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Company time used for private surfing02/July/2001 |
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Employers are worried about time spent by staff surfing the Internet for non-work-related purposes. According to a survey by Taylor Nelson Sofres, 41% of employees with Internet access at work spend an average of over three hours a week on private surfing. The survey, commissioned by Websense, a company that produces software able to restrict the use made of the Internet by employees, involved interviews with 200 adults in each of four countries - the UK, Germany, France and Italy. Results varied considerably by country, with 29% of French respondents admitting they visited non-work-related sites while at work compared with 51% of Italian respondents. Holiday or travel websites were the most frequently visited by employees accessing non-work-related sites (51%), followed by educational sites (42%) and those devoted to hobbies (41%). Shopping and sports sites, which were the most visited in a similar US survey, were slightly less popular in Europe, visited by 28% and 27% of the sample respectively. Butler Group, an IT consultancy, reports that both Websense and another Web-filtering company, SurfControl, "are proposing to add quota features to their software to restrict the amount of time that employees can spend on-line, an option which may be favourably received by staff and will allow employers to appear less restrictive." It adds, however: "Whilst we would encourage organisations to have an ‘acceptable use’ policy, and also would recommend software controls where appropriate, let us not forget that making technology part of everyday life means that people are more capable of using the technology for work as well as for play. "If restrictive software becomes essential, it implies that managers have lost control." © Copyright Lagado Ltd *In advance of the intended expansion in 2002 of the range of newspaper supplements and sections covered by the NRS, a qualitative study has been conducted to gain insights into how people perceive and read newspaper sections. The results will be reviewed in August. *The NRS plans to extend its coverage of specialist magazines, beginning with computer magazines, and has produced another self-completion questionnaire which from mid-2001 onwards is being given to all respondents. Data to the end of 2001, which will not be released, will be used to segment people acording to their likelihood to read any of the titles. *A Readership Accumulation Study, using diaries to measure the speed at which publications penetrate their audiences, has been pilot-tested by NOP with a view to sampling 8,000 adults in two waves of 4,000 each, over September-October 2001 and February-March 2002. Though the sample is considered too small to produce data for any but the largest individual titles, the plan is to use modelling procedures to generate readership curves for all titles covered. © Copyright Market Research News 
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