With easy access to the Internet at work, many employees are becoming addicted to the Web. At its extreme, this is a new, emerging mental health problem that can be as devastating as alcohol, drug and gambling addictions.
One corporate executive, who billed out her time at $350 an hour, would play solitaire on her computer for hours on end during the workday. Another employee would obsess on word games via his PC, rationalizing to himself that he wasn't wasting time at work; he was improving his vocabulary.
There was the social worker who spent her Saturdays at work surfing the Web and there are the many, many employees--usually young men--who get entranced by Internet gambling, whether it be illegal games or stock day-trading.
What all these employees have in common is their addiction to the Internet. Becoming ensnared by the Web affects not only their personal lives, but also their careers-and their employers suffer as well in lost productivity.
With the Internet so accessible at work these days, often featuring much faster connections than home computers, it's almost impossible to find an employee who hasn't spent at least a few minutes during the workday doing some shopping, staying on top of the latest news, participating in chat rooms or e-mailing the latest joke or chain letter to friends.
And while most employers accept the fact that employees will occasionally use their company's online services for personal use, many of them fail to understand that some will become so fascinated by the Web that it will dominate their thoughts and work time. Equally difficult to fathom is that as more and more companies allow more and more workers to go online, the potential fallout--in lost productivity, increased health-care costs and even potential legal liability--will rise.
Long ago, most companies adopted Internet-use policies and most, therefore, assumed the issue was under control. But even policies that provide clear-cut disciplinary warnings and actions may not be sufficient, say Web-use experts. Even filtering software that denies access to inappropriate Web-site viewing, such as pornographic sites, may not be enough.
Companies need to monitor the amount of time employees spend on the Internet, and they need to work with employees so there is a clear understanding of when--or if--the Internet can be accessed for personal use. Employers also need to adopt some stronger measures to alleviate the potential for abuse, experts say.
For some habitual offenders, disciplinary action may not be enough. These employees may be so needful of their "Internet fix" that the company's employee assistance programs will have to respond.
"Various people get caught by various things," says psychologist Marlene Maheu, an Internet addiction expert and author of Infidelity on the Internet. "It's kind of like the difference between someone who has an eating disorder versus someone who is alcoholic versus someone who gambles. Every one of those things has a common core. ... There's either anxiety or depression at the core, and people feel trapped."
Numbers on the Rise
Employees admit spending 8.3 hours a week at work viewing Web sites that are not work-related, according to the Web@Work Survey 2002: Cyber-Addiction in the Workplace, a Harris Interactive poll conducted on behalf of Websense Inc., an employee Internet filtering system company.
Even more disconcerting, according to the survey, is that one in four employees reports feeling addicted to, or compulsive about, his or her Internet usage. Almost six in 10 (55.7 percent) say they would give up their daily coffee before losing their Internet connection. The most addictive Web sites were shopping (24 percent), news (23 percent), pornography (18 percent),gambling (8 percent) and auctions (6 percent), according to the study, which polled 305 employees and 250 human resource managers from companies with up to 38,000 employees.
Add to that the prevalence of email, beepers, text messaging and personal digital assistants, says Maheu, and the problem of electronic workplace distraction becomes even more mind-boggling.
"It's as if the sanctity of the worksite has been pierced by a number of text-messaging devices that can be accessed by people." These devices break up concentration both when messages come in and when the recipients put their work aside to constantly check to see if one has come in.
In the United States, the total number of employees with Web access is about 70 million, according to Gartner Dataquest. And according to the Conference Board, six in 10 Americans (61 percent) go online at least once a month while more than three in 10 (35 percent) go online daily.
With such numbers only increasing, Web misuse at work is not a problem that will disappear anytime soon. Nielsen/NetRatings has measured a marked increase in the non-work related worksite use of the Internet by employees, with a 17 percent jump in 2002 over the previous year. According to its research, nearly 46 million American office workers logged onto the Web during August 2002, with a 23 percent increase in traffic from women at work (although men still outnumber the women online). Peak hours of worksite usage are between 10 a.m. and noon. Men averaged nearly 31 hours online at work in August while women compiled
almost 27 hours of online time, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
That's slightly higher than French employees, who admit spending one hour online each day at work, with almost three in four of them (72 percent) saying they prefer going online during company time rather than lunch or breaks, according to the Benchmark Group. And in Britain, small and medium-sized companies were found to lose more than a day's work each week to employee misuse of the Internet, according to the Cranfield School of Management.
Escape to the Web
So how can companies detect a problem? The typical addictive personality, says Richard A Chaifetz, chairman and CEO of Chicago-based employee assistance provider ComPsych, is someone who has trouble forming interpersonal relationships. The person is more likely to be single and tends to be a loner. After all, he says, if a person has an active social life, good job performance and multiple relationships, he or she doesn't have as much time to spend online.
If they have not yet done so, the first key step is to adopt an Internet policy, says Kian Saneii, vice president of Websense, headquartered in San Diego. "We feel--and privacy advocates also support and promote this--that once you establish a policy ... the next very important step is applying that universally across the board."
Some company policies view personal Internet usage as analogous to personal phone calls, he says. Some companies forbid personal phone calls--or personal Internet access--in their entirety; some allow them, but expect them to be kept brief and not to affect work. Some permit them during lunch hours or break times. But even employers who allow personal use of the Internet at work should keep some site categories off-limits at all times, he says.
The Big Bad Six
Saneii calls these categories the "sinful six," and they include all sites related to pornography/gambling, weapons, race, violence, hate and anything deemed "tasteless," a category covering a variety of unrelated visually or verbally inappropriate topics.
