Does Facebook Make Workers Less Productive?
Posted on July 23, 2009 |
About 77% of employees have Facebook accounts and nearly two-thirds access the site during work hours, according to a new report from Nucleus Research. The survey of 237 randomly-selected office workers found that employees used Facebook at work for an average of 15 minutes per day. That adds up to nearly 1.5% of total lost productivity across the entire employee population.
Is this an example of employees simply wasting time on the job or is something else at work here? I would hazard to guess that there's a correlation between employee use of social networking sites and the ever-shrinking lunch break. Try to remember, if you can, the '90s when people routinely left the office for an hour at lunch. If it seems like a distant memory, you're not alone.
In a September 2008 poll developed by staffing service firm OfficeTeam, 150 randomly-selected senior executives at the 1,000 largest companies in the U.S. said that the average lunch break is just 35 minutes, seven minutes less than they reported five years ago. And, many managers work through lunch at least three days per week.
As companies have downsized during this economy, I’ve heard more employees say they’ve experienced a corresponding increase in workloads as there are simply fewer people to actually get the work done. I think what we're seeing is a transfer from physical breaks to virtual ones. If you can’t meet a friend for lunch, at least you can stay in touch virtually. It’s not as good as meeting in person but it does take the edges off the disappearing lunch break.
What do you think?
