Don't Let Your Boss Catch You Reading This

Stony Stevenson writes "iTnews is running a piece on the culture of cyberslacking in the business arena. Studies worldwide suggest employees spend about a fifth of their work shifts engaging in personal activities. Most of that 'wasted time' is, of course, spent online. From the article: 'A recent survey by online compensation firm Salary.com showed about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work. About 34 percent listed personal Internet use as the leading time-wasting activity in the workplace. Employees said they did so because they were bored, worked too many hours, were underpaid or were unchallenged at work. Firms all over the world are concerned about potentially harmful effects of surfing they deem to be inappropriate may have on their company's image.'"

Re:Poll: When reloading Slashdot every five...

im all for porn too, but youd never catch me there at work.

not nearly enough privacy for all that midget on horse stuff i like.

Re:Poll: When reloading Slashdot every five...

ewww! Midget on horse! That's gross, why can't you just watch dog on woman porn like everyone else.

Re:Poll: When reloading Slashdot every five...

That's why you need dual monitors, multiple desktops on each monitor, and your own proxy server :0)

Seriously, dual monitors allow people to work and play a lot better than a single-monitor setup. That's probably one reason why people are more productive with 2 monotirs - you can shove all the "personal stuff" to one side, and keep an ey on it without actually having to stop working on what you're doing.

Re:Poll: When reloading Slashdot every five...

That's why you need dual monitors, multiple desktops on each monitor, and your own proxy server :0)

Seriously, dual monitors allow people to work and play a lot better than a single-monitor setup. That's probably one reason why people are more productive with 2 monotirs - you can shove all the "personal stuff" to one side, and keep an ey on it without actually having to stop working on what you're doing.

Damn right. I brought in a pc from home so I could have two computers at my desk. I've had two on my desk at home for years and it's pretty painful for me to work without having two these days. We are an all linux shop (except for workstations). Why we don't have linux workstations is beyond me. So I just had to bring in a linux desktop for the orfice. My pc has an openvpn connection to my home router which is also running squid. It's the perfect setup.

I've been slacking at my job a *lot* lately. We even have this retarded timesheet system where you itemize every 15 minute block of your day to some project. If you don't book your 8 hours, it's deducted from your pay (even though we are all on salary), so naturally you book your time even if you aren't doing anything. Lately I've been doing about an hour of real work per day, and spending about 10 minutes filling out my timesheet. It really goes to show that no matter what system is in place, if someone wants to slack, they will slack, and get away with it. My brother is even a better slacker than I am. He got awards from his company and bonuses and everything. Mostly he played robotron and choplifter in mame. Oh, and xblast, and crack-attack are fun too.

Re:Poll: When reloading Slashdot every five...

"We even have this retarded timesheet system where you itemize every 15 minute block of your day to some project."

I have a friend who's stuck in the same situation. Unfortunately, there is no way to be honest under such a system, because it doesn't allow for such things as research that may or may not be applicable to more than one project, but can't really be attributed specifically to one, time spent on general office and management issues, etc.

Hold on there, junior...

In the first place, the Internet didn't create the ability to waste time at work. These "studies" never quantify the amount of time wasted at work today to that which was wasted before the Internet. Without comparing before vs. after, one cannot reach any absolute conclusions.

In the second place, I work practically everywhere these days because of the Internet. I work at home, in the airport, in restaurants, in the car, etc. So counting all these other working locations, my productivity is significantly better than it was 20 years ago.

In the third place, people aren't machines. People are more productive, and more creative, if they take a mental break now and then. And people make better business decisions if they stay current with social trends and events. It's not a time waster, it's a cost of doing business.

Nuff said. Now quit bothering me, I really need to get back to work before my boss comes in.

Re:Hold on there, junior...

I feel that the fact that most people waste 1/5 of their time on the internet may be a good indication that work weeks are 1/5th too long. In fact, if I could find a job where I would only work 4 days a week, I would probably be as if not more productive than now that I work 5 days a week. This is a case where corporations should revisit their policies instead of the other way around.

Re:Hold on there, junior...

