Wasting Away: Non-Work Activities Cost Employers Billions in Lost Productivity [Infographic]

Employees are expensive, and when they spend time on non-work-related tasks, they are even more costly—to the tune of billions in lost productivity.

Office workers spend hours online, and the business liability insurance company BOLT developed this infographic to show how much time American workers waste during an average workday.

According to BOLT, employees that spend time on “non-work tasks” cost their employers nearly $134 billion a year.

The largest time-wasters at work:

Browsing the Web
Communicating on social networks
Watching sports

Sports represent a large chunk of lost work time, where businesses lose nearly $1.1 billion a week in time spent on fantasy football teams.

According to the employees surveyed, online activities are not the only way to waste a workday. Many “work-related” tasks are just as wasteful:

Attending ineffective meetings
Fixing others’ mistakes
Putting up with gabby co-workers.

According to BOLT, 43 percent of employees say they waste time having to settle warring sides in conflicts about office politics.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that almost half of workers (46 percent) say they use the time from 9 to 5 to search for another job. That could also be the basis for the popularity of LinkedIn.

Second only to Facebook, the professional networking site beats out Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Amazon as sites employees admit to surfing to during work hours.

Infographic after the jump…