Blogging Thieves Get Total Of 127,169 Years
January 22, 2008
It’s official 10% of bloggers are thieving scumbags. Problogger ran this poll to discover where people prefer to blog and a shocking 10% do it at work.
Now if you do this, you might think you’re being a bit naughty, or you might justify it as filling in time, improving your skills, or whatever you can come up with. But, the truth is, if you’re using your employer’s time to blog – you’re a thief.
With so many blogs on the Internet, it’s difficult to arrive at an accurate figure. But here’s an estimate of how many working hours are stolen by bloggers:
There are 112.8 million blogs on the internet (the number of blogs technorati say they’re tracking).
So, 11 million bloggers are blogging at work. That’s an awful lot of blogging thieves.
If each blogger is blogging 2 hours a week that’s 22 million hours lost each week.
That’s 1114 million hours lost each year.
That’s 127,169 years of time stolen by blogging thieves each year.
Do you blog at work? Why? Do you see it as stealing, or do you try to justify it in some other way?
Do you have a problem with thieving bloggers in your workplace? And what do you think businesses should do to stop people blogging at work?
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Hi Catherine,
I would venture a guess, that the percentage is higher than 10%, as many will justify their “at work blogging time”, as their lunch hours or breaks.
Unfortunately, it is not just by blogging that employees are stealing from employers. If they make personal phone calls, take office supplies, b.s. with others when they are suppose to be working, come in late, leave early, take extended lunch hours, surf online for personal stuff, email friends/family, use a company vehicle for a personal errand, …should I go on?
On one of my blogs, I covered the issue of how employees steal from their employers. Then I did some calculations, and a large corporation could literally lose millions in a year’s time. Sad!.
Employees may not see it as a big deal, but they are indeed, stealing from their employers. Sure, they may try to justify it as “I don’t get paid enough”, but they are literally giving themselves a raise.
If it’s time for a review, and the employer is aware of the thievery, chances are, the raise they get may be minimal. Employers are not stupid. Computers activity can be tracked, and often is, without employees knowing it.
Being self employed, my blogging comes second to the business. However, if I worked for a company, I wouldn’t even think of blogging at work…unless I was hired as the company’s “blogger”….how sweet would that be?
I would say, the only way to stop employees from blogging at work would be to have the IT department figure out a way to allow/disallow sites.
Hey Ian,,,, You’re an IT guy, what could employers do?
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These are all good points. Personally, I don’t mind lunch-break internet activity or the odd personal email.
I’d rather allow it up to a point than have people hide it.
I’m lucky to be working with a great team of people.
There is a danger when you have a good team that you can unbalance it by cracking down too much. We’re blessed at the moment with a team who go that extra mile – call at a clients home on their own time to fix their IT, work late occasionally or at weekends.
In return, although we’re pushed right now, we’ll let them come in late or take a day off as a thank you.
But there’s a big however! Once you reach a certain size, it’s harder to spot those who aren’t pulling their weight. Or you could be landed with a problem employee or two which make this difficult to pull off.
You have to be a little careful with contracts of employment, and especially careful about applying “big brother” tactics without due warning.
A mistake many make is monitoring a specific individual. You have to monitor all or none ideally.
I have seen a number of software applications that can monitor everything – and it’s scary stuff!
I have seen before and after scenarios. One where people are not aware they are being monitored. And then massive productivity increases once people are aware they are being monitored.
In a past life, we introduced such wide-scale monitoring. And it’s shocking what people do even when they know they are being monitored.
Being the internet, I am not prepared to share details here!
I have people introduce monitoring across the board. They did it by the book, expecting to find evidence to support a case against a particular individual.
But then being shocked when they discovered their favourites weren’t as angelic and productive as they thought.
So it can be a shock. And it can also hurt the business owner personally when they discover a few of the things being said about them!
So if you do start to monitor employees, develop a thick skin fast.
Remember back when you were employed. It’s always natural – even in places were the boss is admired – that you can’t be popular to everyone all the time.