Be careful what you ask for - you might just end up with a 32 hour workweek getting 80% of the pay and end up browsing slashdot in your own time. Anyway, I think you're wrong. There is no intrinsic reason why 40 hours a week would be too much and 32 hours just enough. Smart employers (like mine, I'm typing this from work) don't mind some personal browsing and just care about the job getting done.

Re:Hold on there, junior...

This is more or less where my company stands on things...as long as you aren't looking at "innappropriate material" (porn and such) and you get all your work done by the end of the day, they don't care....you could spend 5 hours a day on the internet just screwing around, and as long as you finish everything assigned to you before the time you are supposed to leave, you won't ever be talked to about it.

Re:Hold on there, junior...

Luckily, with the way our company and our "teams" are structured, each person is assigned specfici tasks to do and are trained to do those tasks...as such, unless you have been trained to do something, they could be short 5 people and they STILL won't ask you to help out.

It sounds assbackwords, I know, but in doing it this way people are EXTREMELY proficient at what they do...our revenues are massive, and our clients are always happy...not to mention you never get someone who is "luke warm" about their job...if you don't like what you are doing, you are simply moved to another role.

Re:Hold on there, junior...

>we are the good guys of the healthcare industry

I understand the words individually, but I simply cannot sensibly parse the phrase as a whole...

Re:Hold on there, junior...

You just have to read into the words. "Patient Assistance Programs and also assits with Insurance Verifications and Prior Authorizations...essentially, we are the good guys of the healthcare industry:-)"

Obviously he works for Microsoft, quietly destroying other peoples patents and valuable property, all the while sucking on candy as any good evil mastermind should.

Re:Hold on there, junior...

Smart employers (like mine, I'm typing this from work) don't mind some personal browsing and just care about the job getting done.

That tends to work well, within reason. I had an employer a number of years ago where the policy was that if all the work was done for the day, that we could come in early and relax. Unfortunately in practice, if there was a project manager at the site, they would have us come back in early and do some other work. Really demoralizing when ones group was the only group which ended up with extra work.

But done in a fair minded way, it can definitely encourage efficiency gains. And in general if there is that much extra time being spent, it would make sense to just hand out some sort of bonus and give the worker(s) a bit more work to fill out most of the extra time.

Re:Hold on there, junior...

I definitely agree with the spirit of your post. People waste time at work? So what?

You ask people to spend the majority of their waking life, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 hours a day 5 days a week, in a little cubical, and you're surprised that they aren't hard at work for that entire time? They're people. They should be able to occasionally talk to people and read things that interest them.

It'd be a problem if you were only asking people to work 5 hours a day, 4 days a week, and people were wasting time on the job. I've had too many jobs, though, where there simply isn't more than 6 hours of work each day, but i had to be there for 10 hours. And those 6 hours of work were stressful, and the breaks kept me from snapping someone's neck.

Also, there's a question in my mind about what constitutes "wasting time". I work in IT. Is it a wast of my time to read Slashdot? Sometimes. But sometimes it's very informative. I've learned a lot from my web browsing while "wasting time", and a lot of that knowledge has benefitted my employers. I also used to "waste" a lot of time screwing around with various hardware/software products, which also lead to increasing my knowledge.

Being "productive" 24/7 just shouldn't be anyone's goal. A little experimentation/exploration/contemplation is useful.

Re:Hold on there, junior...

heh, FTA

Walter Block, a professor of economics at Loyola University in New Orleans, pointed to similarities between employees who slacked off before the computer age and those who waste time in cyberspace.

Your latter two points however are exactly correct. I hear meetings involving the words "Employee Morale" quite often, and yet no one seems to truely understand what that entails. Having the ability to "Waste" such time at work makes for a much happier workforce, who see their efforts much less like work due to such "Slacking". Such employees tend to deliver much higher quality results and care a lot more about actually HELPING the company and actually BEING creative. When we add to that your points of keeping the employees minds fresh and the fact that such employees can work MORE because of internet usage, this really does seem to be a seriously overblown concern.

Course it would depend entirely on the type of work ones site is doing as to whether such morale boosts would actually add value, but it doesnt change the fact that in many situations this can be a very good thing.

