How quickly can you close a web browser window, to prevent the boss catching you on Facebook or YouTube? Well, it doesn’t matter any more! Just tell the captain you’re taking a five minute “WILB break”. That’s workplace internet leisure browsing and it’s been given the tick of approval by Brent Coker at the University of Melbourne.
Coker works in the University’s department of management and marketing. His area of research is online consumer behaviour so he decided to investigate how much productivity is lost when workers get busy on social networking sites (like Twitter or MySpace) and social interest sites (like news.com.au and, er… Ebay).
His study, titled Freedom to Surf, found that those who surfed the internet for fun at work were around 9% more productive than those who didn’t, or couldn’t… perhaps because the interweb had been confiscated.
He says, “the key to this is short, sharp breaks surfing the internet, giving enough time to restore the worker’s concentration.”
At SNOBS, we think this is a particularly exciting revelation for non-smokers in the workplace. Next time half the team head out for “smoko” it’s a WILB-break for the rest of us!
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We actually have an open web policy here at my work and there's never been any issues with people slacking off or anything like that.