A four-letter word to combat pink slip blues!

BANGALORE, INDIA: If the Employee Computing Risk Assessment (ECRA) survey conducted recently by Websense India is anything to go by, an increasing percentage of employees in the IT and other spheres are embarking into ‘forbidden territories’ to combat their pink slip blues.

The survey, conducted across 30 organizations pertaining to IT, Education, Banking and Finance, Manufacturing, Pharma etc of small, medium and large sizes, reveals that sex and gambling accounts for more than 40 per cent of bandwidth and productivity loss during office hours.

The study reveals that the highest productivity loss is suffered by IT/ITES companies (106942 hours in a year) followed by manufacturing companies (38218 hours).

The biggest leakages, besides sex and gambling, according to Websense are Instant Messaging (25 per cent) followed by Web-based email (21 per cent) in these organizations.

In addition to this, an analysis of security risks across these organizations revealed that freeware and software downloads (29 per cent) followed by malicious websites (28 per cent) and proxy avoidance sites (21 per cent) were factors detrimental to performance.

A more detailed analysis of these ‘security risky’ behavior by employees revealed that 29 per cent of risky employees indulged in peer-to-peer file sharing followed by 22 per cent who indulged in viewing ‘Adult Material’.

This is in addition to Adult Content (sites that display partial nudity or sexual context), Lingerie and Swimsuit (images of models in ‘suggestive’ positions), Nudity (singly or in groups) and Sex Education (sites that offer information about sexuality).

Surendra Singh, regional director, SAARC and India, Websense Inc had a single guidance tip for enterprises of all sizes to combat risky behavior of this nature.

“During times of economic slowdowns, it is essential that employees are retained at the same time, productivity should be optimized. Hence, there is no point trying to restrict internet access to employees, but better productivity can be achieved by giving them access during stipulated times, for personal usage.”

The economic downturn on one hand, and the recent terror attacks on the other, is the Indian techie finding solace in the most basic of human desires to overcome emotional stress?