No, Twitter Use Is Not Costing Companies Billions
from the stop.-now.-please. dept
Not this again. It happens with every new internet fad. Some company trying to sell something (filters, consulting, training, etc.) comes out with some study claiming that the new popular internet thingy is "costing x billions of dollars" because workers are using it for some amount of time per day. All of them work on the same basic principle. Figure out how much time people spend using the service, and multiply it by how much people make per hour, and then voila. Of course, this assumes (incorrectly) that every minute not working is "lost productivity." Of course, if that were true then coffee breaks, lunch breaks, sleep and many other things would also be "lost productivity." But, we all know that's ridiculous and that the truth is those things make people more productive by giving them a break here and there to recharge.So, please, please, please don't believe the latest ridiculous study coming out of the UK claiming that Twittering employees are costing UK businesses £1.83 billion. It's the same ridiculousness, calculating that the average worker spends about 40 minutes on Twitter, but making no effort to figure out if that actually negatively impacts productivity -- just assuming that it means 40 minutes of "lost productivity." How many times do we need to repeat that time does not equal productivity before these companies stop coming out with such bogus studies?
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Filed Under: productivity, social networking, twitter
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The following is from the Old Testament:
"thou shalt not muzzle the Ox that treadeth out the corn"
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Another error
There's no idea of people who now twitter used to stare at the wall/play WoW/fantasize about Tila Tequila/etc...
I'd think people would notice if the entire workforce spent 40 minutes less/day working.
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Even if time was equal to productivity...
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Conspicously absent this year...
Actually, I've been a little surprised at the LACK of these reports this year. Based on reading my my newspaper, you can conclude that the internet, Fantasy Football, Fantasy Basketball, Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Lance Armstrong's Ball, Myspace, Craig's List, Facebook, iGoogle pages, Twitter, the shitter, cell phones, iPhones, pheromones, breakfast, lunch, dinner, sleeping, weeping, soda, sugary foods, ESPN, radios, televisions, iHome Stations, raporism, malware from piracy, and incessant chronic masturbation have cost the American economy 12.69 Quadrillion bazillion ferillion blafillion dollars.
Does anyone really believe this stuff anymore?
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Re: Conspicously absent this year...
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Re: Conspicously absent this year...
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Re: Conspicously absent this year...
Politicians do.
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Re: Re: Conspicously absent this year...
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Ha! That's a fine point. Twitter doesn't make slackers, it absorbs them from archaic means of not working.
Seriously, the productivity problem I've run into time and again is that management often does not, or cannot, deal with non-producers.
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Lost in Empire
I agree with above statements that blocking sites like this have much less harm of productivity. But I disagree with those that misuse the time.
So what above comments are stating that an employee who browse social networks over 3/4 of his work time or 1/2 of his work time is still as productive as someone that does 4/4?
Working 9 hours and being paid 8 and have 1hour lunch or fun time is productive. But working 8 hours , browsing 2 hours and have 1 hour of lunch is employee that needs to be shot in the head for calling it work. ANd on top of that their IT+ Management suck.
Work is work ...tweeting and updating status updates every 2 minutes isn't productive and you can't prove me wrong...
So is the UK deal real? I think so , problem is they are not as sensative on NPI and workload as in United States ...Websense is installed in majority of companies but I don't blame you for not working at big corps :) I know 40 of them at least including Colleges.
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Re: Lost in Empire
Working 9 hours and being paid 8 and have 1hour lunch or fun time is productive. But working 8 hours , browsing 2 hours and have 1 hour of lunch is employee that needs to be shot in the head for calling it work. ANd on top of that their IT+ Management suck.
Hmm. Why not judge productivity based on *productivity* rather than hours worked?
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Re: Re: Lost in Empire
Because that kills the stranglehold employers have on anyone that is either salaried or exepected to work or be available after hours. If, like me, you tend to "work" something like a 12 hour day on a salary, you ought to be able to expect to decompress now and again. I make myself available both to our internal staff and external customers roughly 7am - 9pm or so. If my boss started clamping down on my reading of techdirt, or my love of random wikipedia articles to find/learn random new shit, then I'd have to comply since he'd be within his rights.
What I WOULDN'T have to do would be to be available for more than 9 hours a day, and I can assure you that productivity would suffer because of it...
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Re: Re: Lost in Empire
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Re: Re: Lost in Empire
Sarcastic and true answer:
Because that doesn't sell any Activity Blocking software, filter software, DPI software, PC monitoring software, or associated solutions.
Realistic answer:
Because it is much easier to count hours of ass-in-seat than to count 'product'. The manager's manager has little faith in his ability to measure output, so he is instead asked to assure ass-in-seat time.
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Re: Lost in Empire
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Re: Lost in Empire
So, don't tell me what amount of my time needs to be productive. That's between me and my employer and my employment contract.
And the article states that 40 minutes a day on Twitter. So, where did you pull those b.s. numbers from ... oh yeah, they're b.s., we all know where they came from. If an employee is spending three quarters of their time not working, then there probably is a problem, but it's not Twitter, and Twitter shouldn't be singled out because of it. Now, if you want to readjust your numbers from supposedly someone spending most of their day fudging about to the true number of about 10% ...
Of course it would be hard for someone putting in 25% of the time effort to be as productive as someone putting in 100%. But, I can guarantee you that someone putting in 90% of the time can be as if not more productive than someone putting in 100%.
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Re: Lost in Empire
8 + 2 + 1 = 11
The person is at work for eleven hours and you want to shoot them ... sick
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Ha
I coulda been robbin' banks.
-- Yes, because there are people on the Internet stupid enough to take me seriously.
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Personally, I think it's crap, but that's the way it is from their perspective.
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measure productivity
Obviously people do "waste" time at work shopping, reading sports, doing all kinds of things, ones that would probably dwarf Facebook and Twitter use. But if it's truly effecting their performance, duh, fire them.
I wonder if some of this is simply managers resenting people who can get their done work faster than others and then chill out for a bit - or the managers are at least worried that the more sluggish workers will resent it.
One place I worked as a consultant, they wouldn't let me have web access because I wasn't permanent. A fairly childish version of the above. Instead, I just did my work quickly as usual, and took long breaks walking around outside. And I finally got fed up with infantile rules, and quit. Managers often have this fascinating idea that making the workplace more miserable helps productivity.
Everywhere I've worked I've run into a few people who could just get their work done faster than others. I saw no reason to begrudge these people some slack time; they outperformed their colleagues, so who cares if they played fantasy football or Twittered all day.
I guess it's also like unions gone wrong... anybody who outperforms is making others look bad and needs to be tamped down. Likewise, they think even the most productive workers should be punished because the sluggish can't get their work done while Twittering.
Obviously, some of it is simply managers who love both benchmarks and control. I'm so glad to have opted out of the BS corporate environment.
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on the subject of bad managment
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They spend 20 minutes of a coffee break 3 times a day
they spend an hour on lunch.
they spend 20 minutes on the phone talking to friends.
they check their mail 3 times a day, for 10 minutes each time.
they update their facebook status and play mafia wars once a day for 30 minutes.
they get to work 10 minutes late, and they never do anything useful in the last 30 minutes of the day.
Let see... 480 minutes - 40 - 60 - 60 - 20 - 30 - 30 -10 - 30 = 200. So basically, they work about 3.3 hours per day.
Yup, the internet has no effect on productivity!
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Re:
Way to embody the failure of counting hours. Where in your equation is ALL of the MASSIVE productivity the internet allows for business? Websites? CRM software? Email campaigns? Speed and paper savings from faxing?
Maybe it's time to get a vasectomy for the sake of the human race, friend...
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Re: Re:
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every second
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Re: every second
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What is productivity?
Who was more productive?
That's why people like to measure it in time. It's the simplest, easiest unit that isn't going to cause huge arguments about what "productivity" is.
And, of course, because businesses like metrics. They allow nincompoops to hide behind figures as though they were facts. It's what the Peter Principle is built on.
It's like the telecommuting paradox. Working in central London it probably costs my employer thousands of pounds a year to merely have a desk for me to turn up to. Real estate, light, water, heat, power for the PC, air conditioning, lifts, cleaning services... It all adds up. And for what gain? I have email, I have instant messaging, I could have a webcam with ease. Even allowing for bandwidth costs, it would certainly be cheaper to buy me a laptop and let me work from home.
The only people who actually need to be here are the receptionist and anyone having a face-to-face meeting (usually with a client or supplier).
But then if we all worked remotely they would definitely have to measure productivity differently.
So they fall back on the simple familiarities...
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Showing up to work at all �costs British economy £2.13 trillion a year�
The survey was conducted by Morse IT, with no consideration whatsoever of the company’s extensive line of Internet filtering products.
Twatbook was costing the economy £1.38 billion zillion a year, pointless meetings learning to synergise our buzzword growth were costing £65.23 billion zillion a year, MP3 file sharing was costing £12 billion zillion a year, reading the Daily Telegraph was costing £15.25, drinking tea and eating food was costing £17.243154 (recurring) billion zillion a year, blinking on the job was costing £5 billion zillion a year and employees going to the toilet rather than having catheters fitted to stay at their desks 24 hours a day was costing £6.66 billion zillion a year. b3ta was free, for some reason.
The total losses to the economy added to more than the national gross domestic product, strongly suggesting that showing up to work at all, and indeed the capitalist system in toto, was a net loss, and we should all live off farming our back yards and send our tweets via actual carrier pigeons.
Temp agency OfficeAngels disagreed. “As younger generations join the workplace, I believe UK businesses will, inevitably, have to embrace social networks, recognising the benefits of providing staff with potential for business networking. So they can find a job somewhere that doesn’t insult their intelligence by blocking a knitting needle shop as a ‘weapons site’ or something equally twattish.”
(My original blog post.)
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Twitter always sucks
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I Disagree Here
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