It’s only natural to have the odd moan about your boss. Or the workload. Or whatever it is. We wouldn’t be human otherwise.
But there’s an acceptable level and an unacceptable one. So be careful to draw the line in the right place.
And equally, be careful not to be discriminatory against an individual.
If others are carrying out the same “crime” you have to punish those too, no matter how much you like them.
You don’t want to end up in an industrial tribunal defending yourself against somebody who holds up the lack of punishment of others for the same offence ,as setting a precedent of acceptable behaviour, and thereby creating a case for discrimination.
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Hi Barbara – that is so true. I think I read about that on your blog. Now was it 30% or 50% of the time they are paid for that the average person actually works?
So, it’s really like you’re paying them double their salary for the hours worked!
I think this is one of the things I find difficult about employing people, as I have always worked hard when I’ve worked for others myself. And small businesses especially really can’t afford all this skiving and pilfering.
Ian – you mention it being harder to spot people abusing the system as you grow, which is why it can be a good idea not to allow them to do it to begin with – then they don’t take advantage.
I put IT misuse in our contract years ago. It didn’t stop it, but it avoids any misunderstandings if you have it in there.
When someone is abusing the internet at work, they always set “view history” to 0 days – it’s a big telltale sign. So, I just switch it back to 10 days.
And you’d be surprised at how much people will use the Internet at work. It annoyed me a lot because, I certainly didn’t have time to use if myself, so I didn’t see why other people should be spending half the day doing so. And it really adds insult to injury when you find someone researching different ways that you can sue your employer!
Blocking particular types of site is something I would certainly look at in the future.
Catherine Lawson’s last blog post..Blogging Thieves Get Total Of 127,169 Years
I don’t work…dummdidummdidummm
Cath,
The big brother software is exceedingly clever. Best installed on a file server, it can literally track everything that individual does.
It times how much active time they spend on applications. So they can’t just open Word or Excel and have it sat there and expect to be credited with working all day.
It can relate to keystrokes and in fact record every letter typed.
It also takes screen shots of the desk-top which could be used in evidence. And you can even programme in keywords to particularly look out for and alert whoever you choose.
For example, “CV”, “resume”, “curriculum vitae”, the names of your competitors could be scanned constantly.
You can get summary reports. You can see every Messenger conversation, hotmail outbound email, screenshots of the hotmail inbox.
It is very scary stuff!
But incredibly powerful as an incentive to work.
It can help you benchmakr different employees for productivity.
If you took a more positive view of it, it can be used to identify skill gaps or areas of weakness.
Ian Denny’s last blog post..Why I Bothered To Tell This Sorry Story
I don’t have a chance to blog at these jobs.
I did do some blogging at the old one, but that was partially because there were days where I had nothing to do. And I’d try to take initiative, but sometimes there just wasn’t anything to do. My boss would be balancing her checkbook. I was sitting by the phone and keeping the front door covered, so technically I was working. I also kept an eye on my work inbox.
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As bad as blogging is, regular Internet use is worse!
However, In a world were employers want you to be availabel 24/7 on CrackBerry, the mix of personal and work time is getting blurier!
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Catherine,
I do agree, if employees know, when they are hired, they may be monitored, it “sets the tone” for your expectations. Like you said, it doesn’t necessarily stop it, but if you need to reprimand an employee, you have the evidence.
And as Ian said, you do have to apply it equally, across the board. Thick skin is good to have, no matter what your business is. Some employees will complain, no matter what. That just is their nature…..can never be pleased.
I would imagine that in a large company, if they do monitor, they might be amazed at the amount of time the majority of employees are slacking off. That could be tough, as in some cases they could lose a large percentage of their employee base, if they were to start reprimanding/firing people for misuse.
What makes it bad for a large company that hasn’t managed the problem of misuse of time, when new employees are hired, they begin to assume it’s acceptable, as they see the “older” employees “doing it”.
