COMMENTARY–
Just considering technology tin can help set up some of the symptoms doesn't hateful you're actually addressing the problem.

The real reasons behind lost productivity are a lot harder to sell to managers: poor planning, low morale, and bad management.

The final few years have seen an enormous growth the in technologies available to companies to monitor and filter their employees' due east-postal service, Web surfing, instant messaging, and any other technology-related fourth dimension wasters. This sort of affair by and large doesn't go down well with the It media, since many journalists have a slight lean to the left. Considering information technology smacks of Big Blood brother, journos tend to express outrage near the invasion of workers' rights and so forthââ,¬"a position many workers tend to agree with.

On the business side of the debate, these products are well received, non necessarily because managers enjoy trampling on or invading the privacy of their subordinates, but because the vendors of this software pitch the message in terms of render on investment. "Your employees are wasting your money," they proclaim, "spend coin with us to cease them!"

One such company, SurfControl, thoughtfully provides an ROI calculatorââ,¬"enter the number of employees, average hourly wages, and the amount of fourth dimension spent on unproductive personal Web surfing or electronic mail. Multiplying these figures together, the computer estimates the amount of money your company is "losing". Dividing this figure past the cost of SurfControl's software, it estimates an ROI period.

Using a modest gauge of an hour a twenty-four hour period spent on personal electronic mail and Web surfing, even a relatively small visitor such as this magazine's publisher is evidently losing somewhere in the vicinity of half a million dollars a twelvemonth considering of its slacker employees. If SurfControl's software were used to postage out this wasteful activeness, it would pay itself off in less than a day (I hope my manager doesn't read this).

One has to assume, however, that executives are not entirely thick, and would not take these figures literally. For i affair, the calculations are overly simplistic, and don't take into account bandwidth or management costs. And if of class if employees aren't wasting time on email or the Web, there are numerous other means to waste time that tin can't exist filtered.

However, the real assumption behind this debateââ,¬"that personal e-mail service or Web surfing are a pregnant and costly waste matter of employee productivityââ,¬"is taken for granted. And this is because the real reasons behind lost productivity are a lot harder to sell to managers: poor planning, low morale, and bad direction.

A recent study titled Untapped Potential by management consultants Proudfoot Consulting examined productivity levels across seven countries including Australia. It found that Australian workers only spend threescore pct of their fourth dimension at work productively, compared with an optimum level of 85 percent (leaving out fourth dimension for sick days, holidays, and training).

The report constitute past far the greatest crusade of lost employee productivity is insufficient planning and command, accounting for 47 percent of all wasted time in Australian businesses. Next on the list: inadequate management, 24 percent. Poor working morale was nine percent, as was inappropriately qualified staff, and Information technology-related problems accounted for only seven per centum.

Admittedly, personal e-mail and Spider web surfing are symptoms of these problems, rather than causes in themselves. However, curtailing employees' personal use of IT avails will non fix any of these problems. It won't reduce the amount of fourth dimension employees spend redoing work because of bad planning, or barking upwardly the incorrect tree because managers didn't communicate their goals clearly. It won't fixââ,¬"except perhaps tangentiallyââ,¬"computer downtime or time wasted trying to find badly-filed documents. It will take no effect on the amount of piece of work duplicated considering of departments' silo mentalities, and it certainly will not better employees' morale.

This is non to say filtering and monitoring are useless or pointless. But managers should seek to apply them equally office of an overall strategy that addresses the causes of the problems, rather than band-aiding the symptoms.

Josh Mehlman is features editor of Technology & Business. Subscribe now to Australian Technology & Business organisation mag.