Facebook addiction blighting Indian firms

Facebook - addictive
Facebook - addictive

It seems it's not just workers in the West that love Facebook, with a survey of employees in several Indian cities discovering that an hour a day is being wasted on the social networking sites.

The survey, conducted by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocahm), discovered that 77 per cent of more than 4,000 employees with Orkut accounts accessed them during work time, and around half of workers checked their Facebook accounts.

40 per cent of workers actually built their profiles on the sites whilst on the clock and the vast majority of workers – 83 per cent – felt it was perfectly acceptable to surf the net in office hours.

Confusing

Survey results revealed, a little confusingly, that 16 per cent of companies allowed access to social networks at work for personal use, and 19 per cent for business use, with 40 per cent stating their employers allowed full access to the sites.

But that does seem to be changing, said D S Rawat, secretary general of Assocham: "As a matter of fact, [the] growing use of browsing sites can be dangerous for overall productivity and IT companies have already installed software to restrict its use."

The survey did reveal something a little darker. Some 84 per cent of the respondents showed signs of Internet addiction. They claimed to spend more time online than would be considered normal, expressed irritation when interrupted online, and didn't take breaks at appropriate times.