals loosening work ethics as British employees tell their favourite distractions and display gender […]
Nearly a half of British employees shop or read news online during work, a third spends time on social media, but generally women waste less time than men, according to new research.
The newest study by Safetica about employees’ online behaviour reveals loosening work ethics as British employees tell their favourite distractions and display gender inequality when it comes to wasting time.
The introduction of computers and the internet into the work environment promised increased efficiency and higher work results, but people being people, they ended up counterbalancing that by doing all sorts of other things online. To find out what’s their favourite distraction, Safetica, the provider of employee monitoring software, commissioned a survey in Great Britain, from TNS Omnibus, carried out among 670 employees.
As it turns out, nearly a half of employees admit to spending time reading online news websites or shopping online, on sites like eBay, Amazon and brand stores. Over a third spend time on social media like Twitter and Facebook at work and almost a quarter watch online videos on YouTube or listen to online radios. Other categories scored under ten per cent, and about a quarter employees do not have access to internet at work.
If there’s anyone sympathising with male chauvinist views still around, they might not be too pleased with some of the additional findings.
The demographic breakdown shows that younger males lead in bad habits in all categories, except online shopping and reading news, where older males are first. Females work with internet less, but then they do, they waste much less time online in all categories, except when it comes to shopping or social media, where they beat men by a few percentage points.
Another interesting find is that the higher social class got as much as twice higher scores in reading news (54% vs. 26%) and online shopping (47% vs. 35%), are about tied with the lower class in social media (38% vs. 35%) and video and music sites (22% vs. 20%), but don’t seem to care about funny images (7% vs. 10%) and gaming (6% vs. 13%) as much.
So, we can speculate that while those better off prefer staying on top of global affairs and shopping while they should be working, the working class brighten their day by reading about the next version of Grand Theft Auto on gamers sites and laughing at funny cat pictures? Well, at least both classes share about the same level of interest in scantily dressed ladies on adult websites (9% of males and only 2% of females admitted to visiting those during work hours). But wouldn’t necessarily offer this paragraph as research with serious scientific merit, as several of these sub-statistic results had less than 50 answers, which would tend to produce a larger margin of error. Stats are funny like that.
In either case, regardless of demographic peculiarities, employers and employees should ask themselves whether the workplace really is the right place for their private online activities and whether steps should be taken to change the currently measured situation in any way.
Safetica UK recommends:
• Monitor employee browsing at work and limit it only if it is deterrent to the work process. We recommend primarily monitoring, as in the case that work and efficiency requirements are met, restricting employees’ browsing freedom can have a demotivating effect on them.
• For work tasks where such use is required, prepare a set of clear guidelines what should not be done. Such as not clicking suspicious links, installing apps and games, disclosing sensitive info to various websites, as many malicious and phishing sites are out there among the legitimate ones, trying to breach company security and access their data.
• Ensure that even if employees decide to disregard the rules, company data and computer infrastructure cannot be compromised by a chance infection or data breach.
Source: www.safetica.co.uk
