A passing remark that someone made a few days ago got me thinking.  It was a comment about Solitaire and the negative effect (perceived or real) that it had on employee productivity.

Back in the early to mid Nineties employers the world over were worried about the impact that having a game like Solitaire installed on a company PC would have.  They worried about hundreds of thousands of hours frittered away idly gaming because it made it easy to look busy without doing anything productive (I remember a joke about how big companies could save on their power bills by attaching a little generator to the mouse button and using all that juice to power the company).  They went to great lengths to remove games from business PCs because they wanted their staff thinking about work now thinking about how they could put the six of clubs on the seven of diamonds.  For a time it worked, but people being people ways to circumvent the restrictions were quickly discovered and spread like wildfire.

The, during the mid to late Nineties even small companies had hooked up all their PCs to the Internet (the idea was that they could leverage this free network for email and messaging rather that give all the employees free Internet access.  Companies now worried about hundreds of thousands of hours frittered away surfing.  Again, it was something that looked close enough to work to be mistaken for it at a casual glance.  Companies started to introduce technology to filter the staff's use of the Internet and keep it under check.  I know of companies who totaled up the time spent online of each employee and people who surfed too much faced some serious questions (and these people didn't need to be low down the ranks either, even the time that executives spent online was tallied and passed on to "those upstairs" - it was a time of real heady power for the IT security staff!).  Surfing quickly replaced card games and over time there was a lot more that an employee could do from their desk that didn't add any value at all to the company their worked for - such as shopping online, planning the next vacation, banking, communicating with friends.

Now take a look at the blogosphere.  How much of the blogosphere is powered by people at work?  How much are employers unwittingly paying their staff to post content on their blogs?  I can't help but think that if anyone actually did the math on this the corporate world would suffer a collective cataclysmic heart attack, and this is without the companies knowing what their staff are actually saying about them.

I'm not even going to factor into this the total amount of time that employees spend increasing the value of other Web 2.0 companies on the coin of their employers.  Think Technorati.  Think Flickr.  Think Bloglines.  How much of their value is because of the free workforce they get because tagging and uploading photos and reading blogs looks like work enough but isn't?  Now we don't have people just wasting time with card games, we have entire businesses springing up who rely on the endless amount of time that others can spend on building up the value of the company.

Here are some questions I'd love to see answered:

• How much time does the average worker with access to a PC actually spend working?
• What does this translate to on a bigger scale (say for the whole of the US)?
• How much of the value of many of these Web 2.0 companies is based on people being able to work for them for free because someone else is picking up the tab?
• What increases in efficiency could a Fortune 500 company experience if it tightened up control of the web?

If anyone has any answers (or links to answers) then feel free to waste some of your employers time and drop me a note!

Technorati Tags: Solitaire, blogosphere, blog, Web 2.0, Technorati, Flickr, Bloglines

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 14:10 and is filed under PC Doctor's Thoughts, Random Stuff .... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.