This does make me wonder though. If employees are spending so much time on the internet, etc (wasting time), does that mean some companies are overstaffed? Are we, as employers, not communicating our expectations to those that are coming on board? And, not enforcing company policies, as we should?
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I worked as an employee for a while, but I don’t see blogging as definitely stealing. I think it depends on the situation. If there is nothing to do, and I’ve had jobs like that, then it’s okay to read a book, read a magazine, twiddle your thumbs, or play computer games. In that case, I see nothing wrong with blogging.
Obviously, if you’re supposed to be doing something for your employer and you’re blogging instead, then that’s a problem.
Also, it would depend on your definition of blogging. My most recent job wouldn’t allow me to type blog posts while I was waiting for the next call (I worked at a call center), but I could read a book or whatever. I chose to “blog” using a pen and paper during downtime. I really think they should have allowed me to use the computer, but I did ask (since the computer is their property), and was told I couldn’t.
So it depends on the job and the type of blogging, and whether it’s being done instead of doing your job.
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The problem, if I may be so bold, is not the workers, it is the company. The answer is also the company, but it has nothing to do with more and more clever monitoring software.
People are people, and they will do whatever suits them best for the situation in which they find themselves. If their work is unmotivating, unrewarding and they can spend 10% or more of their time doing personal activities, then clearly the company isn’t set up very well to capture their best efforts.
You can expect people to spend 100% of their time on work, but if you haven’t given them anything rewarding to work on and you haven’t filled 100% of their time with work they need to get done, then they are going to do other things. If you institute more and more draconian measures to limit what they can do besides work, they aren’t going to be more productive, just more resentful.
What you need to do instead is first review what it is that each person is doing, and your own system. You might have bottlenecks that cause some people or groups to be idled waiting for other groups to act. If you haven’t give them secondary tasks, and not just busy work, which people can instantly detect, then you can’t expect them to stay busy.
You may also have given someone much more time to do a task than is necessary, or as often happens, people finish one task but the boss is too busy to get around to assigning them another, so they just sit idling away the time.
It is definitely a challenge to keep waste and inefficiency to a minimum, and motivation at a maximum, but some businesses are much worse at it than others. One answer is to blame the employees, but that isn’t where the problem lies. The better answer is to figure out where the company can do better to keep people working full time on meaningful jobs and then reward them for good performance, so their incentive is to work, not to goof off.
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I think Matt makes a great point.
It is the company who is at fault.
And I also completely agree with Barbara about over-staffing. But I don’t think it’s just a big company problem.
I’m ashamed to say that at one time we had 16 employees. We went bust, and started again – with 4 full-time and one part-time employee.
We managed to keep pretty much the entire client base of the previous company. All we did is cut out a small element.
And we braced ourselves to work evenings, weekends and every hour available in blood, sweat and tears to keep them.
We rolled our sleeves up but noticed that after the first couple of weeks, we were coping. And not just coping, coping pretty easily.
Granted we were the talent and could do things quicker we believed, but we were seriously worried that we wouldn’t cope – 16 to 4.5 staff.
After about 6 weeks, we had quiet days. We were going home on time. We weren’t working weeends.
So where did all that time go?
I actually don’t completely agree with squeezing 100% out of everyone. Without a 5 minute bit of banter about football this morning before the daily support calls started, we would have a stifling, unsociable environment.
I am not advocating a party atmosphere at all. Nor idle banter all the time.
We spend too much time in work not to be sociable.
I expect us all to work hard, but take appropriate mental breaks.
I don’t mind a member of staff going online and booking a ticket to a match, Or looking up a train time for their weekend away.
I do mind persistent stealing. Building a smokescreen which hides time wasted. Especially when it becomes contagious and everyone silently or covertly behind your backs agrees what’s acceptable in terms of skiving so the consensus makes it right.
A balance can be achieved. Where people behave like adults and “give and take” works.
But it’s a fine line. It takes just one bad egg to upset the mix. It then tips very easily towards a culture where monitoring becomes sadly necessary.
