City Workers Banned From Facebook -- After Spending 572 Hours On It
It's no secret that Facebook is productivity's biggest enemy. With all those gifts to send, games to play, and friends to stalk, there's no time for work once you log in to the social networking site. While many offices and schools have caught onto this, it took one British city council a little longer than most.
According to The Daily Mail, the Portsmouth City Council recently banned the staff of 4,500 at its town hall from using Facebook, after discovering that employees spent an average of 413 hours per month perusing the site. Not only were these Brits spending a jaw-dropping amount of time logged-in, but they were also logging in often -- about 270,000 times a month. Things really spiraled out of control this past July, when the staff totaled 572 hours and 38 minutes, or 71 working days, on Facebook, even though they were only supposed to visit the site during lunch or after work. That's taxpayers' money hard at work, folks.
While the site has been blocked, the staff can apply to access Facebook only if it's necessary to complete their job (although it'd be hard to imagine too many instances where this would apply). This ban is a commendable effort by the local government, but the council shouldn't forget that there are plenty of other ways to waste time on the Internet -- Youtube, Hulu, eBay, Switched... [From: The Daily Mail]
Death of Print
Elle Girl
In April 2006, Elle Girl's print edition was closed down, but the Web site lives on at ellegirl.com.
CosmoGirl
Though it will be folded into Seventeen magazine, the teen version of Cosmopolitan will publish its last print issue in December 2008. It will live on at CosmoGirl.com.
Christian Science Monitor
Founded in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, this venerable paper will move all its daily content to the Web starting in 2009, though it will still publish a weekly print version.
Radar Magazine
Was it too snarky for its own good? We'll never know, but this modern-day successor to '80s-era Spy magazine shut down in October. AMI, owner of the National Enquirer, bought RadarOnline.com, however, which will focus on celebrity gossip a la TMZ.com.
US News and World Report
Once a serious competitor to Time and Newsweek, US News and World Report is now best known for its College guides, which it will continue to publish. The weekly newsmagazine, however, will be turned into a monthly, and all daily operations are moving to the Web at usnews.com.
_thumbnail.jpg "Vintage Keyboards")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
WATER said 8:54PM on 9-04-2009
They're dumb. You are at work to do a job. Save the web browsing for home use.
Reply
sabbycee said 9:18AM on 9-05-2009
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..
Reply
marshall said 12:01PM on 9-05-2009
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.
Reply
Dave said 8:43PM on 9-07-2009
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
Reply
J.B. said 11:30PM on 9-07-2009
Uh... Dave, all of the 4500 probably don't even use facebook. I don't know the percentage, but probably less than half use facebook and then there is a percentage of the workers who wouldn't use facebook during work hours. So the minutes of usage per actual person using facebook is a bit higher. At any rate, unless someone is doing Marketing and Business Networking, they have no business doing facebook from their office computers... period. They can do that stuff from their cell phones or home computers. I'd say they should hunt down the perps and make them refund the money for the hours they wasted on purely personal... or they could dock their vacation time. But this won't happen, just like the President isn't going to reimburse the tax payers for the stunt of flying Air Force One around Ground Zero to get another photo of the plane... to the tune of $400,000. Haven't you heard? More than half the country thinks that everybody else owes them a living. Sorry to sound so cynical, but those numbers are from recent poles, and sadly, it is true.
Dave said 8:46PM on 9-07-2009
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
Reply
Daniel Lovejoy said 2:45AM on 9-08-2009
Not all of the 4500 employee's would be using Facebook. I never use it. I looked at it once, decided, that like myspace, it was lame, and never felt the need to go back.
The employees that did use it during work, not break time, should have their pay docked and given a warning. If they do it again, fire them.
The other alternative is to block social networking sites from being accessed by government computers.
Ever notice that social networking sounds like a way of getting social diseases?
tlmdecember31 said 8:47PM on 9-07-2009
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.
Reply
Mensawannabe said 8:53PM on 9-07-2009
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.
Reply
Squampo said 9:03PM on 9-07-2009
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.
Reply
Givemeabreak said 9:13PM on 9-07-2009
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!
Reply
Joe Papierz Jr said 9:21PM on 9-07-2009
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.
Reply
bellered said 9:23PM on 9-07-2009
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.
Reply
rae romanoff said 3:47AM on 9-09-2009
Cheer up...there's always Twitter!
Reply
Sloan said 9:41PM on 9-07-2009
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
Reply
mdvk said 9:56PM on 9-07-2009
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
Reply
noMOREtv4u said 10:38PM on 9-07-2009
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.
Reply
nina said 11:55PM on 9-07-2009
Toche noMOREtv4u.....couldn't have said it better myself!!! Watch the road workers sometime.....they wait for a DROP of rain and then scramble, moving faster than they have all day, to get away from that drop or, God forbid, two that may hit them like a plague!!...lol..lol...lol But, if you're a person who's worked all their life, paying into the system, and you become ill or hurt and can no longer work.....well, the Hell with you!!! No one gives a damn, Oh too sorry....scrape by on garbage for all we care. Just go ahead and ask me which one of these groups do I feel should get the money we ALL HAVE to pay in. And, I can also tell you....it's not paying Jessica Simpson another million dollars to shake her ass for our Troops over seas......this comes from a mother who's only child is a young male soldier!!!
Rjoeand said 6:41AM on 9-08-2009
In my city each city work crew on the street has to have at least 3 shovel leaners to watch the one who digs the hole. That seems to be about standard for patronage city workers and ghost payrollers
meghan said 11:03PM on 9-07-2009
my question is why they chose that picture when it wasn't that city that they are writing about
Reply