The Internet’s impact on business

The Internet has dramatically changed the way that many businesses operate over the past decade. This has mostly been for the good, although there can also be added pressures, such as on employees from the use of email, or on businesses from the distractions that websites ‘ such as social networking sites ‘ can have upon staff.

Recent research undertaken by two Scottish universities has discovered that more than a third of workers in Britain are experiencing stress as a result of emailing. Feelings of frustration, fatigue and general unhappiness at their work rate are apparent as many workers struggle to respond to the sheer volume of emails that are being received and the perceived pressure to respond within a certain time.

As the quantity of emails in workers’ inboxes increases steadily, productivity suffers and stress increases as people spend less time doing the work for which they were employed and dedicate too much time dealing with emails ‘ whether spam or business-related. One survey reported that 34% of staff said that they thought they checked their inbox every 15 minutes. However, monitoring software reported a different story when fitted to those users’ PCs, so that in reality, many were checking or viewing emails up to 40 times an hour.

The burden to respond quickly to emails appears to be partly to blame and when combined with the volume of emails being received, stress is the outcome for 33 per cent. The need to check emails almost becomes an obsessive habit for some and perhaps there is a need for more coaching of staff to create better email management techniques.

The other growing concern for businesses is the time being wasted by employees on websites such as Facebook, the latest social networking phenomenon. Recent research by SurfControl estimates that Australian companies could be losing $5 billion a year due to staff taking an hour a day to use the site. The rapid growth in Facebook’s popularity is supposedly replacing instant messaging and emails as a primary method of communication.

In response to this trend, a new Sophos survey reports that 50% of workers are now being blocked from accessing Facebook by their employers who are worried about the website’s impact on productivity as well as security issues, such as identity theft or the inappropriate exchange of business information. Of 600 workers surveyed, 43% said that their company was blocking access to Facebook, while an additional 7% claimed that usage of the social networking website was restricted and only those with a specific business requirement were allowed to access it.

The remaining 50% of respondents said that their company did not block access to Facebook, with 8% specifying that the reason was fear of employee backlash!

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