Employees fritter hours on non-work surfing

By siliconindia   |   Friday, 19 December 2008, 18:21 IST   |    8 Comments
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Employees fritter hours on non-work surfing
Bangalore: The internet is a major cause for productivity loss for companies, with employees using the net for over five hours a week, on an average, for non-business related work including online-shopping, entertainment and instant messaging during work hours. Surendra Singh, Regional Director, SAARC, Websense International Limited, quoting a survey, said, "The average employee frittered away 5.3 hours a week, not including lunch and scheduled break time, just in non-business related internet surfing". The survey, named 'The Employee Computing Risk Assessment,' was conducted by Websense on the nature of internet surfing among 40,000 employees working in 30 organizations. Employees used the net for general mail (51134 hours), instant messaging (44495 hours) news and media (31237 hours) and social networking (19886 hours) in between work. Online brokerage and trading (15193 hours) was also among the top five non-business surfing categories, revealed the survey whereby 211338 hours of 40,000 employees were monitored by Websense, leader in integrated web, data and e-mail security. The survey revealed that infected internet sites were regularly accessed by all companies. Freeware and software download, malicious websites, potentially unwanted software, proxy avoidance and peer-to-peer file sharing emerged as top five security concerns of the organizations. Employees using ineternet directly impacts network resources by affecting quality of service and incurring additional hardware expenses, he said. The survey covered four vital areas of employee internet behavior that may potentially leave the organization open to security risks. They include - apart from productivity loss - legal liability, security risks and network bandwidth.