Cyberslacking

With a new baby and a full-time job, Jill McGarr doesn't have time to cruise the malls this Christmas. Instead, she's cruising the Internet, shopping for gifts for her husband and 2-month-old daughter. Not owning a home computer, however, she's doing her online shopping at the Cleveland graphics studio where she works. Does that make her feel guilty? "Oh, come on," says the 28-year-old secretary. "I'm not cheating anyone. I'm a multitasker." After all, she says, everyone shirks at work sometimes. Besides, she says, "what's more beneficial? Talking on the phone to a friend or maybe becoming more computer literate because you're using the computer?"

McGarr might be multitasking. But a new generation of cyberslacking workers are multishirking by spending hours a day frittering away time online. As e-mail and high-speed Internet access have become standard-issue office equipment, rampant abuse of computers in the workplace is making the water cooler look like a font of productivity. For bosses, cyberslacking is becoming a pervasive and perplexing problem in the new wired workplace. With the Internet morphing into the virtual Mall of America, day trading, Quake playing, vacation planning and hard-core porn (not to mention gateways to exciting new career opportunities) are all just a click away. "There is something extremely seductive about this technology," says Kimberly Young, founder of the Center for Online Addiction in Bradford, Pa., and author of "Caught in the Net." From game sites like mplayer.com, where usage surges during the lunch hour, to online retailers like Amazon.com, which experience their heaviest traffic during the workday, the message is plain: folks who surf prefer to do it at work.

Corporations are scrambling to measure the scope of the problem. According to a new survey from Vault.com, 90 percent of the nation's workers admit to surfing recreational sites during office hours. And 84 percent of workers say they send personal e-mail from work. SurfWatch Software estimates that nearly one third of American workers' time on the Net is spent cheating the boss out of real work, double last year's rate of on-the-job recreational surfing. Research commissioned by Elron Software found that more than half of American workers cybershop on company time. And it's not just for books. Jennifer Greco found a lovely two-bedroom condo while cruising the Web during lunch from her office at Encore Group, a Chicago marketing staffing firm. House hunting at work saved the 29-year-old consultant from traipsing all over town and, she says, "I didn't have to look hard or long at all." Perhaps most grating to employers is the on-the-job job hunt. A financial analyst at a Hollywood movie studio who asked that his name not be used says, "The bulk of my time online is spent looking for work elsewhere."

With demand for downtime diversions skyrocketing, all sorts of Web sites are popping up to satisfy the need to shirk. There's Gamesville.com, a game-playing site with the slogan "Wasting your time since 1996." Dilbert, of course, has his own dot.com, and his cartoonist creator, Scott Adams, says working stiffs can now use the Internet to transform their cubicles into "virtual Vegas gaming houses, complete with nudies." And then there's DonsBossPage.com, a Dagwood Bumstead-style site filled with jokes and games that gets 5,000 hits a day. Each site features a prominent panic button in case the boss wanders by. Simply click on it and a phony spreadsheet pops onto your screen and typing sounds clack from your speakers. Dereliction of duty at the keyboard is an efficient way to recharge your batteries at work, argues Don Pavlish, the 25-year-old "chief Web geek" who created Don's Boss Page. "There's more value in 15 minutes of Web surfing than going outside for a smoke," he reasons.

Ever the killjoys, bosses are taking a dim view of all this virtual goldbricking. They see it as an insidious, profit-eating virus, costing corporate America more than $1 billion a year in wasted computer resources, according to SurfWatch, a maker of software to police cyberabuse. And that doesn't even count the billions of dollars in lost productivity. Along with the time wasting, executives worry that the new technology increasingly enables workers to pilfer trade secrets in the blink of an e-mail. Personal surfing and e-mailing can also seriously strain a company's computer network. And workers who consume a steady diet of porn in their offices may expose their employers and themselves to sexual-harassment lawsuits. Even short of lawsuits, many co-workers are being placed in uncomfortable situations when they walk in on colleagues who are viewing pornography. "As more people get access to the Internet, it's becoming an area of abuse on a wider scale," says Patrick Gnazzo, vice president of business ethics at United Technologies. The Hartford, Conn.-based manufacturing conglomerate has instituted a "rat fink" policy that requires workers to tattle on colleagues who are misusing their computers.

But workers may soon pay an unwelcome price for all the workday antics. There has been a sharp increase in workplace surveillance as employers have begun paying more attention to how their workers are spending their time at the keyboards. More than two thirds of U.S. companies engage in electronic surveillance of their employees, according to a new survey from the American Management Association. The biggest growth is in cybersnooping, with 27 percent of companies reviewing e-mail, up from 15 percent two years ago, and 21 percent going over computer files, up from 13 percent. "It's not a question of individual privacy," says Richard Mauro, president of Telemate.net, which has sold its cyberspying software to more than 1,000 companies. "It's about the abuse of company assets."