Employees wear the cyberslacks

Two-thirds of employees in the US are cyberslackers using the Internet for their own personal interests instead of work. Not only is this a waste of time, money and resource, it is also responsible for using up precious bandwidth at work and is a massive drain financially on employers. That's the conclusion of a study by US e-outfit, Greenfield Online, Inc, which interviewed a 1,000 people about their cyberslacking habits. It found:

• 64 per cent of people said they use the Net for personal interest during working hours. Of these, 26 per cent spend less than an hour doing so, 22 per cent spend one to two hours, eight per cent spend three to four, and another eight per cent spend more than five hours cyberslacking.
• search engines, news, information and email were the most popular sites followed by shopping, entertainment and games.
• 29 per cent said they did not know if they had ever accidentally picked up dangerous files, such as Trojans, while surfing the Net for personal interest. Six per cent said they had and 64 per cent said no. As for dangerous files via email, 27 per cent were unaware whether they had ever encountered such a file by email, 19 per cent said they had, and 54 per cent said they had not.
• Nick Galea, GFI president, said: "This study confirms our own in-house research that unproductive use of the Internet is widespread. "This results not only in loss of time and wasted bandwidth at work, but it also drains organisations financially," he said. He added: "GFI has developed LANguard Internet/Network Access Control for this very reason -- to prevent unproductive use of the Internet by monitoring users' Web surfing patterns according to the organisation's specific needs." Gosh, isn't that handy. GFI does research that shows the wired working world is riddled with cyberslackers...then lo and behold, GFI sells a product that will turn those cybertimewasters into efficient drones. What a stroke of good luck. ®