<p>A cyberslacker is defined as an employee who uses the Internet and mobile technology during work hours to surf the net, shop, play games, check stock prices, etc.</p>
<p>I haven’t worked in over 20 years. We had PCs but no Internet access back in 1992. I spend a couple of hours each day on the Internet here at home. Personally, I find that reading the CC forum can be rather addicting. Judging by the frequency I see other people posting on the forum, others must feel the same way.</p>
<p>I asked my DH about the cyberslacking phenomenon. He never uses the Internet for personal use or for checking his personal e-mail during the workday. He expects the same of all 52 employees he manages at work. However, I think he’s probably in the minority. My gut feeling is that the younger the employee, the more time they spend online at work. I did find a study in the journal “Computers in Human Behavior” that indicated that young, male employees are more likely to be cyberslackers. </p>
<p>I did a bit of research. Here are a few stats:</p>
<p>– On average, office workers spend 21 hours per week online at the office (4.2 hours per day)</p>
<p>– 30 to 40% of internet access is spent on non-work related browsing</p>
<p>– A staggering 60% of all online purchases are made during working hours</p>
<p>– 64% of employees say they use the Internet for personal interest during working hours</p>
<p>– 30-40% of lost productivity is accounted for by cyber-slacking</p>
<p>How do you feel about cyberslacking? If you approve, how much time do you think is acceptable? Do you have any observations from your workplace?</p>
<p>Anybody? I usually have pretty good luck coming up with topics. Guess this one is a bust. No one has anything at all to say about going on the Internet while at work?</p>
<p>I don’t work so cannot comment but I made a conscious decision not to get a data plan on my phone so I can be unconnected at least when I am out of the house. I spend way too much time on the computer when I’m home - especially in the winter.</p>
<p>I’m disappointed that only two people posted a response to my thread. </p>
<p>I guess I’ll just go ahead and answer the questions from my original post in hopes it will get a discussion started.</p>
<p>Do you approve of cyberslacking?</p>
<p>I haven’t worked in over 20 years. Since most companies didn’t have computers with Internet access in the early 90’s, cyberslacking was not something that happened. Back then, I would compare it to sitting at your desk and reading a book or magazine when you should be working. Personally, I never did that. I would occasionally make personal phone calls such as making a doctor’s appt. My answer to that question is that generally I don’t approve of cyberslacking.</p>
<p>If you approve, how much time do you think is acceptable?</p>
<p>According to study surveys, the average employee spends between 1-2 hours each day using the Internet for personal reasons. I suppose that 15-30 minutes would be okay, but definitely not 1 or more hours per day.</p>
<p>Do you have any observations from your workplace?</p>
<p>No because I don’t work. However, I’ll share a few stories I’ve heard that truly shocked me. A school principal spent most of her time in her office playing online games. She abruptly retired in the middle of the year which is almost unheard of. Some speculated she may have been asked to retire. A coworker of a friend who worked for the govt would spend most of his day online. Then he would sleep at his desk for an hour. He was making about $120K/year. A division manager where I used to work in the 80’s would spend at least 1-2 hours each day reading the WSJ in his corner office. If that were now, he would probably be reading it online.</p>
<p>I read that many work places now monitor their employees’ Internet usage. Some are blocking access to social media web sites, webmail sites, etc. I’m not sure if anyone is being warned or fired for excessive use.</p>
<p>It seems that the loss of productivity due to cyberslacking could be a huge financial drain on companies as well as our economy.</p>
<p>I believe that my opinions about cyberslacking may not be widely held by other people. Perhaps it has become so pervasive that it’s viewed as being perfectly acceptable.</p>
<p>Guilty. I’m at work right now posting from phone. </p>
<p>However, I work in a bureaucratic nightmare with a new draconian director who needs to approve every little thing I do. Literally I can’t do any project without his direct approval. Not even my boss can approve it. </p>
<p>I’ve been waiting for a new project for three weeks. Email every other day. Otherwise, I’m generally productive at work.</p>
<p>My D had a summer internship last year where she worked in an office. I emphasized that she should not be going on FB or other social media web sites when she was working. Nor should she spend excessive amounts of time texting friends. I don’t know if I’m just being “old school” about this.</p>
<p>It really depends. At my internship, I never used the internet for personal use because I never had time. At my other job, we’re definitely allowed because there’s quite a bit of downtime. Here… Well, it’s this or stare at a blank screen.</p>
<p>Productivity could be reduced if employees are not allowed to CC.
