WASHINGTON — More employees are shopping online during work hours than ever, and employers are not always looking the other way.
An annual survey by CareerBuilder finds that half of employees are shopping at work, with 42 percent purchasing stuff on their smartphones — up 27 percent from 2014.
Accordingly, four percent more employers fired employees for holiday shopping on the Internet while at work over last year. Some 28 percent of bosses say they’ve fired someone for non-work-related Internet activity, including 12 percent of who have terminated an employee for shopping.
The survey was conducted online within the U.S. among 2,326 hiring and human resource managers and 3,321 full-time employees over the age of 18.
A number of employers — 36 percent — say they monitor which websites their employees are visiting, a four percent increase over last year. More than one-third of employers say they care what their employees are doing online, even if it isn’t necessarily affecting their performance. Not surprisingly, 56 percent say they have blocked certain websites from access at work, up three percent from last year.
Rosemary Haefner, the chief of human resources at CareerBuilder, pointed out that people are working more hours and often taking work home and being available for work on off-hours. Employers might take that into consideration before passing harsh judgment.
“In a world where the lines between professional and personal are becoming more and more blurred every day, it’s not surprising that more employees are bringing personal activities to the workplace,” she said.
“Employees should follow the rules, but employers should be careful not to micromanage. The issue should be more about performance than about what employees are doing with their time.”
