Steve Dale wrote a post a while ago about how the Confederation of British Industry recently conducted a study that concluded that workers screwing around on the internet at work was costing the United Kingdom just under £11 billion in lost productivity.

It’s estimated that every individual worker spends about an hour and a half a week browsing sites that have nothing to do with their jobs, which they reason costs employers about £1000 per employee per year.

Steve points out the obvious flaws in the CBI’s logic — that workers who are prevented from shopping on eBay or checking their Hotmail accounts are not necessarily going to become productive, and that the very definition of ‘work-related’ is problematic (is reading the newspaper work-related for example?).

While I agree completely with both of Steve’s points, I think there’s another angle to consider here as well. Companies can easily restrict workers access to sites, and those workers have little recourse. Very few people could legitimately claim they need access to sports scores or whatever else they might want to read in the course of a day.

On the contrary, restricting workers’ access to other ‘time-wasting activities’ is often more difficult to do (it’s hard to prevent people from going to make a cup of coffee every hour or spending too much time going to the washroom). Restricting access to the time-gobbling internet sites seems like a quick and easy way to boost productivity.

I would argue however, that there are two unintended consequences to these restrictions. The first is that employees who are wasting their time at work are usually doing so for other reasons (besides an overwhelming desire to shop on eBay or whatever they do online), and will thus continue to waste time whether it’s online or offline.

And if employees are surfing the web at their desk, it’s far easier to get back into their work than it is if they’re out getting coffee or chatting with their friend on the phone. Restricting the internet could hypothetically have them wasting more time (just in different ways).

I’m willing to admit that what I’m proposing purely hypothetical here. My point is that there’s no real evidence on either side of the argument — no one has any proof of what those employees are going to do with their newly-reclaimed 90 minutes a week.

The second, more important, unintended consequence of restricting browsing is that it sends a clear message to employees: we don’t trust you. I talked about this before in terms of instant messaging.

It’s difficult to put a dollar value on trust (just as it’s difficult to put a dollar value on ‘wasted time’). Is it not better to assume that employees are willing to commit some extra time when they need to (which perhaps would more than compensate for the 90 minutes they ‘wasted’ during the week)?

Ultimately, if you don’t trust your employees, and think they’re not working hard enough or getting their work done, you’ve got bigger fish to fry. Letting employees know that the organization trusts them to manage their time shifts responsibility to the employee to perform.