Employee productivity in the wireless age

Your office can motivate you or can get you down. Nice furniture, adequate lighting, appropriate temperature and well-proportioned private versus open space could do miracles for employee morale. Appreciating employees' efforts and sharing company strategies with them is believed to work like magic.

But human resource experts stress that building confidence, trust and loyalty are the keys to enhancing the productivity of any business and ensuring its success.

Otherwise, long hours will be spent on the internet, socialising, chatting and paying bills. Non-work related activities coupled with taking frequent tea and coffee breaks have proved expensive for companies.

Take internet usage, for example. "Computers should be utilised to invest in time and get strategies," Tarek Rashid, a Certified Trainer and Consultant with the UN, said. "But when computers are used to waste time, then there is a problem.

"When the number of hours wasted on online non-work related activities is multiplied with the cost of each employee's hour, you have billions of dollars wasted," Rashid added. The waste comes in working hours, productivity levels and money, the Jordanian consultant said.

Tarek Al Asiri, General Manager of Argaam (numbers), a relatively small-sized company of a specialised business information website, has faced such a problem.

Al Asiri's company, which is based in the free zone of Dubai Media City, pays Dh15,000 for a ceiling of 200GB of internet usage a month. But after a while, he ended up paying Dh28,000 a month as a result of excess internet usage.

"We referred to the proxy to track down the ‘excess' users and the websites visited. The conclusion was there is a strong demand for YouTube and Facebook as well as the personal email accounts of the employees," Al Asiri told Gulf News.

He employs nearly 25 employees in Dubai and another 15 in various Arab countries.

Excess internet usage at Al Asiri's company led to the company facing a "direct financial loss of Dh5,000 to Dh10,000 a month (only on internet bills). This loss was also coupled with time loss," said Al Asiri, who expects the amount to be higher for larger companies facing a similar situation.

The problem was solved by blocking certain social networking websites. Once this was done, internet usage went back to its earlier ceiling.

Some companies, on the other hand, took the "other extreme", as Al Asiri described it, by blocking the web-based email systems, mainly Yahoo and Gmail.

According to the Saudi businessman, tracking employee internet usage revealed that many employees had the tendency to check their personal email the first thing in the morning. The average time spent on personal activities on the internet was 90 minutes a day. The last working day of the week also witnessed high internet usage that could reach up to three hours.

Personal activities

The time wasted on internet non-work related activity is apart from coffee and lunch breaks, Al Asiri noted.

Despite the fact that there are many people who spend a considerable part of their working hours on personal activities, Dubai and Gulf cities in general ranked among the top five globally in terms of average employee productivity, a study conducted by the United Nations (UN) some years ago showed.

With an average of 44 minutes an hour, Dubai takes fourth place in terms of average employee productivity globally. The emirate follows Japan (57 minutes in an hour), European countries (50 minutes in an hour), and the US (47 minutes in an hour), the study showed. The rest of the Gulf cities take fifth place with 32 minutes as average employee productivity in an hour.

While no updated figures were immediately available, human resources experts and consultants noted that according to the "latest figures, the average productivity of the best companies worldwide is 45 minutes per hour".

According to another research report released earlier this year, each UAE office employee spends an average of "46 days of their working year on non-work related activity alone" such as drinking tea and coffee, gossiping, online banking and paying bills, and socialising online despite the fact that they are putting in "long hours".

Many companies have an active IT policy regarding social media and personal internet usage; other companies either have an "ignored" policy or simply none.

Controlling internet usage at work is becoming more difficult, especially with new technology making a wide variety of gadgets such as the BlackBerry and iPhone available.

Inappropriate usage

The excessive or inappropriate use of these gadgets in workplaces could have other disadvantages like threatening the security of the business, surveys showed. Frustrated employees could misuse such gadgets, experts warn.

Devicelock, a company specialising in electronic devices security, recently conducted a survey that covered nearly 1,000 people worldwide. It concluded that only "few respondents were taking action to combat the threat posed by the increased use of iPhones in the workplace".

Almost two-thirds of the respondents came from North America and western Europe, while the other one-third originated in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.

In the seven months of data collection, over 1,000 responses were posted to the survey question, ‘Have you taken any steps to secure your business against the security threat posed by iPhones?'

The result was that less than 40 per cent of all respondents answered affirmatively to the survey's question; and, willingness to admit that the iPhone threat is a "back-burner issue" appears to be especially prevalent in regions like North America and western Europe, where only about 25 per cent of respondents answered ‘Yes' to the question, according to a statement sent by Devicelock to Gulf News.

However, "this tendency was not seen in the one-third sample coming from regions to the east. Viewed as a whole, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions registered close to a 60 per cent ‘yes' response to the question.

IPhone technology has brought gains in flexibility and productivity, researchers admit, but at the same time it carries the risk of data leaks from corporate computers.

"The particular risk with mobile communications devices like the iPhone is that an employee can run a local synchronisation for data transfer, completely bypassing the corporate network and any network-based security solutions," the Devicelock statement said.

With security measures such as Devicelock in place, IT security organisations have the option of imposing a mobile device policy that limits data exchanges to only specific iPhones and to only the types of data required for exercising an employee's business duties.