1. How to Tell if Your Employees are Cyberloafing
Day-to-day life in the average business office is so different than it used to be. It wasn’t so
long ago that an employee’s level of productivity could easily be assessed by the number of
memos he or she wrote, or the number of reports the worker generated, or the number of
sales calls the salesman made and logged during an 8-hour shift. But in this technological day
and age, productivity is not so easily measured.
Because the majority of workers in the U.S. and other countries now require online access
just to do their jobs, “cyberloafing” (or wasting time on the Internet during work hours) has
become an increasingly common problem for business owners and managers. This issue,
coupled with the fact that many employees aren’t producing the type of work that is as easily
tracked as the number of memos or reports generated during the day, has left many
managers wondering how they can determine whether their workers are cyberloafing and how
they can increase their employees’ productivity.
Some management personnel have made the assumption that the first step in increasing
productivity involves Internet blocking. After all, if an employee isn’t able to access certain
websites, that person is sure to be more productive on the job, right? If only it were that
simple! The truth is that it just doesn’t work. If you’ve ever wondered how to block websites,
you should know that it’s usually done with software that is designed to block entire
categories of sites rather than just a few specific ones. Unfortunately, when you choose
Internet blocking as a means to prevent cyberloafing, you’re likely to inadvertently block some
sites that your workers actually need to perform their jobs. If you suspect that your workers
may be wasting time on the Internet, you might also consider using software that’s designed
to monitor which websites they’re visiting. Unfortunately, “spyware” is no more effective than
blocking access to undesirable sites.
Rather than trying to figure out how to block websites or “spy” on what your employees are
engaged in, it’s much better to use a tool that measures how much time each worker is
spending doing productive work online each day. There are a few cloud-based software
products that do just that. Not only will this allow you to understand how each employee is
spending time, but it will also help you to develop ways to motivate your workers to become
more and more productive in the future. This is the only way to take a positive approach to
resolving the cyberloafing problem.