I don't waste time at work!

Just because I read Slashdot at work means I'm slacking off.

Just a sec, I see someone in my monitor mirror *alt-tabs to Eclipse*

Okay, I'm back, just started a 6000 test JUnit test suite so if anyone wonders if I'm being productive, I can point to the green status bar slowly approaching 100%...

As an employer, I ask: who cares?

My employees are free to spend as much time as they want in the office surfing any site they want do: slashdot, porn, the anarchist's cookbook, whatever. It is useless to me to tell them what they can or can't do when they've met their personal goals for projects.

I also pay my employees differently than most consulting firms. We pay close to minimum wage, plus a very large bonus on each project. I've never had anyone quit, and I've never had anyone complain about their monthly paychecks. By offering a large portion of a project's profits, I know my employees won't waste my money (in salary), won't have to lie on their time sheets, and they'll do the best job they can do because they won't want to go and finish a punch list without pay or handle warranty work at a low rate. It is win-win, and a big reason why I'd prefer full 1099's than W2's if the IRS didn't prevent us from working that way.

When you're salaried or on wages, the employer has to focus a lot more on containing the employee and sending them in the proper direction, constantly. We have zero managers at my company, just consultants. It works fine. Our customers love us because we're 40% cheaper than others in the industry but we excel at handling their needs.

So this all lets me "not care" if an employee decides to spend all day long on the web, and only 1 hour on a project. If the customer is happy, and the work is good, and they do it quickly and correctly, they'll make a killing on the profit sharing, and they'll have a ton of free time to kill at the office if they want to be there. Our top employee works 2 days a week, I think, and earns a very respectable income. He can now spend 3 days at the office playing some MMOG, or go home and sleep. I could care less, the customers are happy.

No, we're not hiring.

Re:As a lawyer, I ask: what me, worry?

No, what he has is a communal office for independent consultants. They get paid by the job, but he runs the show - bringing in work and doling it out. It's a bigger-company with individual talents - good to keep clients happy (we have lots of support), but you get targeted experts. He makes money herding the cats. The pay thing is just to keep the government happy.

Bingo. There are two skills spheres I have always been concerned with in my entire business life (I started a successful BBS at the age of 13 with this same mindset):

1. Those who are risk takers and are able to penetrate a market or a project early. These folks are not the most responsible in the long term (that's me).
2. Those who are responsible and are able to carry projects through to completion. These folks are not risk takers (not me).

A successful business needs a combination of both. The consultants who work with me are usually type 2, in fact I have never met a type 1 individual who competes on my level. This isn't egotistic, it is just a fact since I've been looking for a replacement for years.

Herding the cats is exactly what I do. There are 1000 projects in our markets (primarily Midwest US, Southwest US, Poland and India) that I can't reach because I can't find a way to do them more efficiently. Yet when I know what my consultants CAN do, and what they HAVE done, and what they WANT to do, I can jump into a bid or a decision process and sell our talents and come in well under budget. Most of the type 2 people I know won't take the risk of NOT having work or the risk of collections or the risk of keeping customers as contracts in the future. I'm the king of expensive dinners, bid submittals, comparison summaries and collections. I even use factoring companies when necessary to keep the cash coming in, even at a 5-11% hit. Most consultants are good at doing their job and scheduling their responsibilities, where I am not, so we work very well together. If I could find another 2-3 guys like me (type 1), we could probably take on 600% more work, but it is difficult to assess someone's abilities in the grayer business actions that I perform versus what an actual consultant does.

What it all boils down to is that I don't see the point of earning 6-10x what my average consultant earns. In most years, I am the BOTTOM of the income chart at my own company, but I also like to keep capital within the company as much as possible. Happy employees = future stability. People don't quit if they feel like they are earning slightly more than they are worth, but they'll quit if they smell the potential of earning more elsewhere.

Re:As a lawyer, I ask: what me, worry?

