Internet at Work
There is an old quote attributed to a worker under communism. “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” The quote comes to mind when reading the Vatican’s new policy and various reactions to it. That policy is the banning of Facebook and MySpace from within the Vatican firewall. The typical reaction from the Type A personality types is that it should be the person’s responsibility to manage their time, not the boss’s. I regret to inform folks that workplaces generally aren’t filled with their types.
One doesn’t have to be a Type A personality to do good work. While many are shocked to learn this, most people actually don’t enjoy their jobs. Most people don’t believe their skills are being utilized properly. Most people don’t believe they are being fairly compensated for their contribution to the workplace. Since this is a Catholic web site, I’ll clean up the attitude that can start to pervade: just forget about it. Not doing work is just one of those small acts of rebellion. Looking at the stats for VN, we receive half as many visits on weekend days as we do on week days. When we look at the daily numbers, there is curve stretching from 7:00 AM until 7:00 PM.
Now, I ain’t here to condemn anyone. The last thing I’m going to tell anyone is that there aren’t enough people slavishly devoted to work. I’m saddened and find it quite pathetic how much devotion people give to a work place that has little to no devotion to them. I feel like I’m watching a freshman girl pine over the football team captain at times. Except for those led easily to depression, it is a good practice every time you receive your pay check to remember that this could be your last day of work. If you don’t have a contract you aren’t worth anything. But hey, be sure you keep your cell phone on this weekend and check your work email from home several times.
Such isn’t to claim it is right to waste hours at work surfing the web, commenting on blogs, posting topless photos of yourself on facebook for your 1000 friends to see, etc. Of course it isn’t right. And your employer not only has the right to block it, they are stupid if they don’t block it. For security reasons alone, blogs and basically any site with advertising should be banned. That’s the door most viruses go through today anyway. As for those that claim they need it for work purposes, fill out the form and let your supervisor decide. In most places, I would actually advocate making a green list of sites rather than black list.
Update: To improve the morale of the people reading this post, I offer the following:
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I think it was Pope John Paul I who, when asked how many people work in the Vatican, responded “about half.”
He was John XXIII.
” about half”: pope John was a very optimistic person.
Surfing at work has replaced: (1) cigarette breaks (which now are taken by a fraction of the numbers of people who formerly took them), (2) lunches (remember them – I think it was some time around 1994 when I and my peers stopped taking a lunch hour), (3) water cooler breaks, and (4) vacations and weekends, et cet. It has the advantage of keeping people at their desks where you can find them when you need them. That’s why it’s tolerated as compared to what typically occurred in office-job environments in the pre-Internet days, when it was much harder to find people (unless they had secretaries who could find them under certain protocals that have become a lost art – remember secretaries?)
I was talking with an HR person once, and they said something like 8% or 18% of the workday is wasted doing non-work things.
MZ
And back in the 1980s, the commonly accepted percentage was 20%. That might explain the increase in productivity since then.
M.Z.,
I believe you’re gravely discounting the fact that most workdays for many employees do not end at concrete periods as the case was in the past.
Many of us tend to have blackberries and laptops which keep us preoccupied even outside work hours.
If anything, our personal lives are often impinged rather than vice-versa; however, better to be employed than to suffer the plight of the unemployed, amongst other things.
M.Z.: I’m not sure why it went into the spam filter.