Surfing for personal purposes at work hurts every business today, not just because of time spent on the Internet, but because of lost work productivity, distraction, virus threats, and confidential information leaks.
Mexicans are the employees who consume the most time from work to surf the web for personal reasons, according to the annual survey Web @ Work 2009, which diagnoses Internet use in Latin American companies. The study, prepared by the security firm Websense, collected the opinion among managers, directors and employees of different companies in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Central America.
The use of the Web to chat or send personal emails is the number one disease of Internet users today, but mainly this is the number one cause of the decline in performance and work productivity of employees in a company. However, the problem is not only in the time it takes an employee to see personal information, says the study. What should concern an organization is security - because of viruses spread on the network - and the leakage of valuable information.
One of the reasons why many employees present a notable drop in their performance and work productivity is directly related to the obsessive practice of reading and forwarding chain mail or spam, which has nothing to do with company correspondence. There are employees -no matter their position-, who in their daily working hours a lot of the time that they must dedicate to work and give results, they dedicate to a whole process of receiving, reading, writing, searching, selecting and sending or forwarding personal emails to your closest contacts or friends mainly.
America Online and salary.com also surveyed more than 10,000 American workers about their “time-wasting” habits at work. No one was surprised that personal use of the Internet was the big winner with 44% of responses. The most popular categories within it are the use of email, instant messaging and chats. The economic valuation of the more than two hours of work "lost" is 759 billion dollars.
La acción de recibir y enviar correos con mensajes adjuntos es en muchos casos, una actividad enfermiza que se vuelve una obsesión en un empleado. Esto es un grave problema laboral de nuestros días, el envía y recibir esa clase de correos, se convierte en una obsesión y hay casos en que el empleado pierde por completo la idea del lugar donde está y el rol que debe desempeñar diariamente así como sus obligaciones laborales.
What starts as a habit becomes an obsession in a short time and affects not only the saturation of the mailbox with junk emails, but also those who share these annoying messages, as they make users obsessive, and if they are employees, they distract them of their work obligations causing a notable drop in individual performance and business productivity and in extreme cases, beware! the alienation towards those who usually bombard with "emails with high romantic content" is so great that they can cause a serious marital problem or family disintegration.
There are many examples of cases where more than twenty (20) personal emails have been received and sent to a single contact! -chain emails or junk emails, usually accompanied by attachments of presentations (PPT, PPS) or videos (wmv, mov, mpeg) -, which if it is considered that for each email received and read the user consumes an average of 5 10 minutes to read it (many times longer, depending on the size and format of the file) and to send it another 15 or 20 minutes (includes the time to search and select the file, read, review, edit and attach process), then it can be concluded that the user consumes an average of 15 minutes in the process of receiving-reading-searching-selecting-sending an email.Then 20 files (10 received and 10 sent) consume a time (average) of 300 minutes, that is, 5 hours-daily work, which means a notable drop in personal work performance and a great loss of productivity of the company of the worker, this without considering other consequences derived from that extra-work activity, such as lack of concentration or loss of daily objectives and projects that also drastically reduce the performance and work productivity of an employee.such as lack of focus or loss of daily goals and projects that also drastically reduce an employee's work performance and productivity.such as lack of focus or loss of daily goals and projects that also drastically reduce an employee's work performance and productivity.
Content of email chains
No matter what it is, these chains generally have the same format consisting of a 'hook or hook', a threat and a request. Most exploit, be it the good feelings of people, their greed or their superstitions and of course, their ignorance. At the end of the letter, the user is asked to forward the message to a specified number of contacts.
Main problems of email chains
Inbox saturation. The recipient in his email account is continually bombarded with these kinds of messages until they even reach the limit allowed in the inbox and as a consequence of this, the email account can become inactive, unfailingly damaging the user and the company.
Threat of viruses and Trojans. It is another equally dangerous problem. For those who wonder why they receive "spam" in their email, one of the causes is the sending of chain messages: Companies that offer pornography services or pirated products, take advantage of this modality, infiltrating computers to collect information of all registered email accounts. Then the information of the company is totally vulnerable.
Confidential information leak. The habit of using working hours to receive and forward emails for personal reasons represents a high risk of loss and leakage of valuable or confidential information of a company, which can fall into the wrong hands.
How to deal with the problem
According to the Web @ Work survey, 21% of Latin American companies have decided to block access to sites that can affect productivity, be it emails, pages where mp3s are downloaded, presentations or videos, social networks, bank sites and houses commercial that allow to pay the bills. But, since that is not enough, here are three actions that your company can implement:
- Email, the most vulnerable. Is it acceptable for your company for your employee to use your email for personal purposes during working hours? If your answer is no, the simplest thing is to make a report at the end of the month of the emails sent by each employee to detect those who carry out this type of practice. Meanwhile, another problem faced by different companies is the recurrent invasion of viruses and Trojans through email. In these cases, block spam and prohibit opening "chain" emails containing harmful information. Provide detailed rules. According to France's Commission Nationale Informatique et Libertés (CNIL), companies are required to formulate detailed security and monitoring policies and then disclose them with emphasis to employees. Thus,future problems are avoided or at least employees will know what they are exposed to when entering prohibited sites Invest in infrastructure. Another alternative to protect the computer security of a company, due to the entry of dangerous sites by employees, is through the hiring of an external company that is in charge of the computing infrastructure. According to Websense, this measure includes security for mail and the Web, giving users full control of the solution, both in updates and support.It is through the hiring of an external company that is in charge of the computing infrastructure. According to Websense, this measure includes security for mail and the Web, giving users full control of the solution, both in updates and support.It is through the hiring of an external company that is in charge of the computing infrastructure. According to Websense, this measure includes security for mail and the Web, giving users full control of the solution, both in updates and support.
There are other equally harmful consequences in addition to the loss of performance and employee productivity, such as saturated trays, the threat of contamination by viruses that can infect the system and compromise company data and the worst: information leakage confidential.
Thus, it is not necessary for managers or managers to break their heads to determine why an employee does not give the expected performance or does not comply 100 percent with daily work tasks, the solution is to review their correspondence. With this action they can find surprising data such as: for every email important to the company there are 20 to 50 junk emails; more than 10 emails have been received and forwarded to the same user, with personal content; etc., etc., which can represent consumption from three lost working hours per day to half a working day.
Nowadays, does anyone believe that 100% of the time that people spend sitting in an office is dedicated exclusively to work issues? This is the reality of today: If used without control or supervision, the internet can be a complete killer of work and business productivity.
But the remedy for Executives and Managers is in their hands and it is not complicated: Control Internet use during working hours, periodically check email activity, control Internet access of employees and block certain addresses such as sex addresses., games, download ppt files, music or video.
