Reasons Why Facebook Is a Distraction?

About 900 million people have Facebook accounts, making it a leading social network for users to interact with friends, upload and share photos and videos, create events and play games. More recently, Facebook is increasingly accessed from both the Web as well as smartphone and tablet apps, making it more easily accessible. This makes it more of a distraction, especially in offices where employee productivity is essential to the business's work.

According a survey by Nucleus, an IT research company, about two-thirds of employees access their Facebook accounts while at work. Furthermore, the survey estimates that nearly 90 percent of people who access the social networking site at work can't offer a work-related reason for doing so. It's also estimated that the average session time on Facebook is about 15 minutes per person, which can add up considerably throughout the day, week and year. A worker on Facebook for 15 minutes a day adds up to about five hours every month, which distracts from the same amount of company time.

One of the reasons why Facebook is a distraction at work is because there's much to do in one log-in session. The average Facebook session is 15 minutes, as users click through news feeds, comment on status updates and photos, play games, instant-message chat and send private messages through the site. Employees might also want to share their own links and videos and communicate with friends through status updates, rather than complete the work at their desk.

A recent Nucleus survey also revealed that Facebook is responsible for a 1.5 percent drop in employee productivity among those who use Facebook while at the workplace. While a 1.5 percent drop in productivity seems small, it can add up in companies with multiple employees, particularly if all of those employees are using Facebook in the workplace.

Facebook has become so integrated in the lifestyle of some users that they immediately think of status updates or photos to post when something of interest happens. "This is going on Facebook" is such a popular catch phrase that you'll hear it as often at the workplace as at social events. And various research surveys show that even when people aren't logged into Facebook, they're still thinking about it. A survey by an online education site has found that 48 percent of people ages 18–34 check Facebook as soon as they wake, 28 percent before they even get out of bed. Other data collection sites estimate that 55 percent of people over 25 years old check in on Facebook at least once a day, and 11 percent can't go more than a couple hours between visits. Added up, that's pretty distracting.