Ian Denny’s last blog post..Why I Bothered To Tell This Sorry Story
In the corporate setting I worked where they micromanaged their employees. I was in a management position. Four departments reported to my department part of my job detail was tracking one of our departments calls. That department happened to be the call center. To say I hated that role was an understatement. There were only a few bad apples in the bunch instead of addressing those people my boss continued to put the screws on everyone. The employees naturally resented that they were being looked at through a microscope. As the morale dropped so did the productivity? I resented being put into the role of tracking employees, and I approached my boss about it. A funny thing is the majority of those in management position was quick to point the finger at the workers but failed to see how they could possibly be at fault.
The employees knew they were being monitored, and they didn’t like it at all. I didn’t blame them, although I never told them that. I vented when I was outside of work. Morale went down.
My boss came to me and asked what did I think should be done. I suggested boosting morale through meetings where management actually listened to what they had to say, having the supervisors followed up with those who weren’t pulling their weight to see what was going on would be helpful, also nixing some of the productivity programs would be a huge plus since everyone should not have to suffer for the idleness of a few. She actually listened. Meetings changed, and employees actually had a chance to be heard and give feedback. The excessive monitoring stopped, employee morale increased, and so did production.
The last few months working at that organization my boss faced a similar issue. A new project was launched that would add more work to the employee’s workload. It was unexpected the process wasn’t explained completely and naturally the employees within that department were resentful. That department stayed extremely busy. I knew that was the case because I spent a lot of time with the employees within the department finding out what they did and actually assisting them on various projects because I wanted to get an idea of what the job was like. I had an idea how challenging their job was. My boss pulled me in for a meeting and asked what we should do. I told her the employees had a lot of demands placed on them already, and they felt resentful because they believed management weren’t thinking about them. Knowing their schedule I knew they could not have completed that work within the time frame required. The expectations were unrealistic. Naturally the employees were upset. I suggested that we offer them an incentive to get this project completed. Perhaps a monetary award along with a casual day. After discussion with her boss the COO it was approved. Employees worked overtime, and the project was completed ahead of schedule. In both cases, my boss was willing to blame the employees she didn’t want to look at the reasons why this might be happening.
Several years ago when I was “just a worker†I did things in my idle time; however, my work was always completed ahead of time and I only did that after checking with my boss. I would check with those within my department to see whether they needed assistance and I always followed up with my boss to see whether there was anything that needed to be done. My boss ran out of things for me to do at times, they would let me leave early, but often they told me to take a break. I was fast, and my work was always done correctly.
Eventually, I will have to hire employees for my business but I don’t want to go that route of monitoring everything they does. As I told her we are both adults you know what needs to be done in the time, I’ve given you. I won’t be breathing down your neck. As my business grows, I want to keep that same philosophy. Can it be completed with large companies? I believe it can. My brother oversees 4,000 workers his division is always receiving awards because of their productivity; however, he looks at all sides and is willing to see what he can do to make a situation better. At times, it might be the employees other times he, and those within management might need to make changes.
Interesting discussion thanks for kicking it off.
That should have been…
Eventually, I will have to hire employees for my business but I don’t want to go that route of monitoring everything the are doing. Currently I have one employee. As I told her we are both adults you know what needs to be done in the time, I’ve given you.
I had to come back into this one.
Years ago, being in a new department/ management position, I wanted to know what my group of employees were doing so when they took their vacations, I would do their jobs. Although it meant I would be putting in very long hours, I did find a lot of duplicity.
I ended up restructuring some of the jobs, redesigned spread sheets, etc, which in turn made it easier for my employees to do their job. This not only helped employee morale, but my group knew that I knew their jobs. If they encountered a problem, I had compassion for them, totally understood what they were talking about, valued their input, and we worked together to resolve the issue.
By doing a “cross training” of sorts, I was able to keep the morale up, and earn respect from my subordinates.
I think too often, those in management positions, project an attitude that they are “above” doing the menial work. That attitude can contribute to an even lower employee morale.
