A Stitch in Haste

British researchers have determined that workers "cost" their employers £124 billion per year "wasting" time on the Internet:

The average worker devotes 90 minutes a day to "personal" web use and sending emails -- adding up to 43 lost working days every year.
...
The majority feel they deserve an internet break because they work so hard.

However, it does not always go unnoticed because 17 per cent of employees admit to having been caught surfing the web when they should have been working. Two per cent were sacked for the offence.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Such analytical frameworks are the diametric opposites of -- yet just as erroneous as -- the one I debunked in this post on how it is the worker, not the employer, who pays for "paid" holidays and vacations.

Let's begin with some basic first principles. Employees who sit at a desk with a computer -- especially a computer with email and Internet access -- tend, overwhelmingly I would think, to be salaried employees, not waged workers. For such employees, the notions that their time "belongs" to their employer, and that not working non-stop "costs" their employer money, are wholly untenable.

The employer of a salaried worker pays a certain quantum of compensation in exchange for a certain quantum of work. Whether that work is achieved in a single, monotonous eight-hour shift, or a nine-hour shift with a one-hour lunch break, or a 9.5-hour shift with 90 minutes of personal web use, is irrelevant. There is simply no "wasting" to lament or "cost" to recoup. If the work gets done in the broad time frame agreed to, then how is the unproductive time "wasted"? The employer is given what she pays for; the employee gives what he is paid for. All else is phantom accounting.

There is no doubt some background noise to such analyses. Wear & tear or capacity constraints on the equipment. The cost of having to monitor and restrict access to inappropriate websites. Productivity gains from giving employees flexibility in how they do their jobs. But those phenomena (which tend to mostly cancel each other out anyway) are all ancillary to the basic paradigm: The employer and worker mutually agree to exchange a amount of work for an amount of compensation. There's not much more to "analyze."

Incidentally, I'd be willing to wager that at least some of those reprimands and terminations were not over "excessive" use of the Internet at work, but for inappropriate use (e.g., emailing trade secrets, submitting résumés to recruiters, or plain old naughty pictures). If the worker breaches his contract with his employer, then that's another matter altogether, and not the faux problem that these (unidentified) "researchers" are lamenting.

There is only "waste" or "cost" from a myopic, refracted -- and just plain wrong -- perspective.