Cubicle and office-based Web surfers, cybershoppers and online porn fans are costing corporate America about US$63 billion each year, a California software company claims.
The Internet - once hailed as a tool to make workers more efficient - has become a major on-the-job distraction, said Websense, a vendor of software that manages, monitors and reports on employee Internet use.
The company based its US$63 billion productivity-loss estimate on average US salaries and the assumption that employees devoted one hour each week to non-work-related Web surfing.
Some 57 million American workers now have Internet access at work and as many as 40 percent of them use their corporate Web connections to check out non-work-related online sites, according to research from Dataquest, a division of Gartner, and International Data Corp.
"Sixty-three billion dollars is actually a conservative number when you factor bandwidth loss, storage costs and legal liabilities associated with free and open Internet use in the workplace," said Andy Meyer, vice president of marketing at Websense.
"It's clear that the Internet was responsible for much of the productivity gains of the 1990s, so it's not necessarily a good idea to block (Internet access) completely," said Meyer, who just happened to be pitching a new software product that allows IT managers to schedule blocks of time for employee Web surfing.
This is obviously marketing.
To be science you would need a control study to determine how much time per employee is wasted per week in a shop without Internet access. Do they read the paper, use the phone, drive to the library? There are lots of ways it could simply be the trackability of web-surfing that makes the PHBs aware of the hours their losing for the first time.