Cyber Slacking at work has a direct and indirect negative impact on the productivity of a business.

It has the chance to create huge risks for your company in way of increased viruses, loss of confidential materials and legal implications along with the more commonly observed loss in productivity.

Cyber Slacking causes productivity losses of billions of dollars worldwide.

A definition states that:

Cyber slacking involves visiting adult.. sites and news sites, shopping, stock trading, vacation planning, gaming, chatting, in other words, engaging in general non-business Internet activities on company time and using company resources. - Friedman

Organisations have been attempting to protect their businesses against criminal and gross misuse of the Internet by either creating draconian policies, installing network security measures or cutting off internet access and social media channels.

In an attempt to reduce the risks, organisations take full control over Internet access in their own hands, facing various ethical and legal dilemmas about Employee Rights and working conditions.

We suggest the use of a ‘risk management framework’ that details how to handle cyber slacking from a pro-active to re-active approach, addressing four management behaviours that relate to hiring, prevention, enforcement and termination or rehabilitation.

In addition, the following steps will ascertain your company’s healthy Web future:

Immediate Steps

• Development of employee internet policies while creating employee buy-in to formulate them! (read get buy-in!)
• An immediate review of the individual job output to determine ’slack levels’.
• Establish suitable network security measures to combat the problem of viruses.
• Ensuring that two people in the IT team obtain a security certification.

Going Forward

• HR is to formulate education Initiatives and provide management training for early detection.
• Management training in reading reports should be effective in ensuring that they read reports regularly and use the information to spot any behaviours of concern.
• More vigilance!

Social media is a must for the younger generations [including some of the older ;)] and therefore a company really needs to get the buy-in on how they deal with ‘cyberslacking’.

Most people nowadays have smart phones with direct internet access – so if employees do not use the company assets during workhours – are they still cyberslacking?

I believe that there is even more $ loss in work lost due to this, think of all the new intrapreneurs in your company with their own businesses using their own smart technology during workhours!

• Are you part of this group?
• How will you solve this in your role as HR?

Will the company see this as a way of supporting innovation, talent and having happy intrapreneurial employees within their business or will senior management and people operations move forward to design new frameworks to ‘stop’ these new ways of ‘Cyber Slacking’ in the future?

© New To HR