In our current business, we are almost understaffed, and my husband will work side by side with anyone. At times, we are a little short handed, but that just means we pay some overtime wages. All in all, it works good, as the employees we do have, are guaranteed 8 hours a day. They do give us a lot of their sweat (literally), so if they spend a few minutes goofing off, we are o.k. with that.
Having had “time stealers” in the past, we feel grateful for the crew we have now.
Ian, that’s great that you were able to reduce your staff by nearly 75%…it had to be an eyeopener.
Opal,
Your former employer had to have hated to see you go. It sounds like you were a real asset to the organization.
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Wow – this thread has got a heap of info in it now and there are some great points. And I do like to respond to everyones points but this will be hard to keep up. Plus, we are starting to go into some territory that I’d saved for another post!
Many of you have mentioned working in places where you’ve not been given enough work to fill your time. And as Ian pointed out, sometimes businesses can get into a position where they’re way overstaffed and they don’t realise it until they have problems.
Having proper systems in place can help to avoid time wasted. And regular appraisals would help to get feedback from staff too. But, too many employers use appraisals to give feedback on the performance of staff, and don’t ask for feedback in return, which is a shame.
Opal – it is always the case that a few bad apples will spoil things for everyone isn’t it?. Unfortunately, negativity seems to spread faster than ivy. But, it is great that you were able to help your boss turn things round.
I think a huge danger in business is not identifying these bad apples early on in the game. Because the trouble is, new employees will see them surfing the internet, or blogging all day, taking long lunches and many will thing that is the done thing in the company.
I personally have not experienced anyone blogging at work. But, I have had a couple of people abuse the Internet. I didn’t need to check up on them initially to know they were doing it. I simply noticed that they were only getting a fraction of their jobs done in the day. And, when challenged, they continuously made excuses.
I must admit, I was really naive at first. Maybe I was expecting too much work too fast? But, after too many times working through the night to catch up on the work they hadn’t done, I checked the Internet.
They couldn’t have been doing much else, given that I was almost always in the office – they were simply switching between screens when there was a chance of anyone seeing them!
Now, if you have a small business, you really don’t want to be working through the night to do the work someone else is supposed to be doing; while you pay them to play on the Internet all day. And believe me – it is even harder when you’re a single parent and you’re doing this.
And I’m sure that most people would agree that blogging at work, or playing on the Internet, instead of doing your work is theft.
Aside from not being so naive all that time ago, I learned too other things: You can train people in most things aside from enthusiasm and honesty.
But, judging by the comments – it seems as though those businesses that simply don’t give their staff enough work to keep them occupied for a full day, have other issues to address.
I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has taken the time to contribute to this discussion. It has been really interesting to hear everyone’s experiences.
Catherine Lawson’s last blog post..Blogging Thieves Get Total Of 127,169 Years
This is a great topic Cathy.
I don’t know how to feel about this one. I guess the severity of it will rest upon what kind of work you’re doing at your place of employment.
Some people might engage in hard labor while others would be monitoring patients. I know at my place of employment we’re always glued to the PC because we handle insurance. Sometimes there can be a lapse in between calls of 15 minutes. Why waste this kind of time checking email? Why not do something productive.?
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Thanks and very good point Dwayne. Imagine if a nurse decided to blog instead of monitoring ill patients, or giving them their medication.
I would hate to think that would happen, but it would be naive to assume it couldn’t.
I didn’t realise you worked in insurance. In my last business we worked closely with the insurance industry. Do you take calls from people making claims then?
I sure do!……from all over the world! It can be extremely stressful being there! You have to be a counselor and a professional for customers all at the same time!
In between calls we need something that will be a stress reliever!
Dwayne – I know what you mean. It can be so stressful. A few years ago we had a really evil customer. I dreaded every single communicaion with her.
One day she called and she screamed down the phone so much that I had to hang up. I was feeling really rundown at the time and it is the only time a customer actually made me cry. I actually had to divert my calls to someone else for 30 minutes!
