Employees browsing social networking sites during working hours are costing companies hugely in lost productivity.

A research company in India has revealed the true cost to companies of their employees surfing social networking sites during working hours – close to 1 week per employee, per year.

The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) surveyed more than 4,000 employees across three age groups – 21-30, 31-45 and 46-60 across India and found that almost 12.5% of productivity is lost as employees surf social networking websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace.

According to ASSOCHAM’s Social Development Foundation (ASDF) survey, employees spend around one hour each day on the internet using the social networking websites citing several reasons including looking for romance, just for fun, keeping in touch with friends and for job searching.

The most popular websites were Facebook and Orkut (a social networking site operated by Google), closely followed by MySpace and LinkedIn. The survey revealed that 83% of workers who have Orkut accounts saw nothing wrong with looking on it during work hours, and more alarmingly, a quarter of respondents said they had built their entire profiles during work.

ASSOCHAM Secretary General, Mr D S Rawat, commented on the findings: “The majority of companies effectively lose close to 12.5% of total productivity each day as employees access these sites.

“The growing numbers browsing these sites can be dangerous for overall productivity and IT companies have already installed software to restrict its use.”

Employees appear to be taking advantage of an increasing shortage of web monitoring and despite only 19% of companies allowing staff to search on social networking sites, 60% said they spend around 40-50 minutes a day browsing their favourite websites. 

In October, the UK’s Portsmouth City Council banned staff from accessing Facebook after it was found they spent an average of 400 hours on the site every month.