Ever just walked in the office and the first thing you do is just check your Facebook and Twitter page? Followed by watching the latest trailers on YouTube all whilst chatting to your friends on MSN Messenger? Before you know it, it’s 5pm and it’s time to knock off and go home. Amount of work completed? Naught. This is the definition and epitome of cyber slacking; a waste of company resources and your time and effort to work hard and excel and get the promotion that you have been yearning for. In this new digital generation of ours, it has given birth to an extraordinary phenomenal; cyber slacking.
This is exceptional and unique to our generation where we are extremely interconnected to all the things we like through the use of the Internet. It is also a current and growing dilemma among corporations, whom efficiency and productivity have gone down, causing company losses, which can eventually lead to retrenchment, Thus creating a vicious cycle back to the employees themselves. Here’s a video of cyber slacking by news corporation CBS on the problems of cyber slacking in the workplace.
With this becoming a growing dilemma in companies, it has promoted them to take more deterring and regulating actions despite it being unpopular among employees. According to Wikipedia:
Many firms employ surveillance software to track employees' Internet activity in an effort to limit liability and improve productivity. Other methods used to reduce cyber slacking include installation of proxy server to prevent programs from accessing resources like Internet Relay Chat, AOL Messenger Service, or some online gambling services, strict disciplinary measures for employees found cyber slacking, and carrot and stick measures like providing free or subsidized Internet access for employees outside of working hours.
This video about a company in the United States is one such example.
With this, cyber slacking can become a problem if companies do not assert enough control over the use of Internet in the office. However, employers must also understand the limit in which how much control they can assert. After all, humans are not robot input machines and we are not made to work every single second the moment we step into our offices. That is not how our brains were created to function. A few minutes of rest periodically can still allow room for productivity to flourish within the workspace.
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