Employees spend 15 minutes a day on Facebook
Employees spend 15 minutes a day on Facebook, while at work, according to a new report.
A survey by Nucleus Research has found that 77 per cent of employees have Facebook accounts and nearly two-thirds access the site during work hours.
The survey of 237 randomly-selected office workers found that employees used Facebook at work for an average of 15 minutes a day, which adds up to nearly 1.5 per cent of total lost productivity across the entire employee population.
Of the 13 percent of users that had a business reason for accessing Facebook, most were not using it for personal networking but to promote a business, product, event, or a site to Facebook users — and Facebook was just one component of an overall marketing strategy.
Recent research by University of Melbourne professor Dr Brent Coker looked at 300 office workers and their internet usage.
He found that people who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20 per cent of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9 per cent than those who don't, and therefore didn't hamper their career development.
How long do you spend on Facebook per day? Should online access be restricted?
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Comments
we expect people to be sensible in our organisation the internet is critical to how we work but so is the integrity of our organisation and we have reasonable precautions in place both for staff and clients. social networking sites are not available on our system - it's not about being punitive, it's about risk reduction.
0 as I don't use Facebook. You might argue as long as the job gets done then how much time they spend is irrelevant however it does seem to me to be a timewaster.
Having said that I spend a fair amount of time each day on the net for business reasons.
To be honest I'm surprised it's as low as that. I'm a bit old for that sort of thing but I bet younger people spend forever on it. I can only imagine it's as low as it is because its banned in so many workplaces.
I can't believe the time spent on Facebook is so low. I would have expected it to be higher. I would expect for the younger generation that their time on Facebook to be higher at work. If you add up 15 minutes on Facebook and all the other sites i suppose it all adds up...
Very surprised it's as low as that. It's been banned at quite a few of the places I've worked at though so maybe that accounts for it.
If businesses want to exploit the full potential of these sites, then it must be good for key staff to get a feel for the application.
This may be an emerging aspect of modern business - training staff to use social networking to the advantage of the business in an effective way?
There seems to be a number of things to consider here - after all we are talking statistics!
Firstly only 77% had facebook. Secondly 2/3rds used facebook at work. It isn't clear if the 'average' 15 minutes is based on the 100% sample, the 77% with an account or the 2/3rds (51.33% of the original sample) who accessed it at work!
Then, of course, there is the average - so for all the people who hardly ever used it at work - maybe the odd quick check.
By the time you take all of this into account the usage level by some people is going to be substantially more than 15%.
Many firms do ban social websites as well as hotmail accounts etc - often for security reasons rather than staff restrictions.
I find it stunning to read that spending up to 20% of your time surfing websites a day will leave you with better productivity. Is this based on the fact that the rest have some other activity they participate in that equally wastes time or that the view on their productivity was given by the participants themselves!