It must be one of the great dirty little secrets of all time. We never seem to see any research on what an unmitigated disaster the internet at work is for productivity. We all constantly hear from others of the amount of time they spend at work on personal games, chat, e-mail, twitter ( twit… indeed), porn, ebay, sports, craigslist, shopping, etc. etc. I have stood in line trying to buy a $700. item while the clerk continued with his chatting. A couple customers, including me, just walked out as time passed. He was not shy about what he was doing.
I know so many execs and managers who get 100s of overkill e-mails daily and have to troll through them trying to decide what to deal with, respond to, or delete and yet get on to a day’s essential work.
I had an employee in a busy and critical position who had access to the internet on his desk. It was the nature of my work that I travelled a great deal and even when home, I was often out of the office. When he finally departed my employ after five years, it took him five hours on a high speed computer to clear out the porn he had saved. Even after that, the woman who took his position encountered jpgs of him engaged in the most repulsive sex acts (this was NOT a handsome nor fit person). She said it was just about the worst day of her life. Later my computer tech was working on the same computer and encountered still more porn.
If I had a business again, I would put one or more computers with internet access in the middle of a room with maximum visibility and with no chair for all to use as needed.
I don’t think the internet made slacking at work any worse. Back in the days, employees brought a novel, or a crossword book, or a Game Boy for recreation during off-peak hours. And almost every company has content filters to block out the worst offenders from your list.
People will get distracted from time to time. That’s no dirty little secret, that’s human nature.
Huh… I was under the impression that businesses routinely supervise their employees. As in, monitoring what those employees do and holding them accountable to meeting work objectives.
You can install software on computers that will take screenshots every few minutes so that a manager can review activity. You can block websites and track Internet traffic through a router.
For example, when I left my employees unsupervised during a week-long trip, I checked their browsing history when I returned. The one who spent all week playing World of Warcraft through a web proxy got fired. The one who took advantage of the slow week and used the Internet to learn how to do their job better was retained.
I’m not arguing that anyone should be able to slack off, but that sounds like a pretty absurd overreaction, and a pretty useless solution. What use are office computers that are cut off from the internet? What use is a standalone ‘internet terminal’?
It would be easier just to set up a bit of filtering.
I have nothing else to do but spend most of my time at work on the Internet (or reading or playing Animal Crossing). I don’t even have to feel guilty about it.
Hello! And welcome to the internet! …guy from before 1995.
I have to question what sort of “busy and critical position” allows an employee time to accumulate so much porn on their work PC that it takes “five hours to clear out” without his boss knowing what he’s doing.
And you know there are technology solutions to automatically prevent employees from surfing the web to web mail (Gmail), social networking (Facebook), porn, gaming and other non-work related sites?
The internet is certainly a disaster for companies that still don’t know how to use the internet.
Productivity in this country continues to rise, modestly, but rise, not fall, even as more and more internet/computer based distractions are invented. And there’s been more than a small amount of research that shows many people are more productive if they take brief breaks for non-work related activities, whether that’s a leisurely stroll to the vending machines or watching a funny animal video on YouTube. There are also people (though fewer than they think) who are more productive when multitasking.
Someone whose porn stash takes multiple hours to delete doesn’t have a problem because they have internet access, they have a problem because they’re an addict, just the same as someone who brought their drug use into the workplace. It’s silly to conflate the two. If he hadn’t had internet access on his work computer, he would’ve been using his smartphone, or bringing in magazines.
Sounds like he was copying his porn collection somewhere rather than just “clearing it out”. I have difficulty believing it would take several hours just to delete even a large library of porn (or was he looking at each one just for old time’s sake? :D)
Can’t imagine why you wouldn’t just format and reinstall rather than spend 5 hours on a “high speed computer” manually removing the porn. Sounds like it was way overdue for a fresh install of Windows anyway.
Whether or not you have a point about the internet and productivity, you might want to drop that anecdote from your spiel as it isn’t an internet fail story - it’s a management, supervision and IT policy fail.
