What it means
The term combines cyber and slacking, and it covers a wide range of behaviour from a quick check of personal messages to hours of daily browsing. Most employees do some of it, and managers differ on how much is acceptable.
The difficulty is deciding where reasonable breaks end and lost productivity begins. The financial cost is the paid time that goes unused, plus indirect costs.
Bandwidth used for streaming slows down systems for everyone, and unsafe websites or downloads raise the risk of malware. There is also the risk of legal exposure if employees view inappropriate material on company equipment.
Companies respond in different ways, such as acceptable-use policies, web filtering, monitoring software and, more positively, clear performance targets. Monitoring raises its own questions about employee privacy and trust, and in many countries the law requires that staff are told what is monitored and why.
Heavy-handed controls can damage morale and cost more than the problem they solve, especially when good employees feel they are being treated as suspects. Cyberslacking is easier to understand as a symptom than as a cause.
Bored, overloaded or poorly managed teams tend to drift online, and so do people without clear goals. Where output is measured and work is meaningful, the behaviour often falls without any technology controls.
The nuance for finance people is that the headline cost is usually overstated. Not every minute online is a loss, since short breaks can restore focus and some personal browsing replaces a chat at the coffee machine.
A sensible estimate separates genuine lost output from normal breaks before calling for a crackdown.
In practice
Real-world examples.
Example
A call centre manager notices that average handling time is rising and finds heavy video streaming on agent workstations. After blocking streaming sites on work devices and offering a proper break room, handling time returns to its earlier level within a month.
Example
A law firm uses time recording, so personal browsing during billable hours shows up directly as lower recorded time. A partner reviews utilisation reports and speaks privately to two associates whose figures are well below their peers. The conversation reveals unrealistic workloads rather than idleness.
Example
A small online retailer lets staff browse freely during lunch but blocks gambling and adult sites on the network. The owner explains the rule in the staff handbook and receives no complaints. The firm avoids the cost of monitoring software, and the only expense is a one-off hour of the IT contractor's time to configure the filter.
Formula
Calculation
Annual cost of cyberslacking = employees x hours lost per week x working weeks x loaded hourly cost
Suppose a company has 80 office staff, each losing 2 hours a week to personal browsing, over 48 working weeks, at a loaded cost (salary plus benefits) of $30 an hour. Hours lost = 80 x 2 x 48 = 7,680 hours. Cost = 7,680 x 30 = $230,400 a year. If a filtering and policy programme cut the loss by half at a cost of $20,000, the net saving would be 115,200 - 20,000 = $95,200.Case study
Seen in the real world.
Marlowe and Finch Advisory is an illustrative, fictional consultancy with 60 staff. The managing partner believed that personal internet use was draining profits and wanted to install monitoring software for $15,000 a year.
The finance manager asked for a sample before approving the spend. A two-week review of web logs, with staff informed in advance, suggested about 45 minutes a day of non-work browsing, but also showed that most of it was in the lunch hour, which was unpaid.
The real lost time was closer to 10 minutes a day per person. At the firm's cost levels that was worth less than the monitoring software, so the illustrative decision was to publish a simple acceptable-use policy and focus on client project workloads instead.
Watch out
Common mistakes.
- Estimating the cost by multiplying all browsing time by salary, which ignores lunch hours, breaks and the fact that some personal use costs nothing in output.
- Introducing monitoring without telling staff or checking local employment and privacy law, which can lead to legal claims and lost trust.
- Treating cyberslacking as purely a discipline problem, when it often points to boredom, poor workload planning or unclear goals.
Questions
People also ask.
Is cyberslacking the same as time theft?
They overlap, since both involve being paid for time not worked, but cyberslacking is specifically the use of internet access for personal purposes.
Can employers monitor internet use?
In many places they can, provided there is a legitimate purpose, a written policy and notice to staff, but rules differ between countries and should be checked locally.
What is the best way to reduce it?
Clear expectations, measurable goals and reasonable break arrangements usually work better than blanket blocking, although filtering of high-risk sites is sensible.
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