Organzatinal Behavior Issue Cyberloafing - Assignment Example

Cyber loafing: an Introduction Internet has created an entirely revolutionized channel of knowledge sharing, enhancement and communication. It has reduced the time difference between two interactions and so has it diffused the geographical borders to unite and connect each and every individual across the globe. For organizations too, internet is an essential support system. It has created a valuable mechanism for fast and accurate information transfer within and between organizations leading to well networked organizations with free and fast flowing communication. It also gives the employees of an organization, access to a vast database of information and knowledge within click of seconds. However, internet has its pros and cons too. It undoubtedly facilitates an organization’s communication and other activities, however, it does carry with it, a potentially damaging side-effect of reducing employee productivity through a process popularly known as Cyber loafing. Cyber loafing is a term used to describe the phenomenal use of workplace internet by its employees for personal and recreational purposes during work hours. It is a form of leisure activity which the employees engage in. Although a certain amount of it actually acts as a stress buster for the workers, however, too much of it leads to an addiction and obsession towards various internet activities such as gambling, online games, music downloads and so on. All these during work hours can reduce the effective and productive time spent on official tasks and assignments, thus leading to a loss of productivity of the organization on the whole. This abuse of internet is a continuing behavior thus leading to an influence of habit due to repeated occurrence of a behavior. The intention for the behavior then becomes a negligible factor. This emphasizes the addiction which grips the employees after the repeated use of internet for entertainment purposes over an extended period of time. Organizations incur huge costs for these activities which engage employees in unproductive tasks and hence are a big threat to employee productivity. Apart from hampering employee output and efficiency, cyber loafing has also given rise to instances of internet abuse which involves harassment of female employees through pornographic or other offensive data circulation within the place of work. Therefore, management has started putting efforts towards monitoring the employee internet access and carefully understanding the factors which lead to cyber-loafing, those which aggravate it and hence, re-design their organizational systems to eliminate this phenomenon. Cyber loafing: Issues and trends Cyber loafing generally involves employees who pretend to be at work and that they are accessing internet for work related requirements but are however engaged in inefficient personal and non official activities. Cyber loafing is also referred to as Goldbricking, cyberslacking or cyber-bludging. Employees engaging in cyber loafing use the workplace internet for many of the following: Online stock trading Entertainment (Music, games, sports business, fashion magazines, gambling, pornography et. al.) Online shopping Email chats and gossips and chain emails Other non-job related internet activities Multi-shirking, is a term which describes the process of cyber loafing at an advanced stage where an employee engages is two or more such non-work related unproductive activities simultaneously. The causes which can be attributed to the indulgence of employees in such wasteful and unproductive internet activities can be many: (a) Characteristics of the workplace: Workplace and work culture which is monotonous and unappealing mainly leads to diversions such as cyber loafing. Stressful work, low job satisfaction and a perception of unfair or mistreatment within the organization propels the need to use cyber loafing as means of distraction or compensation. The work environment of an individual is the primary place which encourages or discourages them towards their work and hence is a major factor. Related to it is the consideration of motivating efforts put in by the company management in terms of rewards, bonuses, well organized performance appraisal or recognition for a job well done. Absence of these again propagates a sense of disinclination towards work even while at it. (b) Rise of easy internet access as a facilitating condition: Internet connections such as broadband have led to an increase in cyber loafing which was not very attractive while a slow speed dial up connection was in place. Slow speed dial up connection was more exhausting and less entertaining with several minutes spent of opening a website, leave aside surfing it. It was tiring and boring at the same time. The appeal for fast internet searching, lightening speed web browsing and faster download options have made the broadband internet connections popular. Not to mention, the ease, comfort and entertainment of accessing internet has been increased manifold with a consequent rise in the employees availing the facility. (c) Basic human tendencies or intentions: It is a basic human tendency to divulge into easy and comfort activities and shirk away from work. However, there are people who are disciplined and sincere enough to put their job priorities before any personal motivations. Failure to employ and induct such people into the organization and support them with a culture of accountability and responsibility will mean the opposites (i.e. those who do not have enough moral restraint so as to stay away from internet exploitation at the company’s expense) would be a part of the organization. Although it is hard to demographically categorize employees into high and low intensity cyber loafers, it is generally seen as a trend that, young employees are the most prominent internet abusers and are reckless cyber slackers. However, it is seen that these activities are not limited to lower rung of employees but is quite prevalent in the upper management individuals too. Cyber loafing: A disadvantage to organizations Cyber loafing is posing a big threat to companies’ Information Technology and Computer resources. Newsweek reports billions of dollars of an organization’s computer resources wasted due to cyber loafing, annually. Also, an indication of billions of dollars lost on an average due to productivity loss makes cyber loafing, a big cost to the company. Companies spend millions on web access and have complete disregard for employees who abuse this access. However, it is genuinely tough for the employers to catch these inappropriate usages, mostly because of ease that the technologies such as internet access through cell phones provide. It is emphatically being argued that this trend of cyber loafing is similar to the sleeping off or slacking off of employees at work prior to the Information Technology age. Cyber loafing also has a very prominent disadvantage to the organization’s IT resources. Considerable amount of cyber loafing and engaging in activities like online gaming, gambling, music and movie downloads can seriously cut across the organization’s internet bandwidth. This slows down the overall system leading to an unresponsive and often irritating slow internet speed which can hinder the internet use when required for urgent and immediate official work. It results in a sheer bandwidth waste. Offensive and abusive material circulated within organizations can also attract legal liabilities on the companies as happened with Microsoft. These litigations can be a huge financial burden on the companies along with a severe loss of production and reputation in the industry. In addition to this, download of copyrighted materials