More And More Americans Goofing Off At Work

Burstek Internet consultants, the Florida-based company, has made available an eye-opening, surprising study of how Americans act on the job. The study shows that due to goofing off by using the Internet, has made productivity losses commonplace.

The company's study on Internet Usage during 2005, which was released recently, considers the results of the study of the Internet activity of 10,688 employees in 2005. The study highlights activity that is related to legal liability, security risk and lost productivity, which are the three major enterprise security threat groups.
According to Burstek COO, David Smith, COO of Burstek, the Internet has experienced a revolutionary impact on global business. He says that it is hard to picture a firm that has not been affected. But, according to Smith, there is a negative side to this as well, in that along with the benefits come many side effects that have the possibility of dramatically eroding productivity. These negative side effects also pose several other dangers, both to the enterprises and to employees as well. That is why, according to him, it is so important to carefully keep an eye on employee Internet useage. According to their study, Smith says, there is confirmation that uncontrolled employee Internet use poses an extremely serious threat to both compliance, security and productivity.

Included study highlights:

While at work, as high as 78.1 percent of all users checked out the Internet for personal purposes and for personal entertainment. This came to a total of over 20 percent of all those pages viewed, as well as viewing time and cost of bandwidth;

Of the time spent on the Internet by employees, 72.34 percent of all personal use reflected employee productivity-draining visits to Web sites. The Web sites visited included those for shopping, for entertainment, for personal e-mail use, for sports, job searches, chat rooms and game playing;

Of all personal using, 19.42 percent represented linking to Web sites that could pose a security threat to the network, which included spyware, file sharing along with malicious code; and

In addition to this, fully 8.23 percent of all sites visited for personal usage, posed a risk of legal liability, these included pornography sites, hacking, gambling and hate speech.

Of those businesses examined, government agencies reported the highest incidence of employees entering sites that contained spyware and/or malicious code (nearly 23 percent);

Additional statistics along with an analysis of internet use by industry may be found in the complete 2005 Internet Usage Study. The study also breaks down results into individual risk categories. The top sites visited by category are also listed and these include sires for online chat, Web-mail, shopping, sports, and more.

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