Same shit, different day. Dada has been puffing his ideas on /. for about 5 yrs now. With only 6 degrees of separation between any two people in the world, and /. being the #1 techie site on the 'Net we should have gotten some confirmation by now that he is legit and the system works. Folks on /. have called him out several times as have others and he then runs and hides. He's a troll. He hopes to sucker in new people every few months.

1/5th of the time wasted?

I think 1/5th of the time wasted is a huge underestimate. At my former job (IT), I easily spent the greater part of my days idly surfing the web. I wasn't avoiding work either - I really just had nothing else to do, but if in those situations I asked my boss for some more work, he would just give me some BS busy work like organizing a file cabinet. So after a few instances of that I just stopped asking him for things to do.

Re:1/5th of the time wasted?

Amen. Right now I am 8 weeks into a 24 week contract. I do on avg. 1 hour of work a day. They hired me to do A,B,C,D. When I started I wasn't allowed to work on B,C, and D because the person who was paying for me said it wasn't their project and it was their money. Hmmm politics. Project A got delayed by 2 months so things I should have worked on when I started won't happen till late Sept.

In the beginning I asked for more work every day and would either get a be patient or crap work (please proof read this, wtf). Then I only asked twice a week, same answer, same grunt work. Example please make sure 5 people review a manual and give feedback. Glad I got my masters for this

Now I don't care. I don't ask. I surf 7 hours a day (Slashdot, news, stocks, LinkedIn, etc) and look for jobs during the day. My boss does comment the work I do is outstanding so when I have work I do it well.

Do I feel bad? Not one bit. I turned down another gig for this one and then got screwed here. So the 7 hours a day they pay me to surf is the opportunity cost to me for having accepted this job.

How come they never do a study showing how a boss or company wastes the employees time?

Solitaire

about six out of 10 employees in the United States acknowledged wasting time at work

The other four in ten were too stupefied to respond, having just played 900 consecutive games of solitaire.

What's else to expect?

As a developer i'm productive at work for 2-4 hours per day. That's less than 50%. You cannot expect from developer to code non-stop for 8 hours and be proficient at it. It simply doesn't work that way... and any employer expecting this is an idiot.

Re:What's else to expect?

Agreed. The only time I can truly code for 8 hours straight is with a nice nap at around hour 4 and then back up and fresh at it. That's straight coding.

A lot of this job is research and "surfing" and "slacking" aren't the same thing. If I'm reading about a development platform that has potential, but has nothing to do with my current work, am I slacking? I don't think so. It's an investment in myself, and in turn my employer, for me to be a better developer across the board. You never know where you'll find a great idea that will change it all.

And then there is the recovery of a mind that's been stressed. Would a person take a break after a test? I would put forward that programming can be this intense sometimes. You haven't done anything physical but you feel spent when finished.

Very few programmers have longevity in the industry (beyond 10-15 years) because of the high stress level. Managers should be doing more to relieve this stress and keep their investments around. I never understood why computing throws away wisdom so easily, instead using green-horns who will work their brains fried just to impress the boss man. It may work in the near term, but long term it's detrimental.

Company Image

Because in todays economy, it's not how good you are, it's how good you look.

If I look like I'm working, logicly, the company must also look like it's doing good, right ?

Easy solution! Or is it?

My bosses fixed this by having me implement an unavoidable proxy server with a whitelist of approved sites. If you want to get onto a site that's not on the list, a manager must approve the site. Needless to say, anything not work related (including news, weather, banking sites, etc) are not on the list. Oh, and they're not playing Solitaire, either, thanks to the group policies in place that prevent the running of sol.exe and all other Windows games. And it's not like they're going to download new ones.

Problem solved, says management, who are not subject to the filter!

Of course all the employees resent being treated like children, and it's created a tremendous amount of ill will toward management, and people gripe about it all the time. At least one good employee switched companies because of the restrictive policy. But hey, at least they aren't wasting time on the 'net!

Re:Easy solution! Or is it?

Management is usually exempt from these things.
Our old IT manager wanted his surfing taken out of the firewall logs so I happy obeyed.

