Employees wasting time at work

We all have to admit that reading the entertainment news online, watching short funny videos, planning vacations, shopping online or scheduling hair appointments are activities that we do during work time. No matter the hierarchical level we are inside the company, we have to take care how often we do it and try not to cross the limit of good sense.

The Salary.com’s fourth annual “Wasting Time at Work study”, revealed interesting numbers for last year too. During this survey more than 2,500 employees across all job levels have been questioned. 90% of the participants (55% female and 45% male) - work full-time and spend between eight to ten hours in the workplace each day. As for the time wasted at work: here are the reports:
wasting-time
Source: Salary.com Inc

As the graphic shows, 64% of respondents report wasting one hour or less each day at work, which is, let’s say “acceptable”. 22% waste approximately 2 hours daily, and 14% waste 3 or more hours each workday. These are, at least for me, alarming numbers, because I can imagine the company losses when employee waste almost one third of the total work time.

Now, let’s see how exactly the most of employee waste their time at work. For the second year, the primary-time wasting activity is surfing the Web (with 48%) followed by socializing with co-workers (33%). Other significant activities employees have during work time are:

conducting personal business (30%)
personal phone calls ( 19%)
long lunch breaks (15%).

It would be very interesting to see the reasons stated by employees for wasting time. This topic deserves a special attention this is why I will prepare a new one and will try to suggest a few solutions in order to help managers stop their employees from wasting work time.

2010 update! Check out interesting statistics related to internet usage at work in 2009.