But employees should have some ethics. CC when you are idling, on break, on lunch break, in early morning, before going home. Don’t CC when you have hot deadlines. Your productivity level tells you should CC or not.</p>
<p>I work from home so get to run my own schedule but I think that CC is widely accepted so is not a big deal anymore. Not that it wouldn’t help with productivity to reduce the percentage of time spent doing it! However, we have had a super increase in productivity with these technologies so it probably evens out, right? But blocking social media and some other types of access is not a bad approach. When I did work in an office setting things such as ebay were blocked, so probably blocking facebook would help with the time drain.</p>
<p>My most recent position was doing restoration/habitat work. So not at a desk.
My H works at a factory & they have issued him a laptop, but I doubt if he gets personal email & he reads the paper & such online only during breaks or when it is really slow.</p>
<p>I do agree that office type workers may have a hard time with the distraction.
The most egregious example I can think of that Ive personally witnessed was the district superintendent playing on her Blackberry during public board meetings.</p>
<p>However I would have welcomed a desk computer when I did work in an office, as periodically the mainframe would go offline and we would be waiting for it to be up again. In the meantime we would have to look busy, even though we couldnt work on anything.</p>
<p>My H rarely ever does any cyberslacking because he gets interrupted regularly at work to do troubleshooting. I can only remember him looking once (in >44 years at work) for an item we needed to purchase for D as her plane was landing while H was at work, other than that I don’t think he does non-work browsing at work.</p>
<p>Don’t know about others, but suspect at some jobs cyberslacking is MUCH more common than others. Since I work from home & only am paid for the hours I actually work, this doesn’t apply to me. Part of my job IS to acquire things on-line for my organization.</p>
<p>In my work there is a blending of work and home life since we can all work anywhere a broadband connection is available. So I can work early in the morning from home, come into the office, go home, eat dinner at my home office, work at night, on the weekends.</p>
<p>I read my work email on my iPhone. If someone needs something at 11:30 PM and I’m not logged in, then I decide whether I want to answer or perform some task then or if it can wait until the morning. We have team members on the other side of the world and sometimes they don’t want to wait another day for an answer.</p>
<p>I also pay for my own wireless hotspot so that I can work from remote locations. We’re generally expected to watch and answer email while on vacation and sometimes do small work projects.</p>
<p>Since you brought up working from home . . . My brother works in upper level management for the federal govt. He is allowed to work from home 2 days a week. He only has to be available to take phone calls or occasionally answer e-mails. So he can be anywhere on his 2 days when he is “working from home.” Since he works from home on Fridays and Mondays, he is most often somewhere for a long weekend. In fact, he was recently in Hawaii for a long weekend when he was “working from home.” Call me jealous, but I wish I had a job like that.</p>
<p>It may be that the value of his answering phone calls and emails is very high and that this is a kind of standby pay.</p>
<p>I can work on the beach if I want to - I just need a cellular modem signal. One of my friends works from home or from his girlfriend’s beach home or her home. He just needs a laptop. His manager is 3,000 miles from our building so he doesn’t communicate with a local group. He just put in his notice to retire early - I think that he should stay on and his management would like to work something out with him. I suggest to him that he should work out a deal where he’s paid full-time for 20 hours a week of work.</p>
<p>I typically eat lunch at my desk and spend part of the hour browsing the internet, doing online shopping on my company’s website (if I place an order at lunch, I can pick it up at the end of the day), and sometimes check my personal email. I don’t go on Facebook on my work computer, but I will check it on my cell phone (during lunch). </p>
<p>I’m generally busy and if there’s not a specific project that I can be working on (which is pretty much never), there’s other work-related stuff that I can fill my time with. As long as I’m not on lunch, I’m doing something work-related.</p>
<p>People at my job have been disciplined for excessive Internet usage. It was not really straight forward slacking. It was lab people who had to sit and monitor process equipment, or had down time while waiting for something. </p>
<p>I spend lots of time on the computer buying things for our company. I used to pop in here now and then, or do some minor surfing. Not anymore.</p>
<p>They have all kinds of monitoring software, so anyone that does cyber slack is looking for trouble.</p>
Judging by the frequency I see other people posting on the forum, others must feel the same way.</p>