Employees are timing out of work obligations for an average of 40 minutes a day to check out the bargains on offer at eBay, the survey has found.
Last year, US-based Nielsen/ NetRatings found that almost 5.5 million people visited eBay while at work during the month of July.
-Employees get caught up in researching items, comparing prices and watching online bids, which can easily add up to several hours of lost productivity," MD of Internet filtering company SurfControl Australia, Charles Heunemann said.
However, while employees may be getting a bargain, companies are the ones footing the bill - losing millions of dollars in employee productivity and reduced network bandwidth.
IDC reports that personal use of the Internet at work is attributable for 30 to 40 percent of lost workplace productivity, and Vault.com claims that 90 percent of employees use the Internet for personal reasons while at the office.
Other popular non-work related surfing activities reported by Vault.com include visiting news sites (72%), shopping (40%), checking stock reports (34%), coordinating social events (28%), and searching for jobs (37%).
I have found Commsofts Net Master product to over exceed my monitoring requirements. The software is easy to use, and reports are automatically ready to analyse every Monday morning. My IT Manager has reported that it does not interfere with, or consume internal bandwidth.