Last year we get a call from our ISP that SPAM is coming from our site. I searched the logs to no avail, we found the PC doing the most surfing and my boss accused them of doing it on purpose. In the meantime, I kept looking at current packets going out....you've guessed it by now....the IT manager had the spam producer on his PC. He never noticed his anti-spyware/virus was out of date.

Lucky for me, I had in writing, his policy of exempting himself so it wasn't my problem.
Always get this weird stuff from your boss in writing because it will always come back to get you if you don't.

If management had to obey the rules of the lowly workers, the Internet would be free for all to use (as it is at my company now).

Re:Easy solution! Or is it?

Block access to the web, and people will go back to other topics (as if they don't already)--who's on Dancing with the Stars, LOST, some YouTube video, their pets, beading hobby, weekend at the lake, et. al. ad infinitum.

Let's face it. People are not going to be 100% productive 100% of the time while they are at work. As other posters have noted, there are different dynamics depending on the type of job, but I won't go so far as to suggesting that similar slacking does not exist for those in the lower-end wage brackets. The biggest way slacking occurs there is through productivity slowdowns.

Sure, it might only take an enthusiastic new employee 15 minutes to clean the breakroom, but it becomes clear very quickly that doing so makes the rest of the employees look bad, since they are allocated 30 minutes to do the job. I knew a guy who went to work (with his buddy) at a silo manufacturing facility many years ago. They got the hang of it soon enough and were soon completing nearly two structures a night. The pace was fair, and they were able to hold some great discussions while they were working. After a couple of weeks, they wondered how many silos they could make if they shut up and focused on the work. First night that way, they made five. The next night, they made seven. After about a week like that, the union steward showed up and told my friend and his buddy that, "it is physically impossible to build more than 2.5 silos per night." Excitedly, they told him what they did, but the guy just repeated his line. For the rest of the summer, they built 2.5 silos a night. Neither opted for full time jobs with that place.

It's not a union thing--it's an establishment thing. Once people have an accepted "norm" for how something is done, it's hard to break away. That's one reason why "face time" is still valued (in some offices) more than productivity. Viva la revolution!

Don't forget depression...

Employees said they did so because they were bored, worked too many hours, were underpaid or were unchallenged at work.

I'd like to add the following to the list: depressed employees. And by depressed, I mean clinically, not just feeling down every now and then. Seriously, being depressed leads to apathy and lack of motivation. This is why I fully believe that workplace insurance programs should always cover psychological and psychiatric treatment at an equal level as other medical concerns; in the end, employees who aren't depressed are more productive, and therefore more profitable to the employer.

Re:Don't forget depression...

Amen

My health care program (while it has its failings) covers psychiatric care. If you feel "not right" and ask for help you will be given a priority appointment for your first session and evaluation*. After that until your shrink (LCSW or psychiatrist, as appropriate to the help you need) determine you are good to go your care is covered. There is no limit on how long or the number of sessions. I'm sure the staff gets some pressure on long term patients, but the impression I got was push back by the care giver was accepted at nearly face value.
Also covered without limit are group sessions, which can be immensely helpful, at least they were to me.

Ultimately I left that job (gee, I wonder why...) but the personal tools I gained from the experience where vastly helpful. My openness about needing help in the past has had some interesting results though; at my current job one of my co-workers came to me for help with a personal issue, because their impression was I'd "been there". The best advice I could give them was to get professional help, and that if they were concerned/afraid/uneasy/whatever I would hold their hand and go to the first session till dismissed by them or the shrink. Ended up attending nearly the entire first session as a silent witness, and was asked to return after they left. Shrink both chewed me out and thanked me at the same time. I should not have been there because of the whole doctor/patient privilege issue, but at the same time, they needed help and I got them in.
-nB

*They seem to understand that in the case of psychological issues immediate intervention is not optional as the person asking for help may not do so very forcefully, but still be in dire straits, either of suicide, or "going postal".

Re:much more

I'm just guessing here, but...

When the network takes a dive, he's the one working nights and weekends to get it back up, while you're at home playing WoW or watching Firefly on DVD.

