Internet hurts productivity

ALMOST 23 per cent of female and 16.4 per cent of male employees believe the Internet has affected their productivity adversely, according to a recent survey by recruitment firm Alectus Personnel.

At 38.4 per cent, marketing professionals ranked as least productive when given access to the Internet.

Around 26 per cent of information technology professionals said the Internet had made an adverse impact on their time at work while only 6.6 per cent of accounting and 11 per cent of banking/finance staff said this was the case.

Alectus Personnel’s Christine Slattery said young people, who were perhaps more computer literate than older counterparts, were more likely to spend unnecessary time on the Internet.

“An increasing number of videos, chain letters and jokes are going around and these are an enormous waste of time,” Ms Slattery said.

“Videos, in particular, are quite large in file size and take a huge amount of time to download.”