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Staff waste 60 minutes of the work day online

Tuesday, July 23, 2013 - 18:42 by Simon Crisp

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A new report has found that the average employee at a British office will spend about an hour of their time at work using the web for personal purposes.

This can include shopping online, checking social networking sites and even visiting news outlets, according to the report from Quidco.

While 88 per cent of the time in the office is dedicated to work, the remainder can be consumed with unrelated tasks conducted online, which is clearly something of a distraction for modern staff members.

Report spokesperson, Andy Oldham, also pointed out that people now have excellent internet access available to them from their portable devices, including smartphones and tablets, which means they do not even need to harness an office workstation to get their fix of e-commerce and Facebook.

The report found that a typical employee will shop online and web-based banking services to spend about 41 a week, bringing the annual total soaring to over 3,800.

A third of those questioned in the study said that they manage their personal bank accounts while at work, making this the most popular activity.

Online shopping was also popular, with many of the respondents pointing out that they tend to carry out web-based activities during working hours because it is not possible to do so outside of these boundaries.

Of course since e-commerce sites can be accessed at any time of the day or night to fulfil transactions, it seems that staff could at least hold off on completing this activity until their downtime.

Many of those questioned said that they only get down to completing personal activities while they are at work when they are not busy with any particular task, so the actual impact on productivity is difficult to measure.