Don’t you find it’s always the ones who have done something truly idiotic and burned their own homes down that are the most difficult customers?
We once had a woman who’d actually left her cooker rings on; then left a hot water bottle on top of them and went out for the night whilst her house happily blazed away. Everyone tried to help her, but she was a real witch.
I do think sometimes that they should consider factors such as stupidity levels when deciding insurance premiums.
Cath,
I’d buy any stupidity detectors you could review and become an affilliate for?
You really must write a book on that business – oh, you already have.
How about a short e-book with many of the great posts you have already as the basis?
Ian Denny’s last blog post..Paperless Office? Then Why Is It Magnetically Drawn To My Desk In Mountains?
I heard once that people only actually work about 2hrs a day per 8hr word day anyway… so unless their blogging comes out their 2hrs of work per day I’m not sure it has as huge an effect as you think… but again who knows… I would say slacking at work more generally is a problem
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Hi Ian – thank you very much. I know you do keep encouraging me to do this, and you are very kind.
I did write 25,000 words of such a book earlier in the year; then decided I didn’t like the slant I’d used ( I know; I’ll probably drown in my own words at some point). So, I’ll have to drag it out again and edit ruthlessly.
Stock trading software person – that is shocking and much worse than I originally thought. This is a massive slacking problem.
But, why is it that some of us work stupid hours, and others are happy to waste away a huge chunk of their lives?
To me, understanding why we’re here to begin with is difficult enough. So, it seems sensible that we might as well do something interesting with our time.
HI Catherine,
I like what you said about not being able to train an employee in enthusiasm and/or honesty. They either have it or they don’t.
Unfortunately, we are often not aware of these problems until after we have hired them……and may not see it for some time. Are we being “set up’?
Like like comment from Stock Trader mentioned, he believes the problem is greater..I agree. What is sad, is that if the slackers remain with a company, it soon starts to eat away at the enthusiasm of the loyal workers, and before you know it, you end up with a snow ball effect.
But then, that raises another question, how come it’s the bad apples/slackers or whatever you want to call them, that influence others so easily. Do they have that much “power”?
How come we never hear of a star employee who influenced the slackers to stop wasting time?
How about if instead of being an employee, per se, all individuals become “contract laborers”/self employed. They could get a license, pay their own insurance, taxes, blah, blah, blah, and then we could hire them based on piece work or by the hour. I would be willing to hire someone for at least twice what we pay (maybe 3 or 4 times), if I didn’t have to match SS, Medicare, blah,blah, blah. It could be a win-win. They could work for 2 hours and get paid, and then go goof off on their own time. Hey, am I onto something?
Unfortunately, finding good employees seems to be like finding a spouse: “all the good ones are taken”…….glad I got mine
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Barbara – that is an excellent idea. I am hoping to do the piecework thing with plumbers once we start doing more commercial work.
If they get the work done quickly, they get a much better hourly rate, but if they screw up – they have to go back and fix it in their own time.
Apparently, it is difficult to get them to agree to work to these terms though. But, it’s going to weed out the lazy ones isn’t it?
Catherine,
We have actually implemented this( piece work, of sorts) in parts of our business (after doing cost comparisons), and find it not only saves money and overhead, but it gives us the time to concentrate on what we are the best at. And yes…..if they do it wrong, it’s their responsibility, not ours.
Just remember not to pay them complete, until you know it’s done according to the specifications.
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Thanks Barbara. I will definitely try this then. I know we sometimes get small problems on a weekend when a plumber hasn’t done a job quite right and the customer calls.
I hate having to pay the person overtime, when they were too lazy in the beginning to get it right.
I think stealing is too harsh a word. I know that this could be called a rationalization, but employers are also encoraching on their employee’s free time so there should be some quid pro quo. How many times have you checked your email outside office hours to see if that important email arrived? And if it did, did you then spend time answering it? And don’t forget cell phones- everyone seems to think you’re on call 24/7, even when there is no real emergency.
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