Is Internet Usage Ruining Office Productivity?

I recently wrote an article (on another blog) that explained how by reducing Internet usage in a large office, a company was able to boost productivity by 20% across the board.

In this case the office was more of a call-centre type affair with people taking live chat, emails and phone calls in response to customer queries.

In a simple experiment, the Internet was switched off for a couple of days and the amount of calls taken, responded to and successfully dealt with increased by a good percentage.

It was a simple “A/B” test if you like and from that we could easily deduce that by not having Internet access the staff were able to operate far more efficiently.

Many put this down to the distracting nature of the web. For example, according to a study on office workers, it can take 25 minutes for the average worker to return to the task they were working on before they got interrupted.

I decided to test this out myself and I noticed that a task that normally takes me about an hour and a half (writing this article for instance) would take at least double the time if someone called me halfway through.

I noticed that after the call I would then make a cup of tea, change the music in the office and most annoyingly, close all the windows I had open with the information for the topic I’m writing about. Distraction is terrible for a writer!

However, as I was researching this article for more backup, I actually found an article that disagreed with my initial thoughts. Written in 2009, it had the very bold headline:

Study: surfing the Internet at work boosts productivity

Interesting!

It starts off by saying:“Workers are more productive when they are able to occasionally

do non-work stuff online, researchers at the University of Melbourne have found. Dr. Brent Coker studied the habits of 300 workers and found that the large majority engaged in what he calls "Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing" (WILB)—surfing the Internet for personal reasons. But despite the common perception that such a behavior is a drain on employers, Coker says that these employees are able to focus better when performing tasks for work.”

Interesting! Of course, there are other studies that show the opposite is true but if you put them all together, it seems that what actually seems to work is short amounts of web time enhance performance, longer times actually reduce performance.

A problem then. You see, that original study was in 2009 and a big thing has happened since then, everyone is now on Facebook.

And the big problem with Facebook is that it’s addictive. It’s almost impossible to get away from the pings and dings of the Facebook timeline as people chat away without you. You just want to take part!

So how does the average office handle this problem? It seems that the solution is to have time set aside for people to surf the web, or allow them to self-regulate, but policing this would probably bring even harder problems to solve.

The solution will probably lie in technology somewhere, but for now, we’re not sure on an answer!

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