One of the big concerns that companies have when setting up IT departments is how much freedom to give to the workforce when it comes to the Internet.
There are two major philosophical ideas on the subject. The first is that employees are paid to work, not paid to surf the web, and that as such, any possibly distracting Internet sites that are not required to do the job should be off limits – or at least, harshly discouraged. The second is that if you treat your employees like robots, they’ll resent it, leading to on-the-job unhappiness, lost morale, loss of top talent, and therefore, overall loss of productivity.
It’s hard to find hard numbers supporting either theory though – until now. As it turns out, Dr. Brent Coker at the University of Melbourne studied the effects of “Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing” (or “Recreational Traffic” as we’ve come to call it here), and found that “employees that surf the Internet for fun at work are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t.”
The attraction of WILB, according to Dr Coker, can be attributed to people’s imperfect concentration. “People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture – after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored.
“It’s the same in the work place. Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity.”
This result is similar to an effect noted by Jackie Andrade, a professor of psychology at the University of Plymouth – people bored in meetings often “doodle” – because the brain needs to constantly process information, and doodling provides just enough brain-juice during a boring task to prevent the mind from running off into a full-scale daydream.
“You wouldn’t want the brain to just switch off, because a bear might walk up behind you and attack you; you need to be on the lookout for something happening,” Andrade says.
A point of clarification – Andrade was talking about the evolutionary basis of doodling. No one has any reason to fear bear attacks during business meetings… yet.
Now, there may be security related reasons why one would want to not give desktop administrator access to employees, though this can be a pain, and reasons why you might block certain harmful Web sites and domains. But beyond that, there really isn’t a gain in blocking the distractions of the Internet; Facebook and IM and blogs and the like.
Reddit.com has the story of “Lou” whose company blocked instant messaging, using the line that IMs could spread viruses. (This is technically, possibly true, because IM clients are executable files… but plaintext? Not so much.) So, to stay in contact with other people at the company where he worked, he wrote a proxy page and hosted it on his own external Web server.
“I was the information systems intern, with the web design experience, so I hacked together a script hosted on my own server that allowed us to chat with each other and with any friends that wanted to visit the link. It worked because it was browser based and no one had to install anything. But I messed up. The script would refresh the page every 10 seconds… and the IT guy in charge of the network soon noticed that certain computers were making hundreds of requests to my server per day. When he found out what we were doing, he logged into the script just long enough to say “There is no chatting allowed on the company network. Goodbye.”He then banned my domain for the rest of the summer.”
So instead of providing a new way for inter-departmental communication, the IT department just shut down that avenue and prompted resentment among employees. In fact, Lou goes on to write:
I’m glad I don’t work there anymore, and since then I’ve only worked for smaller firms that don’t do this kind of crippling to your computer usage.
Which really is the whole point – employees don’t want to feel like children – like they can’t be trusted, and have to be kept away from anything interesting. So the smart people – that is, the people who are worth the most to your business – are less likely to work for you, rather than your competitors, if you treat them that way.
So if locking down the computers isn’t a good idea, how do you handle performance problems related to recreational network traffic? Monitor it, and make sure that it doesn’t interfere with business critical traffic by placing it in lower QoS priorities.
As for us, our preferred distraction? Ping-pong. Which really isn’t a distraction at all, as this video we created earlier this year shows:
I’m a bit surprised to see something like this posted on a network performance related site. I do wonder whether the author has ever spent any time troubleshooting business application performance issues caused by excessive non-business surfing of the Internet or dealing with the escalating costs of providing more Internet bandwidth.
I typically see facebook.com traffic is the number one traffic volume generator on our network. It typically is responsible for 30-40% of the total traffic volume. Now there may be *some* business use of this site, but I can guarantee that the vast majority of this traffic is non-business related.
The web 2.0 sites (where users contribute most of the content) like facebook are one of the major targets of hackers. While you can utilize technology to permit safe access to these sites, fewer than 10% of companies do.
Consumer-grade web mail (think gmail, aol mail, yahoo mail, etc.) are another very large volume traffic generator.
Yes some companies go overboard with their content filtering policies, but some IT departments take a hard look at the costs (hidden or otherwise) and make their decisions accordingly.