Are Your People 'Cyberloafing' in the Office?

by Knowledge@SMU, 20 July 2012

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topics:
Management

tags:
office productivity

A well-known mantra in the workplace survival guide is that it is better to work smarter rather than work harder. This may be meant to encourage workers to be more productive, but some have taken it to the extreme and try to work less by literally doing less.

There are many forms of skiving in the workplace, including taking long lunches, engaging in water cooler talk and making personal phone calls.

Now, the widespread use of the Internet in the office has led to a new trend of cyberloafing: a specific form of loafing behaviour in which employees spend work hours and use company Internet access to check personal emails or visit websites not related to their work.

“Workers can now maintain the guise of being hard at work in the real world, while in fact, travelling through cyberspace by trawling non-work related websites for personal interests and purposes,” said David T. Wagner, an assistant professor of organisational behaviour and human resources at Singapore Management University.

His paper, 'Lost sleep and cyberloafing: Evidence from the laboratory and the daylight saving time quasi-experiment', was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in February 2012.

Cyberloafing is not as visible as other loafing behaviours as it does not require for one to be physically absent from the office for long periods of time.

It means that employees can spend substantial amounts of time engaged in personal pursuits without even leaving their desks, while appearing to be hard at work, said the researchers who worked on the paper.

Given the ease of engaging in cyberloafing, it can be viewed as a workplace temptation that requires employees to exercise self-regulation in order to stay on task.

Building on this line of thought, the researchers sought to examine how lost and low-quality sleep, caused by the shift to Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the US, might influence employee cyberloafing behaviours.

Self-regulation and sleep

Past research has shown that diets are most often broken, and impulsive crimes most frequently committed late in the evening – when people are tired. And because sleep helps restore the self-regulatory resources that are depleted over the course of a typical day, the researchers reasoned that self-regulatory failure would be likelier amongst those who obtain inadequate or low-quality sleep.

Employers should know that

Submitted by James Loftcraft on 11 February 2013 - 6:59am

Employers should know that collaboration is key and sometimes enforcing some rules on your employees can prove to be a challenge. Employees should work hard, but companies should pay more for high tier workers.

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