21 November 2007
A new survey has estimated that UK companies will lose a total of 28.7million man hours over the Christmas period due to staff doing their shopping online.
The survey, by YouGov for a software security firm (reported in Computer Weekly), decides that the 45% of workers that admit to shopping from work will spend an average of 22 minutes a week doing so.
However, as expected this report has provoked serious criticism. In response to a similar report, this estimated that Christmas shopping from work would cost UK Plc a whopping £7billion. This was called into question when compared to a 2004 Eurest Lunchtime Report which revealed that only one in five workers in the UK take a full hour’s lunch break, and that the average lunch break was just 27 minutes long.
This figure is different for the 2006 report, but workers still only get an average of just 28 minutes, while one in five workers never takes a break, or is forced to eat at their desks.
From these reports the question is, is the average UK worker actually making up the rest of their entitled work out with online shopping or is UK productivity suffering?
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