A new study reflects on the topic of cyberloafing, suggesting a democratic approach as solution. According to the authors, this increasing phenomenon is estimated to waste hundreds of millions of dollars, in terms of productivity, every year in the United States.

The research was carried out by Dr McCarter, a professor in in the UTSA College of Business with research interests in managerial decision making, Dr Brice Corgnet, assistant professor of Finance at Chapman University, and Roberto Hernán-González, Associate Professor in Industrial Economics at Nottingham University.

“Leisure surfing can be helpful,” Dr McCarter explains. “It relieves stress and can help people recoup their thoughts, but cyberloafing is different. That’s when people are supposed to be working and are instead surfing.”

The phenomenon of cyberloafing keeps spreading due to the increasing acceptance of internet use at work.

“What’s happened now, with the advent of the Internet, is that it’s nearly impossible to keep people off the Internet at work because of mobile devices,” he said. “Getting people to stop cyberloafing is the big thing management is worried about.”

Dr McCarter noted a study that reports employees in the UK being interrupted by Facebook and Twitter notifications about every 10 minutes. The study notes that it took about 23 minutes for the employees to get back to work, meaning a loss in productivity of thousands of dollars for the employers each year.

Dr McCarter partnered with Dr Corgnet and Dr Hernán-González to develop an effective method to reduce and eliminate cyberloafing in a office setting. The study involed 10 volunteer employees, who were given a basic data entry task, and a volunteer manager, who had the duty of overseeing them. The employees were paid the standard for the data processing role, and then they could get a bonus according to the quantity of work collectively done by the team. The employees could click on a button and surf the web at any moment, interrupting their work.

The results show that some people never stopped working while others went surfing the Internet straight way. Others alternated their productivity, going back and forth between work and Internet. In general, about 14% of the working time was spent cyberloafing.

Dr McCarter and his colleagues tried two methods to stop the phenomenon. The first one involved the manager turning off the Internet access, in an autocratic decision process. This method avoided cyberloafing, but did not increase productivity. The cyberloafing subjects, in facts, were often found distracted, staring at the ceiling for long time frames.

The second method, instead, involved a democratic approach where the subjects were asked to vote whether to switch the Internet access off or not. The results showed that the group of subjects who had previously been cyberloafing increased their productivity by 38% at the beginning and then, after a while, the former cyberloafers started to be as hard-working as their colleagues who escaped the Internet temptations.

“In group voting, you strategically give your workers control over something,” McCarter explained. “By giving them a voice to stop an unproductive behavior, not only did a strong majority agree to stop cyberloafing, but those who had been cyberloafing (and even who voted against turning off the Internet) redeemed themselves by contributing to the team and working just as hard as the others.”

Written by: Pietro Paolo Frigenti

---

Journal Reference: Brice Corgnet, Roberto Hernán-González, Matthew McCarter. The Role of the Decision-Making Regime on Cooperation in a Workgroup Social Dilemma: An Examination of Cyberloafing. Games, 2015; 6 (4): 588 DOI: 10.3390/g6040588