★ “Your Personal Time Is Costing the Company Money (About $280,000,000,000 Per Year)”

Michael Fitzpatrick:

That productivity boost got me thinking about what else we all spend our time on during the course of a workday that might impact productivity.  A quick search will tell you that Americans are spending, on average, 14 of their 74 minutes of online time on Facebook.  Mobile time spent might be more significant, but I don’t have ready access to those distribution stats.

Using that astonishing statistic, let’s make a few assumptions as inputs into our model.  First, I’ll assume that people are spending only 50% of their total Facebook usage during a given day during work hours.  After all, we are hard working Americans…right?

• Time Spent On Facebook During Workday:  7 minutes

Next up, how many of us are sitting in front of computers with internet access each workday?  As a proxy, I’ll use the “knowledge worker” profile with an estimate of 30% of us American workers fall into.

• Total Number of Internet-Connected Workers:  48,000,000 (30% of roughly 160M workers)

Ok, now let’s put these together to show how much time collectively we are spending on Facebook:

• 48,000,000 worker * 7 minutes per day = 336,000,000 minutes per workday

Yikes, that’s a big number.  But how can we translate that into cost-per-employee?  Based on an average salary guestimate of $50,000 and 2000 work hours per year, we can assume a per-minute cost-per-employee of around $0.40/minute.  If we take that cost-per-minute and apply it to time employees are spending on Facebook, we get a big number…

• Daily Productivity Cost due to Facebook Browsing:  $140,000,000

If we apply that to annual cost, we end up with a really scary number:

• Annual US Employer Cost due to Facebook Browsing:  $28,000,000,000