If he never puts in the time, then he is a slacker and I hope he gets canned. If he is like most other netadmins I know, he probably logs a crapload of time when everyone else is away, yet he's still expected to put in face time during the workday. In cases like that, he's probably judged on network availability and other metrics. When all is going well, he has slack time. When all is not going well, he could put in a couple hundred hours in a couple of weeks.

If I were your manager, I'd be wondering how you found time to look at your netadmin's time in the ticket logs if you are already so busy--just something to think about.

Look at the reasons why instead!!!

1. People work too many hours == freakin' unproductive
2. People are poorly managed (nothing to do, boring tasks, other crap)

The problem isn't the internet, nor talking to your co-workers about other stuff that work. The problem is the way we work today. It's freakin' unproductive! We are worn out and tired, and there are few things that require less effort than surfing on the web. Attack the real problem and you'll see that productivity will skyrocket, employees will be a lot happier and have a lot more spare time where they can *gasp* surf on their own, or go hiking, or learn a new language, or travel the world (lots of vacation is GOOD for productivity, not the other way around!).

Yes, I waste time at work sometimes.

And yet, somehow, I'm pretty productive.

See, brains are complicated things, and sometimes what I really need is a half hour or so NOT looking straight at the problem, although I tend to be sort of absently thinking about it. And then suddenly I know what to do, and I go do it.

Low-Wage Jobs

While it's interesting to see the statistics for the workforce as a whole, I think it's interesting to point out that this is another major disadvantage for low wage workers. The types of jobs where you can slack off for 1/5th of the day aren't things like janitors, factory workers, or other lower level service personnel. If you factor that into the amount of work done per hour paid, the disparity between salaried office type work and low wage service work is even greater.

When I first started at my office job during college, I was so used to being in the basic service industry that I didn't fit in right away. I was used to just taking a task, doing it, and immediately going back to the boss for the next thing. I didn't realize that the culture I was in was for slower progress on tasks and there wasn't a need to rush and be essentially managed by the boss every second of the day.

Just some things to think about. A lot of people don't realize that for a lot of American workers, and 8 hour day really means 8 hours.

Fine line

I think there's a fine line (for some) between cyberslacking and taking periodic breaks from the tedium of work. For me, my periodic checks at Slashdot and other news sites are a way to stay sane, so I can hyper focus for other periods of time during the day to get things done. I have a set of sites I visit daily, mostly news/information sites, and my flow works something like this (my days average nine hours sans lunch):

*Arrive, log in, check voice/email messages, responding as appropriate. 30 min.
*Check my preferred websites. 30 min.
*Tackle biggest task(s) for the day. 2-3 hrs.
*Check my preferred websites. 10min.
*Tackle those annoying-but-not-critical tasks. 1-2 hrs.
*Lunch. 15-30 min. (usually at my desk while checking and replying to messages).
*Check my preferred websites. 10min.
*Project work, progress on multi-stage tasks. 2-3 hrs.
*Check my preferred websites. 10 min.
*Follow-up tasks, and assignments to other technology groups. 1-2 hrs.
*IF NOT at the end of the day, check some secondary sites or research some new topics until end of day. 15-30 minutes. This is the one time of day that, for me, comes closest to true cyberslacking. Often I'm just waiting for any final help calls or trouble tickets before our designated end-of-day.

The first site check of the day is longer because most headlines/topics refreshed overnight. Later in the day, I'm only scanning for new headlines or topics of interest. Of course, some days (about once a week), I never get to check my sites. Perhaps once a month I'll have a day where I can read every article that interests me. This works well for me and my employer, as my reading keeps me well aware of numerous trends in and outside of our industry, and it allows me to dive in with greater intesity when I am working. Of course, some will not believe this works without a scientific study, and I'll be the first to say this does not work for everyone. For me, however, I'm glad to work for an employer that allows for some personal use during the workday and is more focused on results than on managing every minute we're in the building. I get my work done on time, seek extra assignments, and pick up slack from my coworkers. Some would argue that my employer is overstaffed [I tried to make that point to a former employer for years until I finally bailed for my current gig, so I know the difference], but that is not the case--it comes down to how I handle my workload. I sprint, then I walk, then I sprint again. My diversions are those little walks that let me run full bore from time to time.