such as music, software which is pirated and texts from the web which is propagated through all pervasive peer to peer file sharing systems can attract law suits on intellectual property infringements on the entire organization which is related to those employees. On similar lines, employer can again be held legally responsible for employees uploading illegal materials on to the company servers or for sending offensive materials to female employees within the organization. These inter-organization communications of personal messages and inappropriate content circulation can thus lead to disruption of privacy at workplace. A gradual formation of such culture at work will have a negative long term effect on the organization’s value and work culture ethics. Correcting a long set in culture of this genre can be a hardened task for the company management and require cumbersome efforts distracting them from other essential strategic roles and decisions which would await their attention. As an after effect of cyber loafing and attempts to eliminate it can also prove detrimental for the organizations. Control and monitor mechanisms to prevent and limit the spread of cyber slacking also leads to extra costs of the organization and a work culture of constant apprehensions and inhibitions carried by the employees. Over monitoring can thus lead to an affected employee morale and high employee turnover, which would devastate the organization’s productivity all the more. Cyber loafing: Resolution and Prevention Organizations are increasingly becoming active towards resolving the issue of cyber loafing and have resorted to several monitoring mechanisms. They have a right to establish that and expect that resources provided by the company to its employees should not be used for personal gains. Managers can IT department officials can creative effective mechanisms to reduce these instances of internet abuse. Although many theorists argue against the monitoring of internet usage at work, it is a necessary evil. Firstly, the use of surveillance software which helps in tracking the internet activities of employees has been employed to limit unproductive and wasteful activities. Software systems such as NetIntelligence and various other web monitoring software, report on a regular basis the amount of time spent surfing the net along with an account of quality time spend on task-related searches. The mouse clicks and keyboard hits are tracked so as to trace the websites logged onto and the emails send. This pertains to electronic spying of employees at work. Secondly, the use of proxy servers, which block certain internet website access including entertainment, social networking (Facebook, MySpace etc.), gambling and other such websites. Moreover, certain organizations impose strict penalties on employees who are caught cyber loafing. Finally, organizations also provide free or subsidized internet access to its employees for use after office hours so as to prevent such use during work. This is known as a carrot and stick approach. Those caught under the above monitoring systems as internet abusers at workplace, should be severely dealt with; fired; suspended; taken through disciplinary actions; and a complete no tolerance is shown towards such inappropriate activities at work. The culture of the organization should set out well defined parameters such as ‘Acceptable limits’ up to which an employee can deviate from work to personal use on internet. However, no more than that should be digested by the organization management. This should be a top-down approach and the upper management should lead by example in this case by implementing similar controls over their internet usage too. Deployment of software to track internet access will also however depend on the organizational type and the type of work. For industries and organizations which demand creative work out of their employees, a strict work schedule and time limits cannot be workable. Such employees require flexibility and cordial work environment for creative thinking. Closed box surrounding, rigid work style approach and constant monitoring can never improve their efficiency. It might on the other hand, prove detrimental to their performance and in return for the organization too. Knowledge workers and knowledge professionals should be evaluated not based on the process and pattern of work but by the quality of outputs they deliver. As argued by lot of theorists, one way to increase the efficiency and productivity of employees is also to make the office a second home for them where they are at ease with themselves and enjoy what they do, not just work monotonously. This requires certain leeway in the form of internet access and entertainment zones as has been neatly followed by Microsoft which pampers its programmers with all the comforts. Also, internet abuse and its far reaching harmful effects on the organizations can be communicated to employees educate them on the internet policies of the company and give them an opportunity to re-view their internet access practice and habits. Moreover, a very rigid tracking policy might as well incur huge costs in software and other equipment setup which was supposedly being saved by preventing cyber loafing. This strengthens the need for a balancing act between curbing cyber loafing and providing flexibility to the employees. Thus, personal internet access at workplace to a moderate extent should be allowed by the organizations with availability of measures for over use and exploitation of resources to be identified and penalized accordingly. Although certain degree of latitude can be provided to the employees, a need to curb blatant company rule violators who indulge in non-business activities during company time is a must. The development of a focused strategy and sound policy by the HR department of organizations so as to effectively manage both the employees’ requirements as well as organization’s well being in terms of efficiency, value and culture is the need of the hour. Conclusion Organizations world wide are standing up to the awareness of existing and ever increasing occurrences of cyber loafing. Acute measures are being adopted to keep a check on such wasteful activities and stop inefficiency from creeping into the organizational systems. However, there is a need to adopt a balanced approach. Completely eliminating internet use for personal and recreational activities is neither feasible nor desirable. Too much monitoring and surveillance of which the employees are distinctly aware of is a moral hazard and can do more harm than good. Alternatively, a company culture which promotes sincere, efficient work along with stress relieving opportunities including recreational and relaxation activities on internet will be well received by employees. The management’s major criteria for assessing productivity should be the tasks assigned and completed. For instances where an employee is efficient enough to complete his or her task and can also afford to spend an extra some time on the internet for personal work, not much objection should be caused. In an era of high work-pressure, anxiety and deadline worries, human health and well being are seriously jeopardized. It sometimes becomes essential to vent out the tension and nervous strain through light-hearted activities such as shopping or chitchatting on networking websites. Excess of anything is harmful. Neither should excess luxury be promoted by organizations nor excess work load. A proportional avenue for both would help organizations achieve an optimum output level out of their employees as well as the employees’ well being who are after all the human resource, the assets of the organization and the drivers of its success. Read More