Shopping while your employer tracks your every point and click doesn't sound like the best way to stock up for the holidays.
But it remains a wildly popular one -- even as firms adopt increasingly sophisticated systems to monitor workers' online activities.
Increasing broadband at home and restrictive internet usage policies at work haven't made a discernable dent this holiday season in employees' penchant for shopping online while at work.
Last week marked the unofficial start of the online holiday buying season for many retailers, with traffic to retail sites up approximately 9 percent from last year, according to tracking firm Hitwise. More than half of weekday traffic since the Monday after Thanksgiving, according to measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings, has come from workplace internet users.
"It's as strong as ever," said NetRatings retail analyst Heather Dougherty. "Once they get over the Thanksgiving hump, they're ready to do their holiday shopping. Monday, they can't help but keep it going, even if they're at work."
Companies are growing more accepting of the idea that workers will fritter away part of the workday shopping online, according to purveyors of employee internet-monitoring tools. Most employers engage in some sort of monitoring of workplace internet access. But rather than block all shopping sites, employers preoccupied with productivity are more apt to set time limits on access.
"At one time, they were more adamant about not having anyone do any browsing or personal activity over the workday," said Susan Larson, vice president of threat analysis and research at SurfControl, a developer of monitoring applications. "Now there's a realization that there should be more of a work-life balance."
Today, Larson said, employers commonly permit use of non-work-related sites for around an hour a day.
Some firms even encourage a bit of online shopping, which tends to take less time than alternatives.
"If it's going to take someone out of the office or away from work, like shopping or banking transactions ... we'd rather have them here," said Benjamin Presnell, LAN administrator at Boston Capital, a real estate investment firm.
Internet-use records for the company's 200-plus employees indicate they're spending actively at their desks. Presnell said shopping activity started to spike in mid-November and has been on the rise since, with high traffic to retail sites including Amazon.com, Ann Taylor, Nordstrom and QVC.
Websense, which sells monitoring software and regularly issues press releases about the internet's effect on employees' output, says shopping isn't usually a top time-wasting activity. It ranks fifth on the list of most-common online work distractions, following news, e-mail, banking and travel. In late November and December, however, shopping rises in the ranks.
"Most companies are pretty surprised at how employees use the internet," said Leo Cole, Websense's vice president of marketing. The company recently claimed that internet misuse costs U.S. businesses more than $178 billion annually in lost productivity.
However, productivity is rarely an employer's top concern when installing or upgrading an internet-monitoring system, Cole said. They're usually more worried about preventing exposure to malicious code online and making sure employees aren't doing anything illegal. Time-wasting becomes more of an issue when IT managers scrutinize logs of online activity.
In a survey of IT managers Websense and Harris Interactive conducted this year, respondents estimated that employees spend an average of 5.9 hours per week surfing non-work-related websites. (Employees, by contrast, estimated that they spend 3.4 hours a week on personal online activity.)
Of those surveyed who admitted viewing X-rated sites at work, 17 percent of men and 11 percent of women said they visited the sites intentionally.
