Email is favourite waste of time for Aussie workers

By Stuart Finlayson

Feb 14, 2005: Nearly a third of all Australian office workers are spending an hour or more a day on personal emails.

But at least Aussies not as bad as their American counterparts, with a whopping 60 percent of office workers in the US admitting to wasting an hour or more a day on email swapping jokes and news with friends.

That is according to a worldwide survey conducted by web and email content security provider Clearswift.

"While Australians are slightly better behaved, personal email over-use is having a significant impact on productivity,” said Peter Croft, managing director Clearswift Asia Pacific.

Not only are Australians wasting millions of productivity hours every week attending to personal emails, most of the culprits aren't even aware their actions are problematic, with more than 85 percent of the Australian respondents saying they didn’t think their boss would be concerned about their level of personal email and Internet use at work.

“Employers need to tell staff what is ‘reasonable personal use’ of email and the Internet at work,” said Croft.

“Most employers allow personal phone calls but even the most relaxed would baulk at more than an hour a day. All organisations need a clear Internet and email use policy to set the ground rules. Employees need to be educated about the policy and it needs to be enforced when breaches occur," added Croft.

Better news for Australian bosses is that the survey also strongly indicates that the importance of security is getting through to staff, with more than 98 percent of Australian respondents saying they have never responded to a spam offer sent to them at work and 97.7 percent saying they would not open an e-card from an unknown sender.

“Even the best network security can be brought down by the human factor and it’s great to see the message getting through not to open emails and attachments from unknown sources and not to encourage the senders of spam.

At least Australians are the most cautious workers when it comes to the contents of emails they are sending, with over 76 percent reporting that they never forwarded racy jokes and emails to colleagues and friends. 

Another area of concern to Australian employers is that of employees using email for illegal purposes, with over 12 percent of Australians questioned admitting to downloading pirate software, music, films or games at work. 

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