Too much employee ‘socialising’ for Aussie businesses

Peter Dinham
Monday, 01 June 2009 17:11

IT Industry - Market

Employees of Australian businesses are apparently spending far too much time chatting and messaging with their friends over social networks instead of doing their work, and their bosses have had enough.

According to Telstra and internet security group, MessageLabs, the bosses are now cracking down on their social networkers, clearly fed up with their employees spending too much time accessing social networks when their companies are aggressively seeking productivity gains in the midst of a tightening economy.

In figures released today as a result of a market study, Telstra and MessageLabs, now part of the Symantec group, say there’s been a four-fold spike in the number of times employers have blocked worker access to social networking sites between June last year and April this year.

New figures released by Telstra and MessageLabs, now part of Symantec, show a four-fold spike in the number of times employers have blocked worker access to social networking sites between June 2008 and April 2009.

According to the two companies, their review of web-usage trends of Australian small and medium enterprises, show:

•    6000 attempts to access social networking sites are blocked each day, compared with 2000 a day 10 months ago 
•    the total number of URLs “blocked” by organisations has jumped by 193 per cent since January, the majority of which     are social networking sites
•    the total number of URLs or website addresses “allowed” has been slashed by 58 per cent since January


Telstra Business executive director, Brian Harcourt, cautions employees of Australian businesses that “tweeting, friending or poking your way through the working day may not be the best way to improve the productivity of those many small businesses which are battling to find a way through the challenging economy.”
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