Shock! Offices Lose Productivity to Facebook - study

Via Reuters Blogs - USA

Posted by: Yinka Adegoke

We think you saw this one coming: Employers are losing a whopping 1.5 workers per 100 in employee productivity to the social networking phenomenon that is Facebook.

This number was uncovered by the clever folk at Nucleus Research, who surveyed 237 randomly selected office workers. They discovered that some of you spend more time than you probably should poking, adding and making inane comments on friends’ pages.

In fact some of you may be horrified to learn that Nucleus is advising corporations to consider restricting Facebook access at work to reclaim that productivity — all the more important in a global recession and rising unemployment they say.

Among the findings from Nucleus’ interviews with said randomly selected workers:

•Nearly two-thirds of those who have Facebook access visit the site during working hours.
•Those who visit Facebook at work do so for an average of 15 minutes each day.
•87 percent of those who use Facebook at work couldn’t define a clear business reason for using it.
•Of those who do visit Facebook at work, 6 percent never use it anywhere else, meaning one in every 33 workers built their entire Facebook profile during work hours.
•There are also serious security concerns as IT departments can’t monitor Facebook messages.

It wasn’t immediately clear if Nucleus’s survey took lunch-break time into account (some people might only visit Facebook during break-time). Either way, one imagines if a survey of 237 workers can ever be used as an adequate sample, then there will be a lot of unhappy workers out there in the office world, should all those IT departments take Nucleus’ advice. As Nucleus concludes in its press release:

Companies should evaluate their Facebook policy and the cost to the organization in allowing access to Facebook, as today blocking Facebook may actually result in a 1.5 percent gain in productivity.

In other words blocking Facebook will give you 1.5 more workers for every 100 workers. Nice.