One of the most memorable stories (or is it an urban legend?) doing the rounds on the Web is the one about a South African company that decided to fight non-relevant online surfing during working hours (known as "cyberskiving") by publishing a list of sites visited by its own employees - together with their name and title.
So-called irrelevant use of Web and e-mail facilities in the workplace takes top position among chief money-wasters, together with too many smoke-breaks and overlong meetings.
Rudy Nadler-Nir, independent strategist
During this sting operation, the company CEO, MD and other top-dogs were found to be visiting a host of sites that had nothing to do with their job-titles, including porn, hate-clubs and online gambling. One of the directors even had an uncontrollable online fetish involving Lassie, the legendary Hollywood pooch.
Whether this story is true or just a figment of the imagination, it appears that so-called irrelevant use of Web and e-mail facilities in the workplace takes top position among chief money-wasters, together with too many smoke-breaks and overlong meetings.
Interesting statistics quoted in UK-based Chris Tomlinson`s "Guru - The Tomlinson View" claim that 30% to 40% of employee activity is wasted through cyberskiving.
The survey he quotes looked at two major income groups: those earning between lb50 000 and lb75 000 per annum, and those earning less than lb25 000 per annum.
Let`s do the sums: group A (earning lb62 000 per annum, or lb5 167 per month on average) costs employers a staggering lb1 808.45 per month for the time they spend cyberskiving. Group B`s (lb25 000 per annum, lb2 083 per month) cyberskiving costs their employers "only" lb729 per month.
No less intriguing is Tomlinson`s claim that employees earning between lb50 000 and lb75 000 are more than twice as likely to download pornography as those earning less than lb25 000 per annum.
High stakes
What we have here is an employer`s nightmare: you bleed money because your employees engage in cyberskiving. What`s worse is that the phenomenon increases with higher paid employees.
The stakes are high. If the average worker spends 30% to 40% of his/her time cyberskiving, it adds up to a staggering 63 hours per employee per month during an average 160-hour work-month.
Mr Employer will probably fall for the stingword "education" and spend time and tons of money trying to teach his employees that cyberskiving is a bad, dishonest activity that weakens the company and endangers their jobs. Mr Employer might invest further in blocking-technology to bar, filter and stop Web surfing and "open" unchecked e-mail.
I would hazard a guess that Mr Employer`s strategy will fail, and it will fail dismally. Mr Employer can kiss his money, and probably some of his employees, goodbye.
Instead, Mr Employer needs to look at his employees as if they were his customers. More than that, if Mr Employer can`t communicate with his own staff members, he hasn`t got a snowball`s hope in hell of talking successfully to his customers. This employer-to-employee communication plan is a must. It is the only way for companies to get a positive outcome where any other type of campaign will probably fail.
How does employer-to-employee communication work in the case of cyberskiving?
Exactly the same way customer relationship management (CRM) would: find intrinsic elements of value to the customer/employee, and then offer those elements attached to a reasonable, acceptable cost.
Finding a solution
Losing 63 hours per employee per month is horrendous. Mr Employer can do some research and find out that the minimal cost of Internet connectivity in this country is around R60 per month.
Mr Employer sits with his strategic team and figures out the list of required types of online information for the month. He then sees to it that the reading (reports, memos, white papers, Web links and so on) is available online.
The stipulated employee-rule is simple: they are given Internet access from home, paid for by their employer (employees only pay the cost of the local phone call) and are encouraged to transfer their cyberskiving activities from work-time to own-time.
At the same time, staffers are welcome to use the online facilities at work to the benefit of their company. This approach seems to have all the advantages of a well-defined "win-win" CRM plan.
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