Facebook is a $5 billion drain on business
By John Pospisil
Social networking site Facebook could cost Australian businesses up to AUS$5 billion (US$4 billion) in lost productivity, according to Internet filtering company, SurfControl.
“Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” said SurfControl’s Dr Richard Cullen.
“There are Facebook groups dedicated to slacking off at work, some of them are specific to employees of a single company.”
Like other social networking sites, Facebook allows you to upload photos, share videos and communicate with a network of friends. You can use it to keep in touch with your “real world” friends, as well as to meet new people. It’s in the same vein as MySpace, but whereas MySpace has always been about music, Facebook originally started as a social networking site for college students.
On a personal note, I have to say that I have noticed Facebook’s increasing popularity in corporate Australia. Over the past six months I’ve received an increasing number of invitations to join Facebook from work-related acquaintances. As a 35-year-old professional, I wouldn’t be surprised to receive invitations from Linkedin, but Facebook?
On a recent visit to a large corporation’s office, I noticed several staff members, in their late 20s and early 30s, ducking off regularly to check their Facebook accounts. It was almost as if they were checking their email. At the time, I couldn’t help but wonder about the impact on productivity.
According to a SurfControl’s calculations, if a Facebook user spends an hour a day checking their account at work, it could cost their employer AUS$6200 (US$4000) a year in lost productivity. Since there are 800,000 businesses in Australia, SurfControl says that this could cost business us up $5 billion a year, assuming that there is one slacker per business (obviously calculated on the basis that $1 billion is 1000 million, rather than 1 million million).
The only problem with this calculation is that currently Facebook has just 224,000 Australian members, not 800,000 members.
Still, SurfControl makes a valid point (and let’s face it $5 billion sounds better than $1 billion) – there’s a lot of Internet-based distractions at work, and the challenge for employers is to work out how to minimize the disruption in the workplace, without being overly restrictive.
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August 20th, 2007
Don’t know if you’ve seen this: A blogger named Derek Sorensen (http://dereksorensen.com/?p=28) has come across an app called Notworking that measures the amount of money your losing by networking instead of actually working.