No, Twitter Use Is Not Costing Companies Billions

from the stop.-now.-please. dept

Not this again. It happens with every new internet fad. Some company trying to sell something (filters, consulting, training, etc.) comes out with some study claiming that the new popular internet thingy is "costing x billions of dollars" because workers are using it for some amount of time per day. All of them work on the same basic principle. Figure out how much time people spend using the service, and multiply it by how much people make per hour, and then voila. Of course, this assumes (incorrectly) that every minute not working is "lost productivity." Of course, if that were true then coffee breaks, lunch breaks, sleep and many other things would also be "lost productivity." But, we all know that's ridiculous and that the truth is those things make people more productive by giving them a break here and there to recharge.

So, please, please, please don't believe the latest ridiculous study coming out of the UK claiming that Twittering employees are costing UK businesses £1.83 billion. It's the same ridiculousness, calculating that the average worker spends about 40 minutes on Twitter, but making no effort to figure out if that actually negatively impacts productivity -- just assuming that it means 40 minutes of "lost productivity." How many times do we need to repeat that time does not equal productivity before these companies stop coming out with such bogus studies?

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Those Who Surf Facebook And YouTube At Work Are Often More Productive

from the this-again? dept

Way back in the late 90s, there was a spate of news stories worried about this awful web thing and how companies were making it available at work -- and how that was obviously going to be a massive drain on productivity. Of course, this was falsely based on the idea that productivity means always working, rather than getting work done. All the way back in 2000, a study came out, noting that employees who did some personal surfing at work tended to be happier and more productive. There were a variety of reasons for this, including that being able to do some personal surfing allowed for useful "mental breaks" that made actual working time more productive. It also let people spend more time on the job (and, in fact, another study found that most employees who do personal surfing at work more than make it up) rather than having to leave work to deal with personal things.

Since all those studies came out in the earlier part of the decade, we had hoped that these issues had been put to rest. But... no, of course not. With new online services like Facebook and YouTube, suddenly companies started freaking out again -- with hyped up claims from internet filtering companies (it always comes from internet filtering companies) about just how much productivity is lost via Facebook and YouTube. And, of course, they have a simple solution: buy our filter and block access to these sites.

And the fear mongering certainly works. Every time we mention any such story, we're inundated with comments from people insisting that there is simply no reason why anyone should ever access Facebook from work. Well, yet another study suggests that's incorrect again. As with the earlier studies, this one found that people who do a little personal surfing of sites like Facebook and YouTube at work, tend to be more productive.

The study found exactly what previous studies had found:

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 nine per cent than those who don't.... People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture - after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored.

It's the same in the workplace.

Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a day's work, and as a result, increased productivity.

Now, of course, there are some people who will abuse the privilege -- and there's nothing wrong with finding out who's doing that and dealing with them properly. But a flat-out blanket ban on such things may actually be reducing productivity for most workers, rather than increasing it. Rather than assuming such personal surfing decreases productivity, why not focus on just those who abuse the privilege.

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If You're Measuring Productivity In Hours, You're Doing It Wrong

from the output,-output,-output dept

Usually we don't see these types of stories until March Madness time, but the NY Times is writing about how much productivity is "lost" due to trying to keep up with the "data stream." Apparently research firm Basex has come out with a gimmicky calculator to determine how much productivity is likely lost, and put out a silly, borderline ridiculous press release noting that Intel claims it worked with the research firm to determine that the impact on productivity because of information overload was "up to eight hours a week." Seriously? Productivity is measured not in hours, but output. If productivity were just about hours, we'd be looking for ways to get people to work more hours. But, most people recognize that there are diminishing returns to making people work too much -- and they have time off to charge their batteries.

If you're going to measure productivity this way, we could just as easily say that we're putting out a study showing that sleeping costs a company approximately eight hours a day in lost worker productivity! Something must be done! While I have no doubt that information overload can be a cost to productivity, it's not going to be measured in hours. If I "waste" 20 hours a week dealing with information overload, but I'm able to extract information that makes me three times as productive, the rest of the week, then that's a good trade-off. Do people actually pay companies for this sort of research?

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Preventing Your Employees From Watching Videos Won't Prevent Them From Procrastinating

from the it'll-just-annoy-them dept

We've been saying for years that the notion that employee web surfing at work constitutes "lost profits" is nonsense. There is an infinite number of ways employees can waste time at work, from chatting with coworkers, reading magazines, or even taking a nap. Monitoring and restricting web surfing isn't likely to make employees procrastinate less, it'll just make them procrastinate in ways that are harder to monitor, and annoy them in the process. The Wall Street Journal has the latest example of surfing-at-work hysteria. Apparently the latest crisis is the time-wasting potential of Internet video sites. The funny thing about the article is that it inadvertently does a pretty good job of illustrating why blocking web-based video isn't a very good plan. One employee actually looked at clients' videos as part of his job, so he had to waste his own and the IT department's time seeking an exception every time he had a video he needed to watch in order to do his job. In an even more ridiculous case, an office had a mass shooting occur in a nearby mall, and all of the employees in the office apparently spent time complaining to the boss for permission to watch the news about it. Here, it was clear that the employees were already sitting around reading stories about the shooting, so they obviously weren't getting much work done. Yet for some reason the boss still seems proud of himself for preventing his employees from watching videos of the event. The article also cites bandwidth limitations as a reason for blocking online videos, but that seems like overkill. If upgrading bandwidth isn't an option (and bandwidth is getting cheaper every year) it seems like a much more straightforward approach would be to simply monitor total bandwidth consumption and warn the heaviest users to keep their consumption down. That would keep the network humming without treating employees like they're children.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Why Being Plugged In 24/7 Doesn't Make It Easier To Get Your Work Done

from the rocks-on-the-riverbed dept

There have been several stories noting the fact that people have a hard time taking a break from work these days. Those people that are glued to their computers or Blackberries will typically argue that constant attention is a must, given the amount of work that they have to get done. But as Dan Markovitz astutely points out, people that are always plugged in are often no better at keeping up with work levels. He makes his point by drawing an analogy to manufacturing. If your factory is producing way more of a given item than you need, it's easy to ignore the occasional product defect. But if you're producing the exact amount the required by the market, then it's of utmost importance to reduce defects and operate efficiently. If you keep allocating extra hours to your work, there's no impetus to figure out what's going wrong and why work is taking up so much time. But by stepping away after an alloted time, you're forced to identify how your actual working hours could be made more productive.

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