While so many of us at the office this holiday week fritter away our days surfing the Internet, consider this: We claim the Internet has actually made us more productive at work.
In a new online survey of American workers by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of the respondents said that the Internet, email and related technologies have made them more productive, while just 7 percent said that the technologies had made them less productive.
While that’s hardly surprising — can you imagine anyone saying, “Hey, boss, please take away the Internet because I’m wasting too much time on it”? — the research did uncover a few unexpected insights.
Only 4 percent of those surveyed said social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were “very important” to their jobs. E-mail, by comparison, was very important to 61 percent of workers.
That mismatch has pushed Facebook to test a version of its social network specifically for workplaces, with a more public release scheduled to be released in the next few months. And it’s why LinkedIn sends you constant messages trying to nudge you back to its site even when you’re not looking for a job.
“Email has proven its worth on the job as the foundational ‘social media’ day by day even as rival technologies arise,” said Lee Rainie, director of internet, science, and technology research at the Pew Research Center, in a statement announcing the survey results.
For all the talk of our culture moving to mobile phones, more than one-third of the respondents said a landline phone was vital to their jobs, compared with the one-quarter that said a cellphone was very important.
Pew surveyed 535 American adults employed full-time or part-time in September using a nationally representative online research panel. The margin of error for the survey, which was conducted in English, was plus or minus 5 percentage points.
Respondents said the Internet had made them more productive and given them more flexibility in their jobs, but about 35 percent said they were also working longer hours because of it. Office-based workers reported more benefits but also more workplace demands because of the technology than non-office workers.
One of the biggest benefits of the Internet, workers said, was the expanded network of contacts outside their company that they had built up.
Still, greater access to the Internet has come with more rules. Nearly half of employers have established rules regarding how employees can present themselves online, compared to 20 percent in 2006, when Pew first conducted a similar survey.
So if you’re goofing off at the office on New Year’s Eve, it’s probably best to keep that little fact off the Internet.