Black Friday sales used to require standing in line and battling crowds. This year, there were $7.4 billion in online sales on Black Friday. Now that your employees are back at work, they are likely to continue shopping online. Last year’s Cyber Monday brought $7.9 billion in sales, and that doesn’t happen without people buying during the workday. It may drive you nuts, but here’s a word of advice:
Let them.
Yes, it may be frustrating that you spot a website open on someone’s computer or that everyone’s talking about the best deals on the season’s hottest toys. Forbes even recommends that you do your travel planning today for super deals. But, shopping on one day out of the year does not make a person a bad employee. Not shopping on Cyber Monday does not make someone a good employee.
To keep reading, click here: It’s Cyber Monday and Your Employees are Shopping at Their Desks
I don’t agree that managers should join their employees in doing online shopping at work on Cyber Monday, but do agree that they should ignore it unless it seriously interferes with business.
Obviously, this workplace is a “white-collar” desk job, where employees perform daily job activity using the company computers. In this type of situation, I am assuming that productivity is not measured in non-stop job-related activity but end results, so these employees will have time in their “paid” work hours to do personal activities on their computers.
I personally take a more negative view of this, since these employees are on company-paid time and should be only doing company job-related work during that time, as this highlights a major flaw in job-efficiency time use. A tighter hourly schedule based on job needs could be utilized to save labor dollars if the employees have that much flexibility to loaf on company time. Okay, sounds miserly (almost Scroogelike) but this is the attitude forced on retail workers–scheduled to work when the company designates need, with no free time during paid company time. I say–do your personal shopping during the off-the-clock time, not while on the clock being paid to work. Sorry to be such a Scrooge but those same employees doing the shopping on company time, just came back from a 4 day weekend which had a paid holiday also and they most probably spend that weekend shopping more than spending time with their families.