Best study ever: Wasting time online boosts worker productivity

[Daniel E.]

Best study ever: Wasting time online boosts worker productivity - latimes.com
August 17, 2011

Spending time online updating your Facebook page, clicking through I Can Has Cheezburger and ogling Robert Pattinson may rot your brain, but new research suggest that it could also make you more productive at work.

“Browsing the Internet serves an important restorative function,” according to a report from the National University of Singapore.

So-called cyberloafing can refresh workers mentally after long periods of work, researchers said at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management in San Antonio this week.

Surfing the Web is even better for productivity than talking or texting with friends or sending personal emails, the study found.

And smart bosses would stop snooping, researchers said: Excessive Internet monitoring and surveillance only makes employees do it more, they said.

Now, if only someone will discover that napping, playing cards and watching "Jersey Shore" also boosts productivity.

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From a related study:

“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says.

[URL="http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/news/5750/"]Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure[/URL]

 

[bstern]

Great study!

Non-work related internet browsing mostly in social networking sites have long been the problem of our company. Add to that, I've also learned through this infographic that there actually is a 40% productivity loss from non work related internet browsing of the workers in a company. It's quite an alarming number really.

We've tried blocking all of those sites but it never really worked. You know the more we tried to block it, the more they made ways to access it. So, we ended up unblocking them again and just settled for monitoring all of their computer usage and allowing that bit of personal use like social media, emails and such.

This study greatly helps and supports our move. Indeed, each of our workers need to have the 'restorative function' once in a while. Thanks for sharing.