Cyber Monday: Clicking away at work

Cyber Monday always follows Black Friday on the calendar…

What it Cyber Monday? Well, for years retailers have had “Black Friday,” the enormously busy sales day on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Cyber Monday (a term coined by the National Retail Federation for the first Monday following Thanksgiving) is the following Monday, when employers see a spike in workers using the Internet for online shopping.

Of course, when employees click and spend, productivity in the workplace will be impacted. Our recent survey revealed the following:

• Nearly one-third (29 percent) of workers, in line with last year’s findings, plan to holiday shop online while at work this year.
• Of those who plan to holiday shop online this season while at work, 43 percent of workers anticipate they will spend more than one hour, 23 percent said they will spend two hours or more and 13 percent will spend three hours or more.

There are other factors that may drive those figures even higher.

• Workers who are coping with the economic downtown may be less willing to take time during the day to leave their workplace to shop or run errands.
• If your company has been affected by layoffs or downsizing, you may have had to assume extra responsibilities – leaving no time to even leave the premises.
• Retailers are being aggressive in their marketing campaigns in an effort to stimulate sales, so there are more coupons, offers for free shipping and other discounts available online.

Here’s some eye-opening data from our surveys about Internet use in the office:

• 61 percent of workers use the Internet for non-work related research and activities while they are at work. Among these workers, 37 percent said they spend an average of more than 30 minutes of their workday on non-work related online activities and 18 percent said they spend an average of an hour or more.
• E-mail: When it comes to digital correspondence, 20 percent of workers send six or more non-work related e-mails per day. Among this group, 22 percent spend more than 30 minutes during the typical workday doing so.
• Blogging: Nine percent of workers surveyed have a personal blog, and while nearly a quarter (23 percent) of them spend time blogging at work, only 9 percent of them spend 15 minutes or more blogging during the typical workday.
• Social Networking: Forty-one percent of workers surveyed have a MySpace, Facebook, BrightFuse or other social networking page. More than one-third (35 percent) of them spend time on their social networking page during the workday with 8 percent spending 30 minutes or more.
• Instant Messaging: Twenty percent of workers use instant messenger at least once a week.