"Wasting time"

Here's another idiot:

According to employment law firm Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees "wasting time" on social networking....
Mike Huss, director of employment law at Peninsula called on all firms to block access to sites such as Facebook.
He asked: "Why should employers allow their workers to waste two hours a day on Facebook when they are being paid to do a job?" 

Let's do the sums. There are roughly 13.7 million members of MySpace, Facebook and Bebo in the UK. If we assume - farcically - that no-one is a member of more than one, and that all these are in employment, this implies that the average person spends 17 hours a month on these sites whilst they are at work - roughly 45 minutes a day. If we assume only half these 13.7m are in jobs, this figure rises to 90 minutes. This is surely implausibly high; it's a lot of time to spend answering and asking damnfool questions.
Which raises the suspicion that Mr Huss might not know what he's talking about. After all, how likely is it that he knows more about what 25 million workers do at work than their own bosses know?
And what's so special about wasting time on networking sites? How much time gets wasted in pointless meetings, or because the IT is crap, or because the air-conditioning doesn't work, or because people get delayed by lousy transport etc etc? Bad management is surely a vaster source of wasted time that Facebook.
And, surely, if employees' work suffers because they are spending time on Facebook, this is a problem to be solved by managers having a word with them - just as if their work suffers because they are late, hungover, or just plain stupid.
As Rick says, moaning about Facebook is a sign of weak management.

Comments

[MatGB]

Heh. This got covered as an exerpt in some way in the Lite yesterday evening, I had it down to write a post about this evening after I'd finished work. Because, y'know, checking and reading stuff while on a call or waiting for something to complete is something I don't have a problem with, but writing a whole post would be skiving. Possibly.

But, um, you've pretty much got everything covered that I sketched out in my head to write. You missed other timewasters like office gossip, holiday snaps, etc.

In fact, I'd argue that Facebook can save time at work—put your damn wedding snaps online, then we can look at them when we feel like it, not when you cart the album around all the offices in the building...

If your staff are genuinely wasting time they would otherwise have spent working on sites like Facebook, then you have a problem, blocking Facebook is like the greeks blaming a cold on too much phlegm, deal with the actual problem, not a symptom. Alternately, just accept that networking and getting to know friends and colleagues is a good thing, helps build morale and is no real difference than, for example, stupid emails forwarding 9/11 hoax stories...

[Alex Galloway]

Surely the whole point is that facebook time-wasting is cheap and easy for employers to eliminate, whereas other time-wasting isn't, so it makes far more sense for an employer to block facebook than it does for him to try to eliminate, say, office gossip. Am i missing something?

[Philip Hunt]

How much time gets wasted in pointless meetings

I used to work at a major telecoms company, where we had meetings to decide when to have the meetings!

[Simstim]

Although if the employees are able to waste their hours on Facebook then at least one aspect of their company's IT isn't crap.

[scumble]

There's also an element of the employer's assumption that they "own" the whole of their employee's time and essence during the time they sit in an office. The train of thought behind it appears to be that if employees were working flat out, more money could be made without more staff.

I sense also the sinister abstraction of "Human Resources" at work. Facebook, and sites like it help to re-humanise the often bleak corporate environment, but considering your workforce as a "Resource" to be utilised "efficiently" is either a stupid mistake or just unpleasant.