A recent study named “The Cost of Social Notworking”, examined specific details about how office workers use the immensely popular Facebook. And it reveals that some 77% of those workers surveyed had an account. Of those people, 66% accessed their profiles while at work, with some 6% exclusively doing so while on company time. That should raise alarm bells in many an employer’s minds, particularly when you learn that 87% of Facebook-using employees can’t come up with a legitimate work-related reason for visiting the site, and the average access time is 15 minutes. For a small company of 200 workers that fifteen minutes multiplies up to 50 working hours (one whole man week) lost to Facebook each and every day.

The knock-on effects on revenue loss are incalculable because they vary with the workload of each employee and the fact that the business model is different for every company. Although difficult to accurately measure, off these figures the money lost throughout the US and Europe concerned is likely to tally up to billions of lost dollars per day.

Some might say that in the current financial climate, Facebook could well be portrayed as The Great Downturn Facilitator.

Others see Facebook in an entirely different light altogether, and take the view that Facebook actually contributes to increasing their staff’s office productivity. After all, accessing Facebook is all about learning what your friends are up to and playing casual games: Both of these could be viewed as bolstering an office worker’s cheerfulness levels and thus resulting in a more positive working environment.

What do you think?