It's no secret that Facebook is productivity's biggest enemy. With all those gifts to send, games to play, and friends to stalk, there's no time for work once you log in to the social networking site. While many offices and schools have caught onto this, it took one British city council a little longer than most.
According to The Daily Mail, the Portsmouth City Council recently banned the staff of 4,500 at its town hall from using Facebook, after discovering that employees spent an average of 413 hours per month perusing the site. Not only were these Brits spending a jaw-dropping amount of time logged-in, but they were also logging in often -- about 270,000 times a month. Things really spiraled out of control this past July, when the staff totaled 572 hours and 38 minutes, or 71 working days, on Facebook, even though they were only supposed to visit the site during lunch or after work. That's taxpayers' money hard at work, folks.
While the site has been blocked, the staff can apply to access Facebook only if it's necessary to complete their job (although it'd be hard to imagine too many instances where this would apply). This ban is a commendable effort by the local government, but the council shouldn't forget that there are plenty of other ways to waste time on the Internet -- Youtube, Hulu, eBay, Switched...
No comments:
Post a Comment