Looks like UK workers are taking their Facebook and Twitting duties quite seriously. This type of behavior is reportedly costing British businesses millions. According a poll conducted by British employment website MyJobGroup on about 1000 workers in the UK, nearly 6 percent (equaling about 2 million) out of the UK’s 34 million workforce spends over an hour a day, while at work, checking out what their friends are doing on Facebook or other networking sites. This sometimes means more than one eighth of a workday goes to the personal entertainment of the employee. Another 55 percent admit to occasionally accessing social media from their work computers. The productivity of companies is said to be suffering as a result.
“Our results clearly show that UK workers are spending increased time whilst at work on social media networks, which, left unchecked, could have negative repercussions on the productivity of many companies across the country,” Managing Director of Myjobgroup.co.uk Lee Fayer said in a statement with the results of the survey.
If companies have a bad opinion about social networking sites, employees think it’s actually ok to sit an hour on Twitter, claiming that it’s not affecting their productivity at all. Some others actually believe that Facebook or Twitter is making them more productive. Now it’s also true that the social networking sites can be very helpful to an employee in some cases. News travel quite fast through Twitter and people working in the media industry could benefit from such information. Blogs can also offer invaluable information for people who are doing some research on a matter. But communicating with friends while at work is a completely different story. Assuming companies would attempt to ban social networking sites from the workplace, they’d have to handle the 68 percent of employees that demand some form of access to the sites during working hours.
In July social networking site Facebook reached the 500 million user milestone proving that such services have become a very important part of people’s lives. Some users have access to social networking sites through their home computers, work computers as well as mobile phones. Judging this huge growth that such sites have recorded, it’s not hard to understand why a working individual would want to sneak a peek at what people are doing on Facebook. After all, when at work, you still have a personal life. As for those wasting an hour or two surfing through stories or playing Farmville, they most likely weren’t that productive to begin with.
Access to social networking sites should be accepted at the workplace, especially if the employees work can benefit from what that kind of information has to offer, but it’s also true that it the time spent for purposes other than work should somehow be monitored.
“Whilst we’re certainly not kill-joys, people spending over an hour per day in work time on the likes of Facebook and Twitter are seriously hampering companies’ efforts to boost productivity, which is more important than ever given the fragile state of our economy,” Fayer said.
