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A large scale university study in Australia has claimed to prove the theory that allowing access time to social networking media and other entertainment sites while in the workplace actually increases productivity.

The theory analyzed by students and researchers at the University of Melbourne suggests that workers with access to their standard ‘leisure browsing’ on websites such as Facebook, become more productive with their assigned tasks.

“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work, within a reasonable limit of less than 20 percent of their total time in the office, are more productive by about 9 percent than those who don’t,” said Dr. Brent Coker, a professor from the school’s department of management and marketing.

Access to the internet in your workplace is a bit of a taboo still for the majority of medium to large businesses with employees in officers. The majority of the time you can find enterprises spending insane amounts of money on limiting access for productivity concerns - the exact behaviour which is being suggested to harm, not focus companies.

“Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case,” he said.

Increased productivity is said to come from careful management of leisure browsing, and of course if it is not managed to a sensible degree then it will have a negative effect instead.

“Approximately 14 percent of internet users in Australia show signs of Internet Addiction, they don’t take breaks at appropriate times, they spend more than a ‘normal’ amount of time online, and can get irritable if they are interrupted while surfing,” Coker said.

Posted by: ben on April 03, 2009 05:36

Source: http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments.php?shownews=25616&catid=6

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My thought: Too control?