As it happens, I worked in a place (as IT manager, of all things) where the head guy wanted email and web to be on one shared machine in the middle of the main office. It was ridiculous.
I mean, there wasn’t even a network installed when I started there, so we had critical data sitting on standalone machines, being backed up on floppy disks once a week.
I had a network installed and a fileserver with tape backup, but persuading the boss to let me put email and the web on everyone’s desktop was nearly impossible - he kept on saying things like “OK, but I want it to be a one-way connection” (erm… One way? which way? - you want them to be able to send mail, but not receive it? Or the other way around? You want them to be able to input a search on the web, but not see the results?)
I did win in the end.
I still work in IT now - my job would be impossible without web access. I can’t possibly know the answer to every issue with which I am faced - so I have to know how to find the answer. I can’t manage my product roadmaps without access to supplier release information, and so on.
I seriously doubt people were more productive pre-Internet than they are now. Back in the day, people would spend all day at the library doing basic research. Now, that research takes minutes.
We have a 30-minute rule at my workplace. We have 30 minutes (during our lunch break) to play on the internet. Personally, I don’t have the discipline to do all of my surfing during my lunch break, but I do try to keep my web recreation to the time limit. One trick I use is to read science articles that are at least tangentially related to my work. I could see me getting fired for posting on the Straight Dope. But I seriously can’t see anyone even writing me up for, say, reading about nanoparticles on Wikipedia. The truth is that as a scientist, I need to know stuff like this. It’s better than me working on a crossword puzzle, which is what some coworkers do.
Anyone in this day and age who uses their work computer to watch porn has a severe problem and is just asking to be in trouble.
(I wonder what workplaces are doing now that people have smartphones and tablets? Now that I have a mobile hotspot for my Kindle, I know my internet breaks have gotten more indulgent.)
That’s the better question, I think. Workplaces can and do put controls on the internet at the desktops/laptops, but I see people on their smartphones all day, every day instead of working - the texting never ends.
I don’t think, in most work environments, strict monitoring is the way to go. If the employee is getting their shit done, then I don’t have a problem with some personal business during the day. If things aren’t getting done, is it one person or pervasive? If pervasive, maybe then some kind of monitoring needs to be put into place. If it’s one person, deal with that one person.
Last job I had sort of slid into letting people use the internet other than just the company intranet, then had a hissy fit when a couple people abused it. There was a huge blowup about it, and I was one of the people accused of abusing it [near as I can tell based on someone seeing google up on my monitor]
When they went through the computer history of the 11 people in the ‘dragnet’ I was the only one that had absolutely nothing other than work related internet activity. The only time I went online was on break or at lunch on my smartphone, and I was the only one actively using spam filters properly. :rolleyes:
If I wanted to kill time, I would have had to find time I wasn’t actively doing something to kill.
Hell, in my first job out of college, the amount of time spent by the employees in drinking coffee and wandering around the cubicles chatting with each other was obnoxious. (most people didn’t have internet access- just a few execs, IT folks, and software development types) They’d literally take an unofficially scheduled break at about 10 am, and go to the break room, where about 15 people would hang out and drink coffee and chat.
Nowadays where I work, people IM each other, and/or fart around on the internet when they don’t feel like doing actual work rather than wander around aimlessly talking to each other and drinking crazy quantities of coffee.
FWIW, I actually got my ass chewed for surfing the internet too much at a job; they let me off the hook when I pointed out that I neither smoked, nor did I go wander around the facility drinking coffee with everyone, and instead I read the Straight Dope and stayed at my desk.
Without the internet I would literally not be able to do my job. I’m a work-comp legal secretary in California. Our work-comp court system is all online now. I can download forms, check on information about a case, and e-file important documents. So, in our case the internet at work is a necessity, not a disaster. Do some people abuse it? Sure. And some abuse break times, and some spend too much time chatting. At least the person goofing on the internet isn’t preventing me from doing my work like the loud chatters are - I can’t hear what I’m transcribing with you lot yammering away!
- you want them to be able to send mail, but not receive it? Or the other way around? You want them to be able to input a search on the web, but not see the results?)