Help Wanted: Get Paid to Play Angry Birds and Farmville- 40K per year plus benefits!
As ridiculous as this job ad sounds, corporations are losing billions of dollars in lost productivity as their employees “sneak” time to play online games such as Farmville and Angry Birds. A colleague of mine got so caught up in their Farmville crops and adding neighbors to their online Facebook craze that they were losing many hours a day. Is the “Angry Bird Effect” costing your company money?
Take a look at your friends’ time stamps on Facebook for Farmville activity, when pictures were uploaded, or when comments were made and you will see that many people are on Facebook during business hours. Since many companies block these social networking sites, it then becomes necessary to utilize one’s smart phone to update and play without the watchful eyes of the IT Department.
In addition to games, the number of texts and emails of a personal nature are eroding away at company productivity. It seems as though just about everyone is sending texts these days. Whether you’re a preteen or you’ve been retired for the last twenty years; everyone is texting! This enables us to be in constant and instant communication with friends, family members, and possibly the cubicle next door at all times. Industry experts estimate that it takes 25 minutes to get back to a work task after an interruption. Just imagine how much time is lost with texting alone!
How much is this costing companies? A study done by Nucleus Research, a global provider of investigative technology research, cites 77% of all workers have a Facebook account and 66% access it for an average of more than 15 minutes per day at work. A full one third admitted to setting up their entire Facebook profile during work hours. Research from Basex, a knowledge management company, estimates costs over $650 Billion in lost productivity to personal emails, text messages, and personal calls at work without even factoring in lost time to games or Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
As the world becomes more and more tied to their smart phones, companies will no doubt be instituting cell phone policies to put their “finger in the dike” of seeping productivity lost to games, excessive text messaging and the like.
If you like our articles, subscribe to get automatic updates!
Also, please feel free to give us feedback about our blog, our website, or just say hello by filling out the form below. Thanks!
smithgroupIT 
Excellent points made. Honestly, though, it can be so hard to keep off of these games and social networking sites sometimes.