Personal web use on the job leads to more productive workers
That quick peak you take at a sports or gossip website during the workday may actually be beneficial to your workflow.
Conventional wisdom says that productivity levels decrease because of “cyberloafing” (browsing the Internet at work for personal use). However, a study conducted at the National University of Singapore found that certain personal activities during work hours can have positive benefits.
The general idea is that with short intervals of an engaging respite from business-related activities, an employee is more likely to be refreshed and have a jolt of focus when returning to work duties. Put simply, reading an interesting article or playing Facebook games for 10 minutes can make someone work harder in the other 50 minutes of an hour.
In an experiment conducted by NUS, three groups of people were asked to highlight as many uses of the letter ‘A’ they could spot in a text, perform another activity for 10 minutes, and then highlight the letter ‘E’ afterwards. Group 1 was asked to do more work, Group 2 was given a break to do anything except use the Internet, and Group 3 was allowed to browse the web for leisure. Here are the results:
- Group 1 (More work) – 227 highlights
- Group 2 (Take a break) – 272 highlights
- Group 3 (Browse the web) – 316 highlights
It’s tough to imagine someone working better because of personal web usage, but researchers Don J. Q. Chen and Vivien K. G. Lim of NUS say personal web browsing may lead to 16 percent increased productivity. The study found that the right type of online activities – gaming, social media, entertainment news reading – could lead to continued engagement and positive workflow. The wrong type of activity, such as reading personal email, could have the opposite effect. Researchers argue that user compulsion to read and reply to messages negatively draws away concentration and energy, which ends up being “detrimental to work.”
So what’s a company to do: open up access to the web and risk letting employees abuse the freedom, or tightly-clamp down and miss-out on an opportunity to increase productivity? A middle ground appears to be the best solution, say researchers. Block offensive websites and monitor usage on places like Facebook or Twitter for signs of abuse, but allow workers to read the news or look at friend photos in acceptable time periods and the company may benefit.
In Jeremy Phan’s recent article about how to access blocked sites, some readers questioned showing people how to access websites like Facebook, Reddit, or YouTube on a company network. However, it might be in the best interest of companies to not put up these blocks in the first place (unless security or other extenuating circumstances prove it necessary). Social media, news, and other online activity can have a beneficial influence on worker productivity, so companies would be wise to permit some freedom to its employees. Cyberloafing and strong output seems a better option than tight controls and average productivity.
Do you seriously expect us to believe that, in today’s average workplace, such a concept would not be routinely abused to the employer’s detriment??
Must be a big-union driven proposal. Get a life!
[...] an interesting article while surfing around tonight. It stated that: … researchers Don J. Q. Chen and Vivien K. G. [...]
How lazy can you get? If you want a job that allows you to do whatever you want on the internet, perhaps you should go into business for yourself and work from home. But then again, you work for someone else. We are not exactly talking about people who really care about their jobs. This ideology supports that condemnation.