Am I the only one who operates like this?

This is very true

My company has an authenticating web proxy that users must use to access the internet, and they track personal web use in this way. We also have a VPN that can dial in to the corporate network from home, which is also authenticating but which traffic statistics, for obvious reasons, aren't monitored.

I've been so committed to slacking, as it were, that I committed significant time to creating a backwards web gateway for myself using an automated dial-in from home, which creates a remote ssh tunnel to my work computer that forwards certain port traffic back to a proxy server on my home network. So now at work I just set my web proxy to the localhost at the specified port and surf backwards through the VPN, only using our corporate web-proxy to do job-related surfing.

And all so I can slack. Never underestimate the laziness of a programmer.

It's not slacking off...

It's just that my code's compiling. [xkcd.com]

healthy

People do what they feel necessary to keep themselves "running". You can outlaw it, but that doesn't change the fact that they do it, maybe you can change what exactly they do.

If it's not the Internet it's smoke-breaks, talking at the coffee/water machine, or just looking out of the window. Also, lots of people are good at appearing busy.

And I think that's ok.

One, if you really put people in the grinder, force them to work 8 hours, no breaks or diversions, I'm sure you will soon see the quality of their work plummet, as well as their motivation. If you're a factory in backland China that might be a winning strategy, if your business is in any way dependent on thinking employees, it isn't.

Two, if you pay by the hour, and your people are only there for the money, then two things shouldn't surprise you. One, that they try to get as much money for as little work as possible. You do the same, except that you don't call it "goofing off", but "profit maximizing", or maybe your consultants have found an even nicer buzzword. But it's just capitalism. If you don't like it, go somewhere where they haven't dumped Communism, yet.
Two, you shouldn't be surprised that someday soon, some institute, consultant or survey will reveal your employees are rather badly motivated. Money alone doesn't do it. Do your homework in leadership. Throughout history, brilliant leaders weren't the guys who paid best, and that's not they are remembered for.

Other side of the issue.

At my first real job, this side of the college world, I tried my damndest to make sure I was keeping busy 95% of the time I was on the clock. (Working a tech support line and burning CD patches for the shipping dept to send out.) As they inevitably do, things slowed down during a lean month and it became impossible to keep busy all the time. The real problem occurred when I asked my manager for more duties; since by 3pm I had finished all of my tasks for the day. My manager was incensed at the idea and wanted to know if I needed to resign or a new job. In the business world, managers don't care if you're wasting time or working efficiently. All they care about is if the work assigned to you gets finished in the timeframe they required. If that means you spend 2 hours in the morning checking your e-bay auctions, so be it. Who cares, the numbers on their reports are all within spec. Yet, 6 years later I'm the manager now and I'm perpetuating the somewhat hypocritical business world.

*sigh* Thanks for the title. :P

So I'm eating lunch, glancing at slashdot.

My boss walks up behind me and says "Don't let your boss catch you reading this? What is that Dave?"

"Umm, its slashdot boss, and Its my lunch time."

"You know Dave, internet usage isnt for personal activities...."

*sigh*

Before the internet there was solitaire

If it wasn't solitaire or the internet, it would be their iPhones, cell phones, Blackberry, portable video players, mp3 player or host of other electronic gadgets they have at their disposal. If you invest in monitoring their internet use, they'll find a way to proxy around it...those who don't have iPhones. Trying to regulate people's behavior turns into an endless goat rope.

If they're getting their work done and they're profitable, leave them alone. If not, let them go. It's that simple. Inappropriate material is an issue everyone should be aware of by now. If they're not smart enough to leave their p0rn on their iPhone, then they deserve to get fired. If they're not smart enough to keep their steamy email affair off the company mail system, b-bye. This isn't rocket science. So many companies over-think the problem.

As a sysadmin...

As a sysadmin slacking off means I'm being productive, since no problems are occurring. You could say that the goal of a sysadmin is to legitimately slack off as much as possible.

Re:limit access

Yeah, productivity thrives in tightly controlled workplaces where the management doesn't trust the employees.