Is Facebook or Twitter affecting your productivity? Recent survey from Assocham’s Social Development Foundation opens up deep questions about the effect of Facebook on the productivity at company. India is known for their extensive dedication towards their work, that is how it became the hub for IT Industry. But the social networking sites is turning out to threaten this status. The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry says that workers use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace and Linkedin for “romancing” and other purposes.

Below are some astounding statistics from the survey over 4,000 corporate employees :

Close to 12.5% of productivity of human resource in corporate sector is misappropriated each day in social networking sites during the office hours.

The survey questioned 4,000 employees between the ages of 21 and 60 in Delhi, Bangalore, Madras (Chennai), Cochin, Indore, Ahmedabad, Surat, Mumbai (Bombay), Pune, Chandigarh, Dehradun, Lucknow and Kanpur.

The survey found that 77% of workers who had Orkut accounts used them during work hours.

Nearly half of office employees accessed Facebook during work time.

Moreover, 4 in every 10 workers built their entire Orkut or Facebook profile at work.

Some 83% saw nothing wrong in surfing at work during office hours.

19% of companies allow use of social networking sites only for business purposes, while 16% allow limited personal use.

Only 40% of the employees interviewed said that their companies allowed staff full access to social networking sites.

84% of respondents in India’s major cities show signs of internet addiction – they do not take breaks at appropriate times, they spend more than a “normal” amount of time online, and can get irritable if they are interrupted while surfing.

The above statistics show some great concern over the use of social networking sites in the workplace. These could only lead to companies banning the sites and preventing any social contact. This could either result in a form of aggression from the workers or it might lead to better productivity.

As the Internet culture is changing, it could be one big experiment from the management side in IT industry to ban the social networking sites. Assocham secretary general DS Rawat said that the growing use of browsing sites can be dangerous for overall productivity. Many IT companies have already installed softwares to restrict sites.

Image Source : bizjournals

News Source : bbc