Preventing access to the "sinful six" may protect companies from legal liability, he says. If employees are granted work-site access to on-site gambling, for instance, they may end up not only losing their shirts and leaving their lives in shambles, he says, but they may blame their company for the addiction and sue them for redress.
Saneii, said companies should "create the policy ... enforce the policy and finally, have assistance programs ... in place" to help employees recover and become productive workers once more.
Thus far, at AFLAC, a 3,300-employee insurance provider based in Columbus, Ga., the company's EAP program has not yet been utilized by a worker claiming addiction to the Web, says Sharon Douglas, vice president and chief people officer. AFLAC began offering wide availability of Internet access to employees in April2000; before that, it was much more limited.
Douglas thinks the worst abuses at her company have already passed. "At the beginning, when we first turned on the Internet access, I think [personal usage] was just rampant. Everybody was checking it out, and because our systems are faster, it was quicker for them to get in and use it, probably, than their home computer--so we saw a lot [of personal usage]," she says. "Once they found out we were very serious about people abusing it, they laid off."
AFLAC's Internet policy calls for employees to use it strictly for business purposes, and their IT professionals monitor usage and provide filtering to prevent access to "inappropriate sites."
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"If we find people who are going to inappropriate sites on numerous occasions or abusing their Internet privileges, then that brings them to human resources and we handle that appropriately," Douglas says. Most times, that means a warning, but the company will not tolerate employees visiting pornography on company time. 'They will be terminated," she says.
"If somebody spends the bulk of their day visiting Internet sites but they are not considered inappropriate sites, then we will bring them in and talk to them. It's almost on a case-by-case basis," she says, noting that some employees, by virtue of their job responsibilities, will be online much more frequently than other workers.
One special annoyance involved chain email letters, she says. "We had a lot of that. People would send a chain letter through e-mail and they were just going all over the place. Someone actually sent it to somebody here at HR," she says.
Clear-cut and firm policies are what's needed when dealing with Internet abuse, she says. "I think once you put your stamp on how you are going to handle [unacceptable Internet usage], I don't see any issue," Douglas says.
Discipline or Assistance
Sometimes it's more than a discipline problem, however, says Chaifetz of CoinPsych. For more and more employees, it becomes a mental health issue.
"It's a dilemma for the employers to differentiate between the individual who is abusing company policies or [the individual who] may need to have psychological or treatment intervention for an addiction," Chaifetz says.
Requests for help specifying Internet addiction are still fairly rare--although he notes the amount of calls "are increasing year by year as the Internet becomes more embedded in our daily routines." Nevertheless, the Internet often comes up as a contributing factor when mental-health professionals analyze other requests for help, he says. In cases involving marital or family problems, the treatment providers often find the affected person is "spending an inordinate amount of time on the Internet."
"It's much more frequently found tied to other kinds of presenting problems ... whether [the person] is addicted to the Internet or addicted to something on the Internet or using the Internet to fulfill an addiction. That's an example of what we see," he says.
"Most [mental-health] programs that treat people with Internet addiction approach it from a typical AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] model, used for alcoholics and other common addictions. They go through the step process," he says.
"It's a tricky issue for the employers [to get to the bottom of employee abuse of the Internet] ," Chaifetz says. But, he notes, it's not the employers' job to diagnose the problem; rather, they should suggest that any employees whose performance has suffered for personal reasons, whatever the cause, seek help through the company's EAP.
One Fortune 300 manufacturing company that had a problem with workers spending too much time online opted to forbid all personal computer use at an employee's desk, he says. Instead, it set up kiosks with computers in Internet rooms and in the cafeteria so workers could take advantage of the faster connection on their off hours.
Some companies, says Saneii of Websense, offer employees a set amount of personal Internet access per day, any-where from, say, 30 minutes to two hours to visit unrestricted Web sites. Some companies open it up after work hours. Some even offer varying amounts of access depending on work performance, using longer Web access time as an incentive for high-achieving employees, he says. Executives need to "find that perfect balance" between the needs of the company and the needs of the employee as an individual who may use the Internet during [his or her] free time, he says.
To help prevent abuse, one easy action is to make sure computer monitors face the door or entryway of the employee's work place so supervisors can easily see what is on the screen, says Maheu.
She also suggests companies that have not yet established an Internet policy should create a committee of both management and regular employees to address employee usage of the Internet. That way, she says, the company is "likely to get more buy-in from the rank-and-file."
Internet access at the workplace will only increase in the future. Even casual use results in a loss of productivity as employees disregard their assigned tasks and responsibilities for an escape to the Web. Employers need to acknowledge the potential problem, monitor usage to determine the extent of their company's problem and have consequences and help available for violators, Maheu says.
"It's not a difficult addiction to treat," she says. "If employers establish the right policies, put the proper controls in place and clearly state how violations are going to be treated, it makes it a whole lot easier."
Hour-by-hour persnonal online usage of American workers
SURFING THE WEB
Hour Home Work
7 a.m. 29% 49%
8 a.m. 38% 72%
9 a.m. 44% 82%
10 a.m. 48% 86%
11 a.m. 49% 86%
noon 49% 84%
1 p.m. 50% 85%
2 p.m. 51% 85%
3 p.m. 52% 83%
4 p.m. 54% 80%
5 p.m. 56% 66%
6 p.m. 56% 51%
7 p.m. 56% 43%
8 p.m. 58% 39%
9 p.m. 56% 37%
10 p.m. 48% 32%
11 p.m. 37% 26%
Source: Nielsen/Net Ratings, August 2002
Anne Freedman can be reached at afreedman@lrp.com.
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