Internet Usage at Work is a Good Thing
Saturday, April 4th, 2009Finally, there’s a study that shows empirically what most of us have known all along: personal Internet usage at work actually boosts employee productivity.
The study was conducted by Dr. Brent Coker from the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne and you can read about it here:
- University of Melbourne Media Release – Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure
- Ars Technica – Study: surfing the Internet at work boosts productivity
- Michael Specht – Internet usage at work makes you productive
According to Coker’s research:
“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.”
It’s About More Than Just Productivity
But it’s not just about productivity, as Specht points out, it’s also about trusting and respecting your employees.
I personally dislike companies that prohibit what Coker calls Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) with the justification that when you’re at work, you should be doing nothing but work. That’s just silly because it’s a completely unrealistic notion of what work is. Work is a subset of life, not the other way round. So you can’t exactly ignore the rest of your life – or, indeed, the rest of the world – while you’re at work.
[There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. It’s okay to apply principles of Taylorism to, say, when you’re working in the kitchen at McDonalds. It’s just that you shouldn’t extend those principles to when your employees are not doing those specific kinds of tasks.]
The problem with a lot of companies is that, while they understand this basic principle (i.e. that there is life outside of work, even between the hours of 9am and 5pm), they aren’t tech-savvy enough to see that this also applies to using the Internet. Companies will, for example, do things like allow flexible working hours so you can do your banking during your lunch hour or go as far as to provide coffee machines and televisions in their kitchens and lounges so you can take a really good break during the work day. And yet, these same companies will block the use of webmail services, social networking sites, and online video sites which, to people like me, are pretty much the virtual equivalent of the kitchen and lounge (and sometimes the preferred equivalent).
So What’s the Problem?
Part of the problem, as has been pointed out in the past, is the generational disconnect between the Baby Boomers, Gen-X, and Gen-Y. That is, there exist numerous members of older generations who don’t understand that, for some members of the younger generation, a good work break could be eight minutes of e-mailing and checking on your social networks, four minutes of going through photos of your newborn niece, and three minutes of watching the latest viral video that’s making the rounds. And this disconnect is understandable. However it is then the job of middle managers to convince senior managers that this kind of personal Internet usage is actually okay.
Another part of the problem are the reports written by generally Internet-clueless analysts on how much companies are “losing” by letting employees access social media or online video sites during work hours. What tends to happen is this calculation:
- Think of an average employee who earns 50k a year; that’s $25 an hour.
- If this person spends, on average, 30 minutes a day on Facebook and Gmail. That translates to $12.50 per day “lost”.
- So, for the 250 days a year that this person works, the company is “losing” $3,125.
- If this company had 400 employees, the company would be losing 1.25 million dollars per year on employees accessing webmail and social networking sites.
Company executives look at this calculation and exclaim: “What?! We’re paying our employees $1.25m to access Facebook and Gmail! Block both those sites!”
The problem, of course, is that while the calculation is essentially correct, the reasoning behind it is flawed. The reasoning being that you are paying your average employee exactly 41.6c per minute to work for you and that every minute this employee does something other than work your money is being wasted. Now if this person was working on an assembly line, your loss-per-minute-not-worked calculation would be valid. But for every other employee, it’s not.
Why is it not valid? Because your employee is human – who has human wants and needs – and it is unreasonable to treat this person like a work-producing automaton upon whom you can do this kind of dehumanising calculation.
To Conclude
My point, then, is that studies like Coker’s are really useful because they empirically demonstrate that you can’t blindly apply principles of scientific management (i.e. Taylorism) across an entire organization.
And because these studies come from a business department of a large and well-respected university – and they use terms that businesses understand (specifically, ‘productivity’) – they will probably do some good.
If nothing else, reports like this tend to make their way into business magazines and give executives something to think about. This particular study may not get companies to unblock access to webmail services and social media sites, but it’s a start.
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P.S. What’s almost funny are the companies that are so completely disconnected for what’s going on online that they don’t even know what Facebook is and therefore don’t have a policy on whether they should block it or not!
Carl Joseph said,
April 5, 2009 @ 8:30 pm
Great article and analysis of the issue Ameel. Thanks for putting it so well.
I recall reading a number of years ago that knowledge workers do tend to need breaks during the day. There is no way that a person can “work” consistently from 9-5 and only take mental breaks during lunch.
What better way to use this time getting involved in the new technologies and “social outlets” that might actually be useful for the company down the track.
Scott Arbeitman said,
April 8, 2009 @ 8:17 pm
The flawed logic of so-called lost productivity is just a symptom. The truth is that salary and considering wages based on time is becoming dated very quickly. Progressive companies pay a salary regardless of when you work or how often. They consider outcomes instead. Of course, this requires that an employer attempt to quantify the value-add of each employee. This is both a difficult undertaking and requires more administrative overhead than is desired. But ultimately, it presents a better picture of each employee’s worth and should result in the need for less management over time, not more.
Imagine the “lost productivity” in blocking web sites or approving annual leave. This would all be eliminated once the salary paradigm has shifted.
Carl Joseph said,
April 8, 2009 @ 9:23 pm
Reminds me of a quote I heard somewhere which went something like “We use amazing technology every day of our lives … then we come to work.”
Is this more about being allowed to bring your social life and norms into the workplace? As opposed to having work norms and social norms separately. Therefore providing a means for work to “leak” into non-work time and vice-versa?
TWIT spoke very briefly about this in their recent episode (http://twit.tv/189 right at the end).
Ameel Khan said,
April 8, 2009 @ 11:48 pm
Carl: I think most knowledge workers know that, the less exciting or challenging the work they’re doing, the more such mental breaks they need. I haven’t listened to TWiT 189 yet but I’ll get back to you once I do. Brilliant quote, by the way :)
Scott: You’re right, the whole definition of work is changing; particularly in post-industrial or service economies. And an employee’s value-add can be quite difficult to quantify when you’re still (a) measuring only their productivity or (b) using how busy they are between the hours of 9am and 5pm as a proxy for how much work they’re doing. Unfortunately, paradigm shifts necessarily take time. Fortunately, we have plenty of Web Workers out there who are actively shifting perceptions of what ‘work’ is so it might not take as long as one would pessimistically predict.
Carl: Part of the problem is about the traditional separation of social life and work life. Somewhat enlightened companies do things like provide flexible working hours and let your social life meet with your work life every now and then. They also do things like discourage working more than 40 hours a week so you can have a good “work-life balance”.
More enlightened companies go a step further and are flexible both about your work timings and your physical location when you do work (i.e. they’re comfortable with the concept of Web Workers and with the use of social media). Even more enlightened companies recognize that you have two social lives: one outside of work and one at work. These companies then take steps to nurture both of those and provide ample opportunity for the two to overlap (sometimes by actively engaging both social lives using social media).
Ameel Khan said,
April 8, 2009 @ 11:51 pm
Laurel Papworth recently wrote a blog post that suggests one way in which you can can get senior management to unblock access to social media at work: http://tinyurl.com/dltwy9. Any thoughts on that?
Carl Joseph » Blog Archive » More on internet usage at work … said,
April 9, 2009 @ 2:19 pm
[...] employees more productive has been doing the rounds lately. After reading the article, various blog posts, being in a “feedback” style meeting yesterday and then listening to a This Week In [...]
Scott Arbeitman said,
April 9, 2009 @ 2:35 pm
@Ameel:I had a look at the blog post. It really seems to borrow themes from what Carl is saying regarding social norms. By agreeing and then enforcing the social norms regarding the use social networking sites, we are saying that these are our values and we expect everyone to agree. Those who break the policy don’t share these cultural norms, and this doesn’t just present a problem vis-a-vis social networks, but to all facets of this person’s work.
Ameel Khan said,
April 9, 2009 @ 5:45 pm
@Scott: Exactly — that post is all about making work-oriented social media norms explicit, democratically agreed-upon, and then enforceable by senior managers.
That said, I have two problems with the approach itself. The first is that you’re making fun of senior management when you imply that they’re clueless “morons” who don’t understand social media. While it’s well and good to use the reductio ad absurdum technique on the objections that they raise against using social media at work, you risk ticking them off it you at any point imply that they themselves are idiots.
The second is that, in the real world, senior management might not take too kindly to your essentially blackmailing them into getting social media unblocked. The blackmail being that you are threatening to expose them as managers who don’t listen to what everyone else in the company agrees with if they don’t agree to your terms and unblock social media sites.
In my opinion, to do things this way you either need to be part of the senior management itself or you need to have the strong support of at least one influential senior manager. If not, you need to have senior management involved at each stage of this process.
Personally, I’d move a lot slower and would first attempt to get key influencers excited about, and ideally heavily involved in, social media. These influencers would be at different levels and in different departments within the company. Only once that was accomplished would I move to the lunchtime sessions stage.
In general, though, it’s a good strategy to adopt because, ultimately, social media use comes from the ground-up. And if it doesn’t come from the ground-up it doesn’t often work and rarely does it sustain itself over a longer period of time.
Internet Usage at Work Follow-Up : Ameel’s Career & MBA Exposition (ACME) said,
April 20, 2009 @ 3:42 pm
[...] Internet Usage at Work is a Good Thing [...]