City Workers Banned From Facebook -- After Spending 572 Hours On It

They're dumb. You are at work to do a job. Save the web browsing for home use.

It is considered THEFT. If you claim you worked and didn't work, especially this OBVIOUS, you should be charged with theft or fraud. Every employer should check into this abuse and stop employees from going to social networks period. Even sites like this! They are addicted to this crap. I know how time consuming it can be. This only hurts productivity and increases costs etc..

Facebook is a good way to find people you lost track of,but once you find them I don't get why they don't just use the phone. I keep getting all kinds of stupid up to the minute reports of my friend and relatives. I look at face book on the weekend to catch up on old friends,but that is it. I'm 95% sure these people have nothing better to do.

lets see, 413 hours devided by 4500 employees is just under 6 minutes per employee..... about 1/3 of a 15 minute break...... I can see the abuse now

correction: lets see, 413 hours divided by 4500 employees is just under 6 minutes per employee per month..... about 1/3 of a 15 minute break...... I can see the abuse now

These people all should be doing what they get paid to do, not be on Facebook. And seriously, once you have "reconnected", shouldn't you then have the old fashioned kind of relationship? The people in this world are truly starting to worry me.

Something is very wrong with the statistics you citing to demonstrate the OUTRAGEOUS nature of these claims. You say 4500 employees "spent an average of 413 hours per month" on Facebook. IF you meant that each employee was spending an average of 413 hours per month, that works out in a typical 30 day month (averaging 21.43 workday/month) to 19.27 hours per workday spent on Facebook. I suggest that any employee that average 19.27 hours per workday doing ANYTHING at his/her desk would have attracted quite a bit of attention.
The alternative interpretation of this data is that all 4500 employees spent a total of 413 hours per average month on Facebook. This works out to slightly under 2 seconds per hour or 15.2 seconds per work day on Facebook. As the article implied that employees were allowed to spend their lunch period doing personal activities on their computer, it should not be amazing that they spent those 15+ secondss on Facebook, during their lunch period. If not, so what? have any of you ever seen any employee spent less than 15 seconds of the work day smoking a cigarette, drinking a cup of coffee, or chatting up a fellow employee.

Clearly the data in your excellent(?) article leave something to be desired.

only 572 ?? C'mon they should've been able to do waaaay more than that ! 572 $uxx Bigtime. Go for over a thousand at least. Like some other nice companies do.

Our company has now blocked Facebook, Youtube, and any online video. I think it's a smart idea. Leave surfing the net at home and do your work!

Those mathmatic genius' figured out the time wasted was 1/3 of a fifteen minute break. You math may be correct, but your presumption that it was used equally by all 4500 employess is surely wrong. It must have been a comparitively small number of employees who abused the program but like all companies the rule has to apply to everybody not just certain ones. Therefore, the few spoiled a good thing for the many.

Wow. They averaged 7 hours a month, each. Clearly, the world will end.

How did the author not bother to do the math, showing that these British idiots were spending, on average, less than one day per month on Facbeook? And, did they happen to do the math on how many hours of personal calls those same employees made per month? or how that total changed over time with the rise of Facebook?

I can't even begin to explain how much I loathe it when these morons glance at the fact that people use computers while at work for personal reasons, and then jump to the asinine conclusion that, therefore, they're wasting time they would've otherwise spent at work.

Ever hear of the water cooler?

Idiots.

The fact that this same writer went on to act like checking Facebook as part of your job was the most absurd thing they'd ever heard of just proves that they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.

Yeah. There's no such thing as a business or governmental entity that connects with users and/or customers via Facebook. Why, clearly, that's the most absurd thing I've ever heard of.

Clearly, I don't have 4 or 5 friends on my own list that are governmental entities. Nope. Not at all.

Moron.

Cheer up...there's always Twitter!

Hello everybody ! Well , my Auntie works in this Portsmouth city hall and she had told me about a small department of 4 employees which has taken care of the facebook situation for all. Please do the math. Now 4496 other employees cannot chech facebooks any longer. Its really a shame for Portsmouth. ByeBye

All the city needs to do is install a firewall that prevents people from connecting to certain sites..Schools do it all the time..If the City had instilled this from the beginning, they wouldn't be facing this problem now

They're government workers. The odds of any of them ever doing anything productive is pretty much zero, so they might as well spend some of their wasted time on Facebook. Perhaps that is time they are NOT making some citizen miserable.

my question is why they chose that picture when